Treatment guidelines for epilepsy evaluate antiepileptic drugs
The number of drugs available to treat epilepsy have more than doubled in the last decade. The American Academy of Neurology and the American Epilepsy Society have assembled the top experts in the field to evaluate the available data of more than 1,400 research articles in order to create a guideline for the treatment of epilepsy with these new antiepileptic drugs (AEDs).
“These guidelines are designed to provide
Issues from fertility to contraception can be challenging
Anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) are powerful medications that help women with epilepsy control their seizures; however, when these same women have to deal with reproductive issues and their epilepsy drugs, a myriad of problems can crop up, according to Mark Yerby, M.D., MPH, a leading expert in women’s issues and epilepsy. About 1 million of the estimated 2.5 million Americans with epilepsy are women.
Dr. Yerby is as
Misconceptions hinder treatment
For nearly three thousand years, people believed that epilepsy had a supernatural cause. But the most dangerous misconception about epilepsy is a modern one, according to epilepsy expert Jerome Engel, Jr., M.D., Ph.D.–many people, including physicians, still believe that epilepsy can’t be treated.
“Epilepsy and epileptic seizures are far more common than people realize,” said Dr. Engel, Jonathan Sinay Professor of Neurology and Neurobiol
Lennart Mucke discusses findings at American Academy of Neurology 56th Annual Meeting
Promising research into the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, with an emphasis on the roles of such proteins as amyloid-beta and apolipoprotein E, will be the subject of a plenary session presentation on April 29 at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) 56th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Lennart Mucke, MD, director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease and Joseph B. Mart
Heart disease researchers at Rockefeller University have discovered the function of a gene associated with high cholesterol levels in humans.
Using mice as test subjects, the Rockefeller scientists determined that the gene, called Pcsk9, can decrease the number of receptors on liver cells that remove the “bad” LDL cholesterol from the blood.
“It’s very exciting to think that Pcsk9 might play a large role in the pathway to regulate the uptake of bad cholesterol from blood,” sai
Cholesterol levels vary with the seasons, reaching their highest levels in the winter months, according to an article in the April 26 issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
According to the article, a variety of studies have suggested that cholesterol levels are higher in the fall and winter than they are in the spring and summer. Although the mechanism for this phenomenon is not clear, such variation could result in larger numbers of people being dia
ESA today announced the launch of its ‘Space Solutions’ initiative, a business-to-business provider of know-how and technologies to industries in the wellness market. The launch was announced at an event featuring an address by ESA astronaut André Kuipers, live from the International Space Station.
Over the years, ESA has developed dozens of innovative technologies and methods to deal with the adverse effects of weightlessness and has applied the findings of space experiments to medicine, p
Computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have teamed up with a group of medical professionals to advance the use of telemedicine.
NIST and the American Telemedicine Association developed technical standards related to the diagnosis and treatment of diabetic retinopathy, which is a complication of diabetes and a leading cause of blindness.
Telemedicine helps patients to have access to health care professionals electronically, whatever their l
In this issue of Science, researchers at Yale University and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto report that curcumin, a compound in the spice turmeric, corrects the defect of cystic fibrosis in mice.
Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is a debilitating and ultimately fatal genetic disorder, caused by the failure of a chloride channel, the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane conductance Regulator (CFTR), to reach its proper place on the cell surface, where it transports chloride ions and water into and o
Although cyclosporine is widely used to prevent rejection in organ transplant recipients over the long term, two problems remain for heart transplant patients: acute rejection, which occurs within the first three months after transplantation, and cardiac allograft vasculopathy, a thickening of the heart wall that can restrict blood flow.
Findings from the second year of a multi-center study of the new anti-rejection drug everolimus were presented Thursday (April 22, 2004) at the Internation
Certain cells from a mother persist in their children’s bodies and can provoke an immune response in which the child’s body attacks itself, according to Mayo Clinic research published in the current issue of the Journal of Immunology (http://www.jimmunol.org). The findings are important not only in seeking the cause and treatments of this disease, but also in understanding an entire class of autoimmune disorders.
Juvenile dermatomyositis (der-mat-o-my-o-SITE-us), or JDM, is a rare muscle-da
Around half a million people a year in sub-Saharan Africa are affected by sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis). The disease is fatal in humans if not treated with chemotherapy; however, adverse effects of drug treatment and an increase in drug resistance underline the importance of establishing an accurate diagnostic test for the disease.
In this week’s issue of THE LANCET, Sanjeev Krishna from St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, UK, and colleagues assessed whether mass
Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids) and Yale University School of Medicine have found that a compound in the spice turmeric corrects the cystic fibrosis defect in mice. This research is reported in the April 23, 2004 issue of the journal Science.
Cystic fibrosis (CF) is fatal genetic disease in which thick mucous clogs the lungs and the pancreas due to problems with the secretion of ions and fluid by cells of the airways and gastrointestinal tract. Normal secretion dep
An international team of researchers has discovered that respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common cold virus causing bronchiolitis in children, can act as a ‘hit and hide’ virus. It was thought that the virus could only survive in the body for a few days, but these new results show that the virus can survive for many months or years, perhaps causing long-term effects on health, such as damage to the lungs.
The research, published in this month’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critica
The Gipuzkoa Cancer Institute and the Donostia-San Sebastian General Hospital have taken the first step to substitute traditional chemotherapy for breast cancer cases with a novel treatment. This new treatment is less aggressive and, thus, does not produce alopecia. From May, the two centres will test the efficacy of the new oral medicine, capecitabine.
The project involves women who have had breast cancer operations and who have been diagnosed with ganglions in the axilas. These women foll
UCL scientists have made the first ever recordings of the brain’s smallest cells at work sensing the outside world. Their findings could help unlock the secrets of the cerebellum, a key motor control centre in the brain which, when damaged, can lead to movement disorders such as ataxia and loss of balance.
Paul Chadderton and colleagues at UCL’s Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research used a method called patch-clamping to measure the activity of a single granule cell in an intact brain.
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