A painstaking effort to create a biocompatible patch to heal infant hearts is paying off at Rice University and Texas Children

New NICE medical technologies guidance supports the use of a device that can detect atrial fibrillation whilst blood pressure is being measured.

Using WatchBP Home A in the NHS for opportunistically detecting asymptomatic atrial fibrillation during the measurement of blood pressure by primary care professionals, is backed by the NICE guidance. The recommendations note that using WatchBP Home A could increase the detection rate of atrial fibrillation, which would allow preventative treatment to be given to reduce the incidence of atrial fibrillation-related stroke.

The guidance also recommends that WatchBP Home A should be considered for use in people with suspected hypertension (high blood pressure) or those being screened for hypertension in primary care. People with suspected atrial fibrillation should have an electrocardiogram (ECG) in line with NICE clinical guideline 36, Atrial fibrillation.

Hypertension is defined by a consistent blood pressure reading on different occasions of 140/90mmHg or higher. If left untreated, high blood pressure increases the risk of a heart attack or stroke. Atrial fibrillation is a heart condition that causes an irregular and often abnormally fast heart rate, and is the most common heart rhythm disturbance. It can lead to dizziness, shortness of breath and palpitations, but some people have no symptoms and so are not aware that their heart rate is irregular. 

The WatchBP Home A device is a blood pressure monitor which automatically detects pulse irregularity that may be caused by symptomatic or asymptomatic atrial fibrillation, whilst it records blood pressure. Blood pressure is taken using a cuff which fits around the upper arm, and which is connected to a small unit which records the reading. The monitor can be used for diagnosing hypertension in a clinical setting with the measurement taken under the supervision of a clinician.

Professor Carole Longson, Director of the NICE Centre for Health Technology Evaluation, said: ‘We are delighted to publish this new guidance supporting the use of Watch BP Home A for picking up atrial fibrillation whilst blood pressure is being measured in some people. The evidence considered by the independent Medical Technologies Advisory Committee (MTAC) indicates that the device can offer advantages in detecting atrial fibrillation opportunistically whilst measuring blood pressure, and that using the device in primary care could increase the detection rate of atrial fibrillation compared with taking the pulse by hand. This would allow preventative treatment to be considered to reduce the incidence of atrial fibrillation-related stroke. The guidance is not about screening for atrial fibrillation, but about the benefits that the device offers in helping to pick up atrial fibrillation by chance in people with suspected high blood pressure or those being screened for high blood pressure, in primary care.

‘Using WatchBP Home A is associated with estimated overall cost savings per person screened of between

Patients whose severe depression goes into remission for six months following electroconvulsive therapy report a quality of life similar to that of healthy individuals, researchers say.

‘If we can get you into remission, you get this big, big improvement in quality of life at six months such that our patients

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a new way of looking at standard MRI scans that more accurately measures damage to the blood-brain barrier in stroke victims, a process they hope will lead to safer, more individualised treatment of blood clots in the brain and better outcomes.

The blood-brain barrier is a unique shielding of blood vessels that limits the passage of molecules from the blood stream into the brain. Without it, the brain is open to infection, inflammation and haemorrhage. Ischemic stroke patients are at risk of bleeding into the brain when there is damage to the barrier. By more accurately identifying areas of damage, the researchers say they hope to use their new tool to predict and reduce the risk of complications from clot-dissolving drugs used to treat this kind of stroke.

‘A better characterisation of blood-brain barrier damage opens the door to new approaches to treating stroke patients,’ says study leader Richard Leigh, M.D., an assistant professor of neurology and radiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. ‘We want to help patients, but we need to make sure our treatments don

Digital cameras, medical scanners, and other imaging technologies have advanced considerably during the past decade. Continuing this pace of innovation, an Austrian research team has developed an entirely new way of capturing images based on a flat, flexible, transparent, and potentially disposable polymer sheet

The new imager, which resembles a flexible plastic film, uses fluorescent particles to capture incoming light and channel a portion of it to an array of sensors framing the sheet. With no electronics or internal components, the imager’s elegant design makes it ideal for a new breed of imaging technologies, including user interface devices that can respond not to a touch, but merely to a simple gesture.

‘To our knowledge, we are the first to present an image sensor that is fully transparent