Obese people who have stomach surgery to help them lose weight will halve their risk of heart attack according to new research from a team of doctors at the University of East Anglia, University of Manchester and University of Aberdeen.

The procedures, known as bariatric surgery, involve techniques such as gastric banding, which are available on the National Health Service (NHS), UK for selected patients.

New research published today in the International Journal of Cardiology reviewed data from 14 studies involving more than 29,000 patients who underwent bariatric surgery. It reveals that death rates were reduced by 40 per cent, and that heart attacks in particular were reduced by half

‘Where does it hurt?’ is the first question asked to any person in pain.
A new UCL study defines for the first time how our ability to identify where it hurts, called ‘spatial acuity’, varies across the body, being most sensitive at the forehead and fingertips.

Using lasers to cause pain to 26 healthy volunteers without any touch, the researchers produced the first systematic map of how acuity for pain is distributed across the body.

With the exception of the hairless skin on the hands, spatial acuity improves towards the centre of the body whereas the acuity for touch is best at the extremities. This spatial pattern was highly consistent across all participants.

The experiment was also conducted on a rare patient lacking a sense of touch, but who normally feels pain. The results for this patient were consistent with those for healthy volunteers, proving that acuity for pain does not require a functioning sense of touch.

‘Acuity for touch has been known for more than a century, and tested daily in neurology to assess the state of sensory nerves on the body. It is striking that until now nobody had done the same for pain,’ says lead author Dr Flavia Mancini of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. ‘If you try to test pain with a physical object like a needle, you are also stimulating touch. This clouds the results, like taking an eye test wearing sunglasses. Using a specially-calibrated laser, we stimulate only the pain nerves in the upper layer of skin and not the deeper cells that sense touch.’

Volunteers were blindfolded and had specially-calibrated pairs of lasers targeted at various parts of their body. These lasers cause a brief sensation of pinprick pain. Sometimes only one laser would be activated, and sometimes both would be, unknown to participants. They were asked whether they felt one

A new study in animals shows that using a compound to block the body

When it comes to the cost and quality of hospital care, nurse tenure and teamwork matters. Patients get the best care when they are treated in units that are staffed by nurses who have extensive experience in their current job, according to a study from researchers at Columbia University School of Nursing and Columbia Business School.
The review of more than 900,000 patient admissions over four years at hospitals in the Veterans Administration Healthcare System is the largest study of its kind to link nurse staffing to patient outcomes. The researchers analysed payroll records for each nurse and medical records for each patient to see how changes in nurse staffing impacted the length of stay for patients. Because length of stay is increased by delays in delivery of appropriate care and errors in care delivery, a shorter length of stay indicates that the hospital provided better treatment. At the same time, a shorter length of stay also makes care more cost-effective. The study found that a one-year increase in the average tenure of RNs on a hospital unit was associated with a 1.3 percent decrease in length of stay.
‘Reducing length of stay is the holy grail of hospital management because it means patients are getting higher quality, more cost-effective care,’ says senior study author Patricia Stone, PhD, RN, FAAN, Centennial Professor of Health Policy at Columbia Nursing. ‘When the same team of nurses works together over the years, the nurses develop a rhythm and routines that lead to more efficient care. Hospitals need to keep this in mind when making staffing decisions

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