A recent study, published in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, describes a 19-year old female diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) who suffered from somatic and psychiatric symptoms for two years. After a four-month course of chiropractic care, the young woman reported an 80% reduction in her anxiety symptoms, including a 90% decrease in her headaches. The patient was able to resume a normal lifestyle without resorting to prescription or over-the-counter drugs.
A prescription cream recently approved to treat select superficial basal cell carcinomas (sBCCs) may provide an alternative to skin surgery in certain cases. The FDA approved 3M’s Aldara (imiquimod) in July.
Dermatologist Craig Elmets, M.D., one of the investigators in its clinical trials, says imiquimod will be “useful for treating patients in whom surgical procedures are difficult, including elderly patients, patients with sBCCs at cosmetically sensitive areas where scarring is a concern,
Mayo Clinic neurologists have discovered a drug application smart enough to alleviate orthostatic hypotension — problems with sinking blood pressure when standing up from a sitting position — without the unwanted effect of also causing patients’ blood pressure to soar when lying down.
“This is a significant step forward for these patients,” says Phillip Low, M.D., Mayo Clinic neurologist and lead study investigator. “This would be a good drug to provide the first line of trea
Boosting the blood count – in effect, curing anemia – in conjunction with radiation therapy won’t help patients with head and neck cancer fare any better than with radiation alone, says a national study led by Jefferson Medical College researchers. Physicians have known for decades that patients who have anemia and are undergoing radiation therapy, especially for head and neck cancer, do much worse in terms of controlling their cancer and survival.
One theory proposes that anemia
Giving flu vaccine to toddlers in the spring and fall guards against infection and is easier on parents than the fall schedule of two doses administered a month apart, found researchers from Duke University Medical Center and the University of Washington.
The study compared the immune response in toddlers aged six to 23 months who received a flu shot in the spring and one in the fall, to the response of those who received fall shots separated by one month. The Centers for Disease C
In rats, stress hormones lower threshold for aggression and aggression raises stress hormones; data may lead help to break the cycle of violence
Scientists may be learning why it’s so hard to stop the cycle of violence. The answer may lie in the nervous system. There appears to be a fast, mutual, positive feedback loop between stress hormones and a brain-based aggression-control center in rats, whose neurophysiology is similar to ours. It may explain why, under stress, humans ar
A drug refined from cottonseed oil and previously tried and abandoned as a male contraceptive could boost the effectiveness of treatment for prostate cancer and possibly other common cancers as well, according to new research from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Results of the study will be reported Oct. 1 at the Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Geneva, Switzerland. The symposium is sponsored by the European Organization for Research a
A systematic review and meta-analysis (pooled analysis) of previously published randomised trials in this week’s issue of THE LANCET provides strong evidence that antioxidant supplements (such as vitamin supplements) are not effective in protecting against gastro-intestinal cancer. Some combinations of supplements may slightly increase gastro-intestinal cancer risk, whereas selenium may be associated with a risk reduction.
The human diet is a complex mix of oxidants and antioxidants.
Results of a European study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET suggest that shorter courses of chemotherapy for children with Wilms’ tumour may be as effective as conventional treatment duration, but have the advantage of reduced toxicity and health-care costs.
Wilms’ tumour, a kidney cancer in under 15-year-olds, affects around 5 children per million every year. Current treatment for this disease (involving chemotherapy and surgical tumour removal) is very successful; efforts are no
A study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET describes how two different types of analysis used in conjunction on samples of tonsil tissue is the ‘gold standard’ method for confirming clinical variant CJD, and that a large-scale screening programme of tonsil tissue is the only way of identifying the true incidence of vCJD infection.
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is thought to be caused by dietary or other exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) prions; 142 people
A seminar in this week’s issue of THE LANCET discusses the under-reported and complex subject of elder abuse. The topic is also covered by an editorial in this week’s issue (p 1192) which concludes that ‘elderly people should not be seen as marginalised victims in society but as fully participating and valuable citizens. Anything less is inhumane and unsustainable’.
Mark S Lachs (The Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York City, USA) and Karl Pillemer (Cornell Univers
A five-year study conducted in multiple centres nationwide revealed that a type of radiofrequency method used in treating heart rhythm disorders is very safe and effective in children.
Patients aged 0-16 years old with various forms of heart problems were recruited to participate in this study, published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology, where radiofrequency ablation, a non-surgical procedure, was used to treat various heart rhythm disorders. Short and long-term ris
MR imaging is significantly better than mammography in detecting additional breast cancers in women who have already been diagnosed with the disease–an important finding that could ultimately affect the treatment of a significant fraction of new breast cancer patients, a new study shows.
The study (The Italian Trial for Breast MR in Multifocal/Multicentric Cancer, promoted by The Italian Society of Medical Radiology) included 90 women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. So
The probability of acute appendicitis is very low if there is no distinctly apparent appendix on the CT scan, and in the absence of any secondary CT signs of appendicitis, says a study by researchers from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
For the study, the researchers analyzed the CT scans of 366 patients with abdominal pain who were referred to rule out the diagnosis of appendicitis. In 46 of the patients, the a
Myths about the infectious disease threat posed by dead bodies could lead to insensitive and inappropriate treatment of victims’ bodies following the floods in Haiti, and need to be checked, according to a public health researcher who has studied the potential risks at length.
Although most of the media coverage of the disaster has been responsible and accurate, there have been some reports which wrongly state that dead bodies can cause epidemics.
‘Fear that dead bodies cause
Two types of thyroid cancer that are closely related and sometimes difficult to distinguish can be readily identified by differences in only a few genes, new research shows.
The study, by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute, used microarray analysis to show that papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) and follicular thyroid carcinoma (FTC) differ in the expression of only four or f
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