A novel breast arterial calcification (BAC) score that uses findings from standard digital mammography is predictive of underlying coronary calcification and cardiovascular disease risk, a new study shows.

‘This is almost the ‘perfect storm’ because the age range for people who are having mammograms is the same as the age range for those who might benefit the most from preventive cardiology,’ said Laurie Margolies, MD, from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

‘If breast arterial calcification is a surrogate for coronary artery calcium, or if it could augment documented risk-factor analysis, mammography could play a part in cardiovascular disease prevention and early intervention,’ she pointed out.

‘We found that the BAC score significantly predicts the presence of coronary artery calcium with an overall accuracy of 69%,’ she reported here at the American Roentgen Ray Society 2015 Annual Meeting

The study involved 325 women who had a non-contrast chest CT and a traditional mammogram within 1 year of each other.

If calcified vessels were identified on the mammogram, the investigators calculated the BAC score by evaluating the number of vessels involved, the length of the vessel involved, and the density of calcium involvement in the lumen.

They determined that breast arterial calcification was present in 45.5% of the cohort.

For each patient, they then compared the BAC score with the Coronary Artery Calcium Score. A calcium score of 4 or higher indicates significant risk for cardiovascular disease.

Agreement between the two scores was ‘highly significant,’ Dr Margolies reported.

For patients with a calcium score of 0, 76% also had a BAC score of 0, whereas 11% had a BAC score of 1 to 3 and 13% had a BAC score of 4 to 12.

For patients with a calcium score of 4 to 12, 55% also had a BAC score of 4 to 12, whereas 29% had a BAC score of 0 and 16% had a BAC score of 1 to 3.

The mechanisms of breast arterial calcification and coronary artery calcification are different. Breast calcification is medial in location, whereas coronary calcification is located in the intima, Dr Margolies explained.

In addition, mammary arteries are branches of several different arterial systems that are considered to be unsusceptible to conventional atherosclerosis.

‘Each of the individual variables we had in the BAC were all significantly predictive of the calcium score (P < .0001),' Dr Margolies pointed out. Calcification in the breast is in the media, which is a different kind of calcification than occurs in the coronaries.  Predictably, BAC-positive patients were significantly older than BAC-negative patients (66.8 vs 58.2 years; P <.0001). There was also more hypertension in BAC-positive than in BAC-negative women (78% vs 55%; P = .0002). Paradoxically, fewer BAC-positive than BAC-negative patients were smokers (11% vs 23%; P < .0087). 'Right now, I'm putting this information in the mammography report, but whether the primary care physician who ordered the mammography is picking it up or acting on it, I don't know,' Dr Margolies told Medscape Medical News. 'But cardiologists are extremely interested in this research. They are looking to prevent strokes and heart attacks, so anything that encourages women to be more proactive about their cardiovascular health is greatly welcomed,' she said. Medscape

A team of biomedical engineers have developed a prototype of a low-cost portable device that can detect bacterial meningitis in babies replacing the existing painful and difficult lumbar puncture puncture test.

The innovative procedure consists of a simple, non-invasive, high-resolution ultrasound scan of part of the brain, called the fontanelle, through an opening between the cranial bones of babies under 12 months of age. The researchers created algorithms that analyse the image and can indicate, within seconds, whether cellularity, a sign of infection, exists in the cerebrospinal fluid.

The economical procedure, aims to revolutionize the detection of this illness, especially in developing countries where hospitals do not have the facilities to carry out the lumbar puncture. Without the test many children die or suffer serious complications as a result of bacterial meningitis. The procedure can be used without specialized training, and has already been tested on a small number of babies at the La Paz University Hospital (Madrid, Spain).

The research was carried out by the Madrid-MIT M+Visi

New evidence has been gained for the success of faecal microbial transplantation in treating severe Clostridium difficile infection, a growing problem worldwide that leads to thousands of fatalities every year. The findings have important implications for a range of diseases associated with microbial imbalance, or dysbiosis, researchers say.

Research led by Michael Sadowsky, Alex Khoruts, and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in collaboration with the Rob Knight Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, reveals that healthy changes to a patient’s microbiome are sustained for up to 21 weeks after transplant, and has implications for the regulation of the treatment. Findings also demonstrate the dynamic nature of faecal microbiota in FMT donors and recipients.

In FMT, faecal matter is collected from a donor, purified, mixed with a saline solution and placed in a patient, usually by colonoscopy. In contrast to standard antibiotic therapies, which further disrupt intestinal microflora and may contribute to the recurrence of CDI, FMT restores the intestinal microbiome and healthy gut function.
Using DNA samples of healthy individuals from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) as a baseline, Sadowsky and his team compared changes in faecal microbial communities of recipients over time to the changes observed within samples from the donor. Significantly, the composition of gut microbes in the both donor and recipient groups varied over the course of the study, but remained within the normal range when compared to hundreds of samples collected by the HMP.

According to Sadowsky, the findings have important implications for a range of diseases associated with microbial imbalance, or dysbiosis, and could influence the regulatory regime surrounding FMT, currently treated as a drug by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA).

‘The dynamic nature of fecal microbiota in both the donor and recipients suggests that the current framework of regulation, requiring consistent composition, may need to be re-examined for faecal transplantations,’ says Michael Sadowsky. ‘Change in faecal microbial composition is consistent with normal responsiveness to shifts in the diet and other environment factors. Variability should be taken into account when comparing microbial composition in normal individuals to those with dysbiosis characteristic of disease states, especially when assessing clinical interventions and outcomes.

Also discovered in the research, the performance of frozen and fresh preparations of faecal material was indistinguishable. Though the sample was limited and warrants further study with a larger cohort, it has several implications for the widespread adoption of FMT. The frozen preparation greatly simplifies the standardization and distribution of the faecal material. It also facilitates long-term storage of donor material for future study and makes FMT accessible to a greater number of physicians and patients. Finally, it offers advantages over fresh material in the testing of faecal samples for pathogens, which in some cases can take several weeks to complete. ScienceDaily

Neural prosthetic devices implanted in the brain’s movement centre, the motor cortex, can allow patients with amputations or paralysis to control the movement of a robotic limb