By age 60, more than 50 percent of men in the United States suffer from benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), a condition that leads to annoying changes in urinary flow. While medical therapy is usually the first line of treatment, a new minimally invasive implant can dramatically reduce symptoms for men.
A therapy that replaces the faulty gene responsible for cystic fibrosis in patients’ lungs has produced encouraging results in a major UK trial.
One hundred and thirty six patients aged 12 and over received monthly doses of either the therapy or the placebo for one year.
The clinical trial reached its primary endpoint with patients who received therapy having a significant, if modest benefit in lung function compared with those receiving a placebo.
Patients from across England and Scotland participated, and were treated in two centres, Royal Brompton Hospital in London and the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh.
The trial is the first to show that repeated doses of gene therapy can have a meaningful effect on the disease, and change the lung function of patients. However, the team say more research is needed to improve the effectiveness before the therapy will be suitable for clinical use. Imperial College London
The first definitive summary of the best and safest treatments for kidney disease and diabetes patients has been compiled by Christchurch doctor and researcher Associate Professor Suetonia Palmer.
The University of Otago, Christchurch researcher together with a global team used innovative statistical analysis to compare hundreds of research studies on the effectiveness of blood-pressure-lowering drugs for patients with kidney disease and diabetes. The result: a one-stop-shop, evidence-based guide on which drugs are safe and effective.
Diabetes and high blood pressure are the most common causes of kidney disease around the world, and people often have both. Chronic kidney disease caused by diabetes always affects both kidneys and generally gets worse over time, often leading to kidney failure requiring dialysis treatment or a kidney transplant.
Associate Professor Palmer says this study is important because diabetes and kidney disease are at epidemic proportions in New Zealand. A common treatment for those with diabetes and kidney disease is blood-pressure-lowering drugs. The aim of these drugs is to prevent kidney damage.
However, doctors and patients face a bewildering array of treatment options as there are many drugs available to lower blood pressure, many used in combination. There are also hundreds of research studies done on the effectiveness of drugs or combinations of drugs. It is not possible for people to identify the best available treatments without scientific advances such as this study.
Associate Professor Palmer works as a nephrologist, or kidney specialist, at the Canterbury District Health Board and commonly sees first-hand how confusing the wide range of treatment options can be for patients, and those who treat them.
Her paper is the first to compare all drug options, and combinations of commonly used drugs, against each other.
Maquet and GE Healthcare are announcing they are developing together a new flexible angiography hybrid OR solution. The combined system for surgical procedures and catheter-based interventions will consist of the angiography system Discovery IGS 730 (GE) and the Magnus operating table system (Maquet). Besides its high-precision imaging technology, the differentiating feature of the Discovery IGS 730 is its unique mobility. With its laser-guided, mobile gantry, it can be conveniently positioned throughout the OR with high predictability to provide the medical team with full patient access. The Discovery IGS 730 enables using both left and right customizable parking locations in a single room for an excellent patient access during either left or right access procedures. Its mobile design allows more flexibility in the implantation of ceiling suspended elements such as laminar flow and booms. The Discovery IGS 730 also offers all features of a premium angiography system. It enables high-quality 2D imagery, as well as 3D rotational angiography and multimodality 3D Fusion with outstanding opportunities for minimally invasive therapy.
The Magnus operating table is a full-fledged, versatile OR table that meets all requirements of surgeons and interventional physicians. It has a
Surgeons could know while their patients are still on the operating table if a tissue is cancerous, according to researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Brigham and Women
Using two biocompatible parts, University at Buffalo researchers and their colleagues have designed a nanoparticle that can be detected by six medical imaging techniques:
CT scanning; PET scanning; photoacoustic imaging; fluorescence imaging; upconversion imaging; and Cerenkov luminescence imaging.
In the future, patients could receive a single injection of the nanoparticles to have all six types of imaging done.
This kind of
Patients with the most severe form of the immune condition Wiskott Aldrich Syndrome have been successfully treated using gene therapy at GOSH.
The treatment meant that the children went from spending an average of 25 days in hospital in the two years prior to gene therapy to no days in the hospital in the two years after the treatment. It also allowed for one child who was confined to a wheelchair to return to normal physical activities without the use of the chair.
Wiskott Aldrich Syndrome (WAS) is a genetic condition that affects between one and 10 children in every million worldwide and reduces their ability to fight infection. Symptoms can include bleeding episodes, eczema and other recurrent skin infections, and autoimmune disease although there is a broad spectrum of severity within the disease with some children being more affected than others. The most severely affected children often need to spend time in hospital.
The condition can very successfully be treated by giving children a bone marrow transplant where faulty immune cells are replaced by working donor cells, although this relies on donors being a good match for patients. Without transplantation, patients with WAS often don
Advances in technology have spurred better outcomes for infants treated in neonatal intensive care units, but parents and physicians need to work together to avoid unnecessary and potentially harmful tests and treatments, according to new Choosing Wisely recommendations developed by neonatologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC).
Armed with new knowledge about how neurodegenerative diseases alter brain structures, increasing numbers of neurologists, psychiatrists and other clinicians are adopting quantitative brain imaging as a tool to measure and help manage cognitive declines in patients. These imaging findings can help spur beneficial lifestyle changes in patients to reduce risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
The concept that cognitive decline can be identified early and prevented by applying quantitative brain imaging techniques is the focus of a recent review. Author Cyrus Raji, M.D., Ph.D., of UCLA and an international team suggest a framework in which neuroradiologists work as part of a team of clinical neuroscientists (neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, etc.) to apply quantitative neuroradiology towards prevention of cognitive decline in populations at high risk for dementia — namely those with lifestyle, genetic, and other associated risk factors.
‘I believe neuroradiology, and especially quantitative MRI technology, will have a huge impact in the future of diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, since there is compelling evidence for the baseline size of hippocampus as a key determinant of risk for future cognitive decline, and since many lifestyle factors can cause atrophy or expansion in the volume of this critical brain structure,’ says neurologist Majid Fotuhi, M.D., Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University.
Such work is already happening at UCLA and other institutions that meld these approaches into novel ways to improve patient care. ‘We are working closely with neuroradiologists to redefine how we can reduce risk for Alzheimer’s with quantitative neuroimaging that helps us pinpoint symptom-relevant volume loss in the brain and subsequent targets for tracking our lifestyle-based interventions,’ says Dr. David Merrill, a geriatric psychiatrist at UCLA Medical Center.
‘Recent advances have improved the ability to characterize imaging markers along the trajectory of Alzheimers disease, starting in the pre-clinical phase. These markers, including structural, functional, and molecular imaging are being used in the AD diagnositc criteria, ‘ says Howard Aizenstein, M.D., Ph.D., a psychiatrist at University of Pittsburgh.
Fotuhi sees imaging findings as a unique motivator for patients to make positive lifestyle changes. ‘Patients seem to enjoy reviewing results of their imaging studies, more so than reading the results of their blood tests or other clinical evaluations. For example, they can see with their own eyes whether there are any strokes or atrophy in their brain. This can have a powerful impact on them and on their determination to make changes in their lifestyle in order to improve their brain health,’ he adds.
Among the lifestyle and risk factors that can be altered to potentially prevent cognitive declines are obesity, diet, sleep, hypertension, diabetes, depression, supplementation, smoking and physical activity. It is estimated that as many as 3 million cases of Alzheimer’s dementia worldwide can be prevented with as little as a 10% reduction in the burden of preventable lifestyle. EurekAlert
When it comes to disposable laryngoscope blades, the possibility of breakage is not normally a consideration. A study by a Nova Scotia research team has revealed, however, that although most metal disposable blades meet standards set by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), their plastic counterparts are not nearly as successful when it comes to deflection and failure load.
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