Clinical trials awaited for procedure that is less invasive than laparoscopy
Surgeries performed with specialized medical devices requiring only small incisions, called laparoscopic surgery, have many advantages over traditional open surgery, including less pain, fewer complications and quicker recoveries. Now, scientists at Johns Hopkins have created a new surgical technique that in extensive animal studies is safe and may improve even further the benefit of minimally invasive surg
Scientists at Florida State University subjected walnuts, cashew nuts and almonds to radiation, roasting, pressure cooking, blanching, frying and microwave heating in an effort to make them safe for allergy sufferers.
In the end, the nutritious little nuggets refused to surrender their allergens, but the research yielded sensitive techniques that detect minute traces of the nuts — potentially fatal to allergic consumers — in seemingly nut-free processed foods.
The study, “Impac
Anal cancer is on the rise in both sexes, particularly among American men, and changing trends in sexual behavior – combined with current tobacco use and infection by a specific strain of the human papillomavirus – may help explain the increase. These findings, from two separate studies by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, will be reported in a pair of papers in the July 15 issue of Cancer. The first study, by lead author Lisa G. Johnson, Ph.D., a statistical-research associate
A blood test that measures food-specific allergy antibodies can be used to help pediatric allergists with the difficult decision of when to reintroduce a food that a child has been allergic to, say researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
In their report, published in the July issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the researchers provide guidelines for using these antibody levels to determine which children should be offered an additional allergy test, known
Results from a multiyear study of severely depressed patients treated according to guidelines established by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas showed a significant improvement in patients’ symptoms and medical outcomes.
Called the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), the guidelines, or algorithms, are a set of comprehensive management tools for doctors treating severely mentally ill patients within Texas’ publicly funded mental health care system. They are the res
Toni Schmader, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has won a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to explore how awareness of negative stereotypes impacts the cognitive functions of women and Latinos.
At issue is whether exposure to a negative stereotype can affect cognitive function. Social psychologists have recently discovered that women and racial or ethnic minorities often perform more poorly on academic tests when exposed to nega
Severe sepsis, is a costly complication in hospitalized cancer patients causing around one in ten cancer deaths each year in the USA, according to an article published today in Critical Care. The excessive response to infection in patients with severe sepsis injures critical organs such as the lungs and kidneys.
Dr Mark Williams and his colleagues from Eli Lilly & Co. in Indianapolis, and Health Process Management, LLC, Pennsylvania used data from six US states to analyze all the hospitaliza
WHO’s objective is to enable 3 million people living with HIV to have access to antiretroviral treatments by 2005. The development of simple and inexpensive generic fixed-dose combined therapies appears the most suitable solution for making possible this access to treatments in developing countries with meagre resources.
The tritherapies that associate two different classes of antiretrovirals (two inverse transcriptase nucleoside inhibitors and a non-nucleosidic inhibitor of this same viral
The health of people in Britain is being put at risk by official policy that discourages sunbathing and promotes use of sunblock products. The cost of disease caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight and consequent deficiency of vitamin D is estimated to be billions of pounds per year in Britain.
Government advice to “cover up, keep in the shade…and use factor 15 plus sunscreen”* is based on outdated information, mistaken interpretation of evidence and guesswork. It ignores evidence sho
University of Iowa researchers have shown for the first time that gene therapy delivered to the brains of living mice can prevent the physical symptoms and neurological damage caused by an inherited neurodegenerative disease that is similar to Huntington’s disease (HD).
If the therapeutic approach can be extended to humans, it may provide a treatment for a group of incurable, progressive neurological diseases called polyglutamine-repeat diseases, which include HD and several spinocereb
Studies of postmortem brains of patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) showed a 31 percent greater than average number of nerve cells in the portion of the thalamus involved with emotional regulation. Researchers also discovered that this portion of the thalamus is physically larger than normal in people with MDD. Located in the center of the brain, the thalamus is involved with many different brain functions, including relaying information from other parts of the brain to the cereb
The medicine cabinet may seem like a strange place to look for a way to get high. But a growing number of teenagers are doing just that, raiding their parents’ pill bottles or buying prescription drugs illegally through Internet pharmacies and dealers.
From potent painkillers to humble cough syrups, the same medicines that can help patients can also be misused to produce a high feeling. And they can hurt teens or hook them into addiction just as easily as other illicit drugs.
Pare
How best to detect and manage bowel cancer is the subject of the latest issue of effective health care.
Colorectal (bowel) cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in England and Wales. Early detection and good management result in improved survival rates.
Improvements have been made in the provision of services and treatment of colorectal cancers, but wide variations still exist across the country. There are still patients who fit the NHS ‘two-week wait’ criteria who
Consumers must be afforded better protection against interventions falsely claiming to reverse or retard the aging process, according to an article published by legal and medical professionals in the June issue of The Gerontologist (Vol. 44, No. 3).
The team of researchers, based at Case Western Reserve University, urge professional organizations to undertake a sustained program of specific educational efforts to designed to sort out the “helpful, the harmful, the fraudulent, and the harmle
Children in developing countries are being put at unnecessary risk of disease and death as they are fed alternatives to breast milk. According to a study published in BMC Medicine today, the amount of breastfeeding taking place falls a long way short of recommended levels. In 2001 the World Health Organization (WHO) passed a resolution recommending that infants under six months of age were fed exclusively on breast milk, in part to protect them from malnutrition, pneumonia and waterborne dis
Individuals who suffer from severe depression have more nerve cells in the part of the brain that controls emotion, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have found
Studies of postmortem brains of patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) showed a 31 percent greater than average number of nerve cells in the portion of the thalamus involved with emotional regulation. Researchers also discovered that this portion of the thalamus is physically larger than
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