Archive for month: August, 2020

After a diving accident left Jason DiSanto paralysed from the neck down in 2009, he had to learn how to navigate life from a powered wheelchair, which he controls with a sip-and-puff system. Users sip or puff air into a straw mounted on their wheelchair to execute four basic commands that drive the chair. But results from a new clinical study offer hope that sip-and-puff users like DiSanto could gain a higher level of independence than offered by this common assistive technology.
In the study, individuals with paralysis were able to use a tongue-controlled technology to access computers and execute commands for their wheelchairs at speeds that were significantly faster than those recorded in sip-and-puff wheelchairs, but with equal accuracy. This study is the first to show that the wireless and wearable Tongue Drive System outperforms sip-and-puff in controlling wheelchairs. Sip-and-puff is the most popular assistive technology for controlling a wheelchair.
The Tongue Drive System is controlled by the position of the user

Researchers at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia have developed a hologram-like display of a patient

Current laser therapy approaches are effective for treating excessive scars resulting from abnormal wound healing.

The review by Dr. Qingfeng Li and colleagues of Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital in Shanghai, China, provides strong support for laser treatment of hypertrophic scars

Widely used treatments for type 2 diabetes have different effects on the hearts of men and women, even as the drugs control blood sugar equally well in both sexes, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
In particular, the commonly prescribed diabetes drug metformin had positive effects on heart function in women but not in men, who experienced a shift in metabolism thought to increase the risk of heart failure.
‘We saw dramatic sex differences in how the heart responds to the different therapies,’ said senior author Robert J. Gropler, MD, professor of radiology. ‘Our study suggests that we need to better define which therapies are optimal for women with diabetes and which ones are optimal for men.’
To the researchers

The Journal of Hospital Infection (JHI) has just released the awaited epic3 guidelines on infection prevention and control for a range of healthcare professionals. They are freely available online on ScienceDirect and on the journal’s website.
The guidelines were commissioned by the UK Department of Health and have been developed after a systematic and expert review of all the available scientific evidence. They update and supersede the previous guidelines on this topic published in 2007.
Infection prevention and control came to the public awareness after the rise of MRSA and C. difficile in particular in the middle of the last decade. Since the publication of the 2007 guidelines, more resistant organisms have emerged, some of which are now almost untreatable by antimicrobials. This is actually no great surprise, as the development of resistance to antibiotics is an inevitable consequence of evolution- microbes have been producing chemical weapons to destroy each other since the dawn of life on earth. Resistance means survival. There are no really new antimicrobial agents under development, and for the first time, we are facing a world where more bacterial infections may be untreatable. Contrary to popular belief, we always had several treatment options available to treat MRSA.
Microbiologist Dr Jenny Child, Editor in Chief of The Journal of Hospital Infection, said ‘It is difficult to stop the rise of increasingly resistant organisms. What we can do however is prevent them spreading between patients and becoming established among the resident microbial flora- the bacterial population in our hospitals. Infection prevention and control has never been more important than it is now.’
It is no coincidence that the very first of the seven key action points outlined in the UK 5-year Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy 2013-1018, produced earlier this year by the DoH and DEFRA, is about improving infection prevention and control.
In her Forward to the epic3 Guidelines, which will accompany the January 2014 printed issue of The Journal of Hospital Infection, Professor Dame Sally Davies, NHS England’s Chief Medical Officer, said, ‘In March 2013, my Annual Report on ‘Infection and the rise of antimicrobial resistance’ highlighted the need for healthcare professionals to understand and put into practice the principles of infection prevention and control in order to improve patient outcomes. These updated guidelines underpin and provide the knowledge base to inform this understanding’.
‘The guidelines provide the evidence base for many elements of clinical practice that are essential in minimizing the spread of antimicrobial-resistant organisms, and maintaining high standards of infection prevention and control that can be adapted for use locally by all healthcare practitioners. The principles set out in these guidelines also provide the evidence base to support elements of the implementation of the 5-year UK Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy,’ Davies added. EurekAlert