Archive for month: August, 2020

According to a new report* by business intelligence expert GBI Research patient care is improving at home and in remote areas, as rising rates of chronic disease, a growing elderly population, and advancements in wireless and sensor technologies continue to drive the global patient monitoring market.

The new report shows that efficient patient management through the use of wireless technology will help to reduce the rising healthcare burden which now affects many developed and developing countries, as large elderly populations who have increased life expectancy further add to the global patient pool.

Wireless technology has a wide range of applications in remote patient monitoring. Remote monitoring enables a patient to undergo hospital visits of reduced length, and have constant monitoring at home. This not only improves the quality of life for elderly and chronically ill patients, but also leads to a significant reduction in healthcare expenditure.

Wireless remote patient monitoring can also provide continuous and real time data to physicians from remote locations such as the home, hospice, ambulance, or other outpatient settings, thereby offering the advantage of convenience to both physicians and patients, while hospitalization costs are massively reduced.

Over the past few years, the number of cases of chronic diseases such as Cardiovascular Disease (CVDs), diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases has increased, due to the growing population in developing nations. According to the World Diabetes Foundation (WDF), 80% of the diabetic population is expected to come from low and middle income countries by 2025.

Emerging economies such as India and China, with huge patient bases and an under-served market, are expected to act as potentially lucrative markets for remote patient monitoring devices. The global patient monitoring devices market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 4% to reach $8 billion in 2017 from $6.1 billion in 2010.

  
*Patient Monitoring Devices Market to 2017 – Increasing Use of Wireless Remote Patient Monitoring to be the Key Technology Trend

Patients who have had metal-on-metal hip replacements are no more likely to develop cancer in the first seven years after surgery than the general population, although a longer-term study is required, a study led by the University of Bristol claims.
A recent BMJ and BBC Newsnight investigation looked into the potentially high level of toxic metals from failing hip implants which may, in future, affect thousands of people around the world. The investigation also looked at why these hip replacements were allowed despite the risks being known and documented for decades. The BMJ has a large collection of articles about the safety of medical devices which can be found here.
This study, commissioned by the National joint Registry of England and Wales and carried out by authors from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, looks at whether these concerns are valid. The registry contains records of over one million procedures from at least 97 per cent of orthopaedic units. Every year registry data and hospital episode statistics are linked up to check how patients who have had joint replacements are faring.
Ashley Blom, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in the School of Clinical Sciences at the University of Bristol, who led the team that undertook the study, said: ‘This research shows that there is no increased risk of cancer with metal-on-metal hip replacements in the first seven years after surgery. Although this is very reassuring, we do not know what are the long-term risks and thus further studies will be necessary in the future.’
In this study cancer rates in patients with metal-on-metal hip replacements were compared with both a group of patients who had other hip bearing surfaces implanted and the general population. Overall, 14 per cent (40,576) of registered patients had some type of metal-on-metal bearing surface: seven per cent (21,264) had a stemmed metal-on-metal prosthesis and seven per cent (19,312) had a resurfacing procedure. The researchers compared patients’ outcomes using mathematical modelling. The models included the age and sex of the patient as well as three measures of general health at the time of hip surgery (the American Society of Anaesthesiologists grade that scores the patient’s other serious illnesses, the number of distinct diagnostic codes recorded at time of surgery, and the number of NHS funded admissions to hospital in the previous five years). The authors do say, however, that comparison with the general population is not straightforward as hip replacement patients ‘tend to be healthier than others of the same gender and age group’.
Results show that the chance of a 60-year-old man with moderate health and a metal-on-metal stemmed hip replacement being diagnosed with cancer in the five years following surgery is 6.2 per cent, compared to 6.7 per cent chance with hip replacement using other bearing surfaces. For women, these figures were 4.0 per cent for metal-on-metal stemmed hip replacement and 4.4 per cent for other bearing surfaces. Further results show that the incidence of cancer diagnosis is low after hip replacement and lower than that predicted for the age and sex matched general population.
The authors hope that this study will help clinicians reassure patients that the ‘risk of cancer for hip replacement patients is relatively low’ with no evidence of an increase in cancer associated with metal-on-metal hips. They add though that this only shows results for up to seven years following surgery and the analysis of long-term data is required over the next few decades as some cancers take many years to develop. University of Bristol

Dr. Fritz EilberResearchers from UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have found that by administering a PET scan to individuals with soft-tissue sarcomas after just a single cycle of neoadjuvant chemotherapy, they can predict increased survival in these patients.

Prior research by this multidisciplinary team of physician-scientists had shown that a combined PET/CT scan using a glucose uptake probe called FDG allowed them to determine the pathologic response of patients’ tumours after the first dose of chemotherapy drugs. They then wondered if the patients who showed a significant PET response after the first round of chemotherapy also were surviving longer.

‘We did find that patients who experienced an early PET response to treatment had significantly increased survival,’ said the study’s senior author, Dr. Fritz Eilber, an associate professor of surgical oncology and director of the Jonsson Cancer Center’s sarcoma program. ‘This is vital because patients want to know if the drugs are working and what that says about their ultimate outcome.’
In the study, 39 patients with soft-tissue sarcoma underwent a PET scan to measure their tumour

Stroke patients receiving in-patient rehabilitation are more likely to land back in the hospital within three months if they are functioning poorly, show signs of depression and lack social support according to researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston. Hospital readmission for older adults within 30 days of discharge costs Medicare roughly $18 billion annually.
Among the first of such research to explore the risk of re-hospitalisation among this patient segment, the study is available online at The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences. The findings are timely as effective this October hospitals will be held accountable for high short-turnaround readmission rates.
According to Dr. Kenneth Ottenbacher, Director, Center for Rehabilitation Sciences, and Associate Director, UTMB Sealy Center on Ageing, ‘by identifying clear demographic, clinical and environmental factors that lead to re-hospitalisation, we can develop meaningful quality indicators for post-acute care that target ways to improve patients’ health and contain costs by reducing the likelihood of readmission.’
Currently, more than 30 percent of stroke patients receive in-patient rehabilitation after release from acute care, he said.
‘Though we intuitively know that these patients are at highest risk for being re-hospitalised