Certain pediatric surgeries carry such low risk of serious blood loss that clinicians can safely forgo expensive blood typing and blood stocking before such procedures, suggest the results of a small study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children
Rice University nanotechnology researchers have unveiled a solar-powered sterilization system that could be a boon for more than 2.5 billion people who lack adequate sanitation. The
Improving vaccination rates against the human papillomavirus (HPV) in boys aged 11 to 21 is key to protecting both men and women, says new research from University of Toronto Professor Peter A. Newman from the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.
HPV has been linked to anal, penile and certain types of throat cancers in men. Since the virus is also responsible for various cancers in women, vaccinating boys will play a crucial role in reducing cancer rates across the sexes.
An electronic decision support tool helped to reduce deaths from pneumonia in four hospital emergency departments in a new study.
Although guidelines for treating pneumonia exist, it is often difficult for these to be fully implemented in an emergency setting. The researchers therefore developed an electronic tool, linked to a patient’s medical record. Unlike a paper guideline, the tool automatically extracts data that predict the severity of pneumonia. The tool then provides recommendations regarding where the patient should be admitted to, which diagnostic tests are best to use and which antibiotics are most appropriate.
Researchers from Intermountain Healthcare and the University of Utah in the USA tested the effectiveness of the tool on pneumonia patients in seven emergency departments. The first group of 2,308 patients were analysed before the electronic tool was used. A later group of 2,450 patients were assessed when four of the seven emergency departments used the electronic tool.
In both groups the researchers looked at hospital admission rates, length of hospital stay, deaths, secondary hospitalisation rates and adherence to guidelines.
The results showed a significant reduction in death rates in the emergency departments where the tool was used. Crude inpatient mortality rate fell from 5.3% to 3.5% and, after adjusting for severity, the relative risk of death was reduced by 25%.
EurekAlert
Pacemakers, insulin pumps, defibrillators and other implantable medical devices often have wireless capabilities that allow emergency workers to monitor patients. But these devices have a potential downside: they can be hacked.
Researchers at Rice University have come up with a secure way to dramatically cut the risk that an implanted medical device (IMD) could be altered remotely without authorization.
Their technology would use the patient
Sepsis is the leading cause of in-hospital death and there is no specific treatment for it. Now, research led by Dr. Qingping Feng of Western University suggests a protein called recombinant human annexin A5 may have therapeutic potential for the treatment of this disease
Sepsis is caused by an overwhelming immune response to an existing infection. It
Prone positioning has proved to be effective to improve oxygenation by promoting alveolar recruitment and to reduce ventilation- induced lung injury by homogenizing the distribution of stress and strain within the lungs.
Despite clear physiological benefits, most of the previous trials failed to prove that maintaining the acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patient in prone position during mechanical ventilation provides a significant improvement in mortality compared to the standard semi-recumbent position.
However some of the post-hoc and meta-analysis showed that the most hypoxemic ARDS patients may benefit from this treatment.
In their recently published paper
A new individualised systems medicine strategy enables a selection of potentially effective cancer therapies for individual patients. The promising results achieved by applying this strategy to chemoresistant adult acute myeloid leukaemia patients have been recently published
A multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, FIMM, and the Helsinki University Central Hospital has developed a novel individualised systems medicine (ISM) strategy which enables selection of potentially effective cancer therapies for individual patients.
Results achieved by applying this strategy to 28 patient samples have been recently published.
Most of the patients studied had chemoresistant adult acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), a disease characterised by poor prognosis.
AML is today largely treated by the same chemotherapeutic agents as applied 30-50 years ago. Here, the researchers measured the response of patients
Although increasing evidence indicates that low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), an emerging technology for neural regulation, has antiepileptic effects, the mechanism remains unclear. Prof. Xiaoming Wang and team from the Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College, China investigated the influence of low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic simulation on changes in several non-linear dynamic electroencephalographic parameters in rats with chronic epilepsy and explored the mechanism underlying repetitive transcranial magnetic simulation-induced antiepileptic effects. In their study, an epilepsy model was established using lithium-pilocarpine intraperitoneal injection into adult Sprague-Dawley rats, which were then treated with repetitive transcranial magnetic simulation for 7 consecutive days. Non-linear electroencephalographic parameters were obtained from the rats at 7, 14, and 28 days post-stimulation. Results showed significantly lower mean correlation-dimension and Kolmogorov-entropy values for stimulated rats than for non-stimulated rats. Low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic simulation has suppressive effects on electrical activity in epileptic rats, thus explaining its effectiveness in treating epilepsy. EurekAlert
The precise targeting and limited dosing of radiation via proton therapy is proving to be an advantage in ongoing efforts to reduce treatment side effects among head and neck cancer patients, according to a new study of pediatric patients from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The results were presented this week at the 55th annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) conference.
‘Children are especially susceptible to the side effects of radiation therapy, and treating them for head and neck cancers poses an additional challenge due to the risk of radiation to developing tissues,’ said the study
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