Health and Medicine

New product approved to prevent bleeding deaths

A razor nick during a much-too-close-shave ten years ago may result in hundreds of thousands of lives saved in the future. Scientist Frank Hursey was working with absorptive materials back in the late 80’s when he cut himself shaving. He picked up a volcanic mineral he’d been studying and decided to try it on his bleeding wound. The product worked so well as a coagulant that Hursey set to work doing further testing.

After three

Giving birth is clearly a high-stress experience. But usually it involves positive stress, which helps the woman cope with the exigencies of delivery and prepares the baby for a life outside the mother’s womb.” These are the words of Siw Alehagen from Linköping University, Sweden, who has written a dissertation about fear, pain, and stress hormones in women giving birth. Among other things, she has performed studies during actual delivery, a method that few researchers have dared to attempt anywhere

On Friday, May 31, Anders Eklund, Department of Radiation Sciences, Medical Technology, Umeå University, Sweden, will defend his dissertation evaluating a new and simpler instrument for measuring the pressure of eye fluids, a key risk factor in glaucoma. Anders Eklund has a master’s in engineering and works at the Unit for Medical Technology and Informatics, Northern Sweden University Hospital. He has further developed and assessed a new type of sensor based on vibration technology. His work has targ

It has often been claimed that psychological stress is an important cause of heart disease, but a study in this week’s BMJ shows that previous research may have been misleading.

Researchers measured self-assessed stress amongst middle-aged Scottish men working in and around Glasgow in the early 1970s. These men were then followed for more than twenty years to see whether or not they developed heart disease. Several different measures of heart disease were used.

Men who thought they

In a joint project with the STW Technology Foundation, medical information technologists from Leiden have developed a virtual robot which meticulously scans the heart muscle using images of the heart. The contours detector reduces the work of specialists and does not affect the patients. The research group will present the results in the middle of May at a congress in Honolulu.

To map the condition of a patient’s heart, physicians have until now used a series of MRI images (magnetic resonanc

Activity Generates New Nerve Cells For Old Mice – Study Supports Link Between Active Life And Lower Risk Of Neurodegenerative Disease

Active older people seem to have a lower risk of certain neurological disorders such as Alzheimer`s disease. A study published May 22 in the on-line edition of the Annals of Neurology, the research publication of the American Neurological Association, demonstrates how this increased activity might protect the brain.

Researchers in Germany and the Unit