Normal everyday life for parents requires organisation. Parents of children who require ventilators, oxygen, IVs and other tools to live, those day-to-day tasks can be time-consuming, difficult and stressful on the family. But researchers from Case Western Reserve University found that mothers who successfully integrate the care of the technology-dependent child into family life have families that function better.
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A new study testing the benefits of a virtual exercise partner shows the presence of a moderately more capable cycling partner can significantly boost the motivation
Attitude may play an important role in how exercise affects menopausal women, according to Penn State researchers, who identified two types of women — one experiences more hot flashes after physical activity, while the other experiences fewer.
‘The most consistent factor that seemed to differentiate the two groups was perceived control over hot flashes,’ said Steriani Elavsky, assistant professor of kinesiology. ‘These women have ways of dealing with (hot flashes) and they believe they can control or cope with them in an effective way on a daily basis.’
Women who experienced fewer hot flashes the day after participating in vigorous to moderate physical activity were more likely to be part of the group that felt they had control over their hot flashes. Women who had more hot flashes following exercise were likely to be those who felt they had very few ways of coping with their hot flashes, Elavsky and her colleagues report in a recent issue of Maturitas.
Elavsky suggested that cognitive behavioural therapy may help some women feel they have more control over their bodies and reactions to hot flashes.
The participants with fewer hot flashes the day after vigorous exercising were also less likely to experience anxiety and depression. However, women who had fewer hot flashes the day after only light or moderate physical activity had higher levels of pessimism and depression than others.
‘The bottom line for research is that people need to look at individual differences,’ said Elavsky. ‘It’s not enough anymore to do a study and look at overall impact of an exercise program on symptoms. It’s very clear that we need to look at the different responses that women might have, and try to understand these individual differences more.’
Elavsky and her colleagues followed 24 menopausal women for the length of one menstrual cycle, or for 30 days if they were no longer menstruating. Each woman used a personal digital assistant to record hot flashes and wore an accelerometer at the hip to track physical activity. The women in the study regularly had hot flashes before the start of the study, experiencing from five to 20 a day.
‘The real-time reporting of symptoms and the objective measurement is a strength of the study,’ said Elavsky. ‘There aren’t any studies out there that use both of these approaches.
A recent report in The Lancet has concluded that blood pressure should be measured in both arms as the difference between left and right could indicate underlying health problems such as vascular disease.
Dr Christopher Clark and colleagues, from the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Exeter, reviewed 28 previous study papers on this subject.
According to the study, the difference between arms is important, although the arm with the higher pressure can vary between individuals. Most people in the study had an elevated blood pressure risk and about one-third had a normal level of risk.
The study concluded that a difference in systolic blood pressure of 10 millimetres of mercury (mm Hg) between arms could identify patients at high risk of asymptomatic peripheral vascular disease. A difference of 15 mm Hg would also indicate an increased risk of cerebrovascular disease, a 70% increased risk of cardiovascular mortality and 60% increased risk of death from all causes, the authors said.
Peripheral vascular disease (PVD) is the narrowing and hardening of the arteries that supply blood to the legs and feet. There are often no symptoms. Early detection of PVD is important because these patients could then benefit from stopping smoking, lowering their blood pressure or being offered statin therapy.
Writing in The Lancet, Prof Richard J McManus, department of primary care health sciences at the University of Oxford and Prof Jonathan Mant, from the department of public health and primary care at the University of Cambridge, said the review supports existing guidelines.
Prof Bryan Williams, from the Blood Pressure Association and the University of Leicester, said the study reinforced the message already in the guidelines from health watchdog NICE.
www.lancet.comNew research showing that almost half of 13,000 patients with head and neck cancers had other health-related problems at the same time is one of the presentations in a special session at the 31st conference of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO 31). The session will highlight the effect of the demographic time bomb caused by an increasingly ageing population. Dr Charlotte Rotb
According to a new report* by business intelligence expert GBI Research patient care is improving at home and in remote areas, as rising rates of chronic disease, a growing elderly population, and advancements in wireless and sensor technologies continue to drive the global patient monitoring market.
The new report shows that efficient patient management through the use of wireless technology will help to reduce the rising healthcare burden which now affects many developed and developing countries, as large elderly populations who have increased life expectancy further add to the global patient pool.
Wireless technology has a wide range of applications in remote patient monitoring. Remote monitoring enables a patient to undergo hospital visits of reduced length, and have constant monitoring at home. This not only improves the quality of life for elderly and chronically ill patients, but also leads to a significant reduction in healthcare expenditure.
Wireless remote patient monitoring can also provide continuous and real time data to physicians from remote locations such as the home, hospice, ambulance, or other outpatient settings, thereby offering the advantage of convenience to both physicians and patients, while hospitalization costs are massively reduced.
Over the past few years, the number of cases of chronic diseases such as Cardiovascular Disease (CVDs), diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases has increased, due to the growing population in developing nations. According to the World Diabetes Foundation (WDF), 80% of the diabetic population is expected to come from low and middle income countries by 2025.
Emerging economies such as India and China, with huge patient bases and an under-served market, are expected to act as potentially lucrative markets for remote patient monitoring devices. The global patient monitoring devices market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 4% to reach $8 billion in 2017 from $6.1 billion in 2010.
*Patient Monitoring Devices Market to 2017 – Increasing Use of Wireless Remote Patient Monitoring to be the Key Technology Trend
Thousands more American senior citizens with kidney disease are good candidates for transplants and could get them if physicians would get past outdated medical biases and put them on transplant waiting lists, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers.
The Hopkins investigators estimate that between 1999 and 2006, roughly 9,000 adults over 65 would have been ‘excellent’ transplant candidates and approximately 40,000 more older adults would have been ‘good’ candidates for new kidneys. None, however, were given the chance.
‘Doctors routinely believe and tell older people they are not good candidates for kidney transplant, but many of them are if they are carefully selected and if factors that really predict outcomes are fully accounted for,’ says transplant surgeon Dorry L. Segev, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of the study. ‘Many older adults can enjoy excellent transplant outcomes in this day and age,’ he says, and should ‘be given consideration for this lifesaving treatment.’
Those ages 65 and older make up over one-half of people with end-stage renal disease in the United States, and appropriately selected patients in this age group will live longer if they get new kidneys as opposed to remaining on dialysis, Segev says. The trouble is, he adds, that very few older adults are even put on transplant waiting lists. In 2007, only 10.4 percent of dialysis patients between the ages of 65 and 74 were on waiting lists, compared to 33.5 percent of 18- to 44-year-old dialysis patients and 21.9 percent of 45- to 64-year-old dialysis patients.
Segev cautions that some older kidney disease patients are indeed poor transplant prospects, because they have other age-related health problems. But he says his team’s new findings, in addition to other recent research, show that new organs can greatly improve survival even in this age group.
Segev and his team constructed a statistical model for predicting how well older adults would be expected to do after kidney transplantation by taking into account age, smoking, diabetes and 16 other health-related variables. Using those data to define an ‘excellent’ candidate, the information was then applied to every person 65 and older on dialysis during the seven-year study period. The researchers also determined whether these candidates were already on the waiting list.
‘We have this regressive attitude toward transplantation in older adults,’ Segev says, ‘one based on historical poor outcomes in older patients, which no longer hold up. Anyone who can benefit from kidney transplantation should at least be given a chance. They should at least be put on the list.’
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
For patients undergoing surgery for spinal stenosis, the risk of complications is higher when the surgeon performs very few such procedures
Development of new therapies for a range of medical conditions
The humble aspirin may soon have a new role. Scientists from The City College of New York have developed a new aspirin compound that has great promise to be not only an extremely potent cancer-fighter, but even safer than the classic medicine cabinet staple.
The new designer aspirin curbed the growth of 11 different types of human cancer cells in culture without harming normal cells, reported a team from the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education of The City College of New York in a paper published this month in the journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters. The cancers controlled included colon, pancreatic, lung, prostate, breast, and leukaemia. ‘The key components of this new compound are that it is very, very potent and yet it has minimal toxicity to the cells,’ said Associate Professor Khosrow Kashfi, the principal investigator.
The aspirin compound also shrank human colon cancer tumours by 85 percent in live animals, again without adverse effects, according to a second paper in press by the City College researchers and colleague Kenneth Olson of Indiana University School of Medicine, South Bend. ‘If what we have seen in animals can be translated to humans,’ said Professor Kashfi, ‘it could be used in conjunction with other drugs to shrink tumours before chemotherapy or surgery.’
Long the go-to drug for minor aches and pains, aspirin and other so-called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen and naproxen, are known primarily for their ability to calm inflammation. Studies in the 1980
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