Scientists have developed the first ultra-thin, flexible device that sticks to skin like a rub-on tattoo and can detect a person

St. Louis University scientists led by professor of pharmacological and physiological sciences Daniela Salvemini, Ph.D., discovered that drugs targeting the A3 adenosine receptor can ‘turn off’ pain signals in the spinal cord to provide relief from chronic pain.

Pain is the most common reason that people seek medical attention, but the available treatments–most commonly non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and opioids–are not always successful at relieving pain in patients with chronic pain. For this reason, Salvemini and colleagues teamed up with researchers from the National Institutes of Health, the University of Arizona and two institutes in Quebec, Canada, to investigate a new target for treating chronic pain: the A3 adenosine receptor or A3AR.

In earlier studies, Salvemini’s laboratory demonstrated that two drugs which target the A3AR–IB-MECA and MRS5698–were effective in treating several models of chronic pain, including painful chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, metastatic cancer pain, and nerve injury. More recently, the group sought to uncover the mechanism of A3AR pain relief.

‘Chronic pain can result from the loss of regulatory mechanisms in the nervous system pathway that transmits pain,’ Salvemini said. ‘Adenosine acts as a regulatory signalling molecule in other areas of the nervous system, so we hypothesized that A3AR might also play a role in regulating pain signals during pain processing.’

Indeed, Salvemini and colleagues found that A3AR drugs not only relieved pain, but did so by activating an inhibitory transmitter system known as the gamma amino-butyric acid (GABA) system. In areas of the spinal cord and brain dedicated to pain processing, A3AR activation promoted GABA signalling by preventing the breakdown and removal of GABA from neuronal synapses.

‘In chronic pain, GABA signalling is often lost or diminished. Our A3AR drugs were able to restore GABA signalling in areas that process pain and ‘turn off’ the signals that maintain the pain state,’ Salvemini said.

With A3AR drugs demonstrating good safety profiles in clinical trials as anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer agents, Salvemini and colleagues are enthusiastic about the potential of these new drugs to treat chronic pain in patients. EurekAlert

Thousands of patients die each year in hospitals across North America due to medical errors that could be prevented were doctors and nurses provided with instant access to patient records via wireless technology. Cue the catch-22: the electromagnetic radiation caused by those very devices can interfere with electronic medical equipment and thus lead to serious clinical consequences for patients.

Luckily, that could soon change thanks to new research from Concordia University that helps define a clear rule of thumb for how close health-care workers with their Wi-Fi devices can be to electronic medical equipment.

In a study researchers from the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science assessed the risk that a medical device will malfunction when radio waves that emanate from portable devices like tablet computers are present in a hospital room.

Hospitals often specify that staff members carrying wireless transmitters not approach sensitive electronic medical devices any closer than a designated minimum separation distance (MSD).

Once daily bathing with disposable cloths with the topical antimicrobial agent chlorhexidine of critically ill patients did not reduce the incidence of health care-associated infections.
Infections acquired during hospitalization (health care associated infections) are associated with increased hospital length of stay, rates of death, and increased costs. The skin of hospitalized patients is a reservoir for infectious pathogens. Subsequent invasion by skin flora is thought to be a mechanism contributing to health care-associated infections. Chlorhexidine is a broad-spectrum topical antimicrobial agent that, when used to bathe the skin, may decrease the bacterial burden, thereby reducing infections. Chlorhexidine bathing is incorporated into some expert guidelines, according to background information in the article.
Michael J. Noto, M.D., Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and colleagues conducted a study in which five adult intensive care units in Nashville performed once-daily bathing of all patients (n = 9,340) with disposable cloths impregnated with 2 percent chlorhexidine or non-antimicrobial cloths as a control. Bathing treatments were performed for a 10-week period followed by a 2-week washout period (a period allowed in order to eliminate the effect of the first intervention before starting a new intervention), during which patients were bathed with non-antimicrobial disposable cloths, before switching to the alternate bathing treatment for another 10 weeks.
A total of 55 infections occurred during the chlorhexidine bathing period (4 central line-associated bloodstream infections [CLABSIs], 21 catheter-associated urinary tract infections [CAUTIs], 17 ventilator-associated pneumonia [VAP], and 13 Clostridium difficile) and 60 infections during the control bathing periods (4 CLABSI, 32 CAUTI, 8 VAP, and 16 C difficile infections). After adjusting for various factors, no significant difference between groups in the rate of the primary outcome (composite of these infections) was detected.
Other infection-related secondary outcomes, including health care-associated bloodstream infections, blood culture contamination, and clinical cultures positive for multi-drug resistant organisms were also not improved by chlorhexidine.