Archive for month: August, 2020

For patients with advanced gastric cancer, treatment with chemotherapy after surgery can reduce the risk of cancer related death by 34% over five years compared to surgery alone.
Prof Sung Hoon Noh, a gastric surgeon from Yonsei University College of Medicine, Korea, presented 5-year follow-up from the phase III CLASSIC trial, which added combination chemotherapy to a standard surgical procedure called D2 gastrectomy. The chemotherapy regimen studied in the trial is called XELOX, which is a combination of the drugs capecitabine and oxaliplatin.
CLASSIC was a multinational open-label randomised phase III trial performed in South Korea, China and Taiwan. Patients with stage II

Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) have found that a weekly yoga class provided similar lower back pain relief and reduced the need for pain medication as twice weekly classes in lower income minority patients. The results of the study indicate that patients interested in trying yoga for lower back pain could benefit from attending a medically appropriate weekly yoga class.

While previous studies have shown that yoga can be an effective treatment for chronic lower back pain, few studies have studied this among specific populations.

‘Lower income patients often have worse lower back pain due to limited access to both mainstream health care treatments and complementary treatments such as yoga, massage and acupuncture,’ said Saper.

In this 12-week randomised trial, 95 predominantly low-income adults suffering from moderate to severe lower back pain were divided into two groups. One group attended yoga class once a week and the other attended twice a week, and both groups were encouraged to practice the poses and techniques at home. At the end of the 12 weeks, both groups of participants experienced similar and substantial decreases in their pain level and need for pain medications, but there was no additional benefit seen in those attending twice a week. Also, their ability to perform daily functions improved.

‘Given the similar improvement seen in once weekly yoga classes, and that once a week is more convenient and less expensive, we recommend patients suffering from lower back pain who want to pursue yoga attend a weekly therapeutic yoga class,’ said Saper. Boston University School of Medicine

Upstate Medical University researchers joined diabetes researchers across the country in reporting that an investigational MiniMed integrated insulin pump system with automatic insulin suspension safely reduced night-time hypoglycemia for people with diabetes without increasing average blood glucose.

Hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, can be life threatening for people with type 1 diabetes, especially at night when they are likely to be unaware of any symptoms while they sleep. The condition can result in confusion, unresponsiveness and

While the use of ultrasound to identify tumours during kidney cancer surgery is gaining acceptance, a research team at Henry Ford Hospital has successfully taken it a step further by showing an added benefit when the procedure is done robotically.
Simply put, the kidney surgeon who performs the ultrasound robotically has direct control over the painstaking procedure instead of having to rely on an assistant for part of the task.
The researchers compared the robotic ultrasound probe to the same procedure using a laparoscopic ultrasound probe, which requires an assistant to guide the ultrasound probe for the surgeon. At the end of the study, the researchers found comparable results between the two methods.
‘Besides giving the surgeon autonomy, the robotic ultrasound probe is more easily manipulated than the laparoscopic probe when measuring the tumour from certain angles,’ said Craig Rogers, M.D., a urologist at Henry Ford Hospital’s Vattikuti Urology Institute and senior author of the study. ‘This can reduce the need to move the kidney to gain better position.
‘While our study showed comparable results from both methods of mapping and measuring kidney cancers, the robotic ultrasound probe enables the precision of a robotic instrument as well as direct surgeon control.’
The surgical procedure studied used in each case studied by the researchers was robotic partial nephrectomy, or RPN, in which only the diseased part of a cancerous kidney is removed by a surgeon-controlled robot instead of traditional open surgery in which the entire kidney is removed.
They collected data from 75 consecutive RPN procedures using a laparoscopic ultrasound probe and 75 consecutive RPNs using a robotic ultrasound probe.
‘Both groups had similar tumour characteristics, operating times and other factors, and their outcomes were similar,’ Dr. Rogers says. ‘There was no statistically significant difference in measured variables between groups when controlling for tumour size and complexity. So the robotically controlled ultrasound probe performed on-par with traditional ultrasound, but with the added benefit of direct surgeon control and precision.
All patients in both study groups were found to be cancer-free during follow up examinations at a mean of 25.7 months for the laparoscopic group and 10.2 months for the robotic group. EurekAlert

If all medical errors were counted together as a single cause, they would likely rank as the third leading cause of death in the United States. As health care personnel race to improve the quality of their care to save lives and prevent unneeded harm, a new study indicates there is more they can do to learn about what errors are occurring and why.

Researchers from the Drexel University School of Public Health demonstrated a systematic analysis of hospital administrative data for patient safety at a population level, in a recent paper in the Journal of Healthcare Risk Management. They say that health care organisations have an untapped opportunity to use their own administrative data in this way as a ‘springboard to problem identification’ at the leading edge of preventing even those medical errors that are not yet preventable.

‘For example, a patient may receive a drug in the Emergency Department and develop an allergic reaction, but did not have any known allergies at the time of treatment,’ said Dr. Jennifer Taylor, an associate professor at Drexel who led the study. ‘While such events may not be deemed to be preventable now, we need to start tracking them so our research and development colleagues know what