‘Today, we
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have created a synthetic form of low-molecular-weight heparin that can be reversed in cases of overdose and would be safer for patients with poor kidney function.
‘We took this drug and not only made it cost effectively, but we
Probiotics are effective in preventing hepatic encephalopathy in patients with cirrhosis of the liver, according to a new study. Hepatic encephalopathy is a deterioration of brain function that is a serious complication of liver disease.
‘This rigorous new research finds that probiotics modify the gut microbiota to prevent hepatic encephalopathy in patients with cirrhosis of the liver,’ said David W. Victor III, MD. ‘These results offer a safe, well-tolerated and perhaps cheaper alternative to current treatments.’
Investigators from Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital, New Delhi, India, conducted a single-centre, prospective, open-label, randomised trial with cirrhosis patients who showed risk factors for hepatic encephalopathy, but had yet to experience an obvious episode. When comparing treatment with probiotics versus placebo, the researchers found that the incidence of hepatic encephalopathy was lower in patients treated with probiotics.
Probiotic supplementation was not associated with any side effects and none of the patients required discontinuation of therapy. These results suggest that probiotics are similar in effectiveness to the current standard of care, lactulose, in the prevention of hepatic encephalopathy, yet they appear to be much better tolerated. The effectiveness of lactulose, a non-absorbable disaccharide, is limited by side effects (diarrhoea, bloating and gas) and a narrow therapeutic window.
‘By virtue of its size, study duration and design, as well as the thorough nature of the baseline and follow-up assessments, this study represents an important contribution to the hepatic encephalopathy literature,’ added Dr. Victor, a practicing hepatologist in the Methodist J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center at Houston Methodist Hospital, TX. AGA Institute
The development of graphene
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed two inexpensive adapters that enable a smartphone to capture high-quality images of the front and back of the eye. The adapters make it easy for anyone with minimal training to take a picture of the eye and share it securely with other health practitioners or store it in the patient
A Mayo Clinic review of 47 studies found that 30-day readmissions can be reduced by almost 20 percent when specific efforts are taken to prevent them. Key among these are interventions to help patients deal with the work passed on to them at discharge.
‘Reducing early hospital readmissions is a policy priority aimed at improving quality of care and lowering costs,’ says Aaron Leppin, M.D., a research associate in Mayo Clinic
Scientists reported today the first human recipients of laboratory-grown vaginal organs. A research team led by Anthony Atala, M.D., director of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
Using portable ultrasound as a first-line imaging study in kids with suspected appendicitis helps reduce emergency room length of stay and reduces the need for CT scans, according to a team of Mount Sinai researchers. Bedside ultrasound, often referred to as point-of-care ultrasonography, has a specificity of about 94%, meaning that it misses few cases, the Mt. Sinai researchers add.
Nanoparticles have a great deal of potential in medicine: for diagnostics, as a vehicle for active substances or a tool to kill off tumours using heat. ETH Zurich researchers have now developed particles that are relatively easy to produce and have a wide range of applications.
If you put your hand over a switched-on torch in the dark, it appears to glow red. This is because long-wavelength red light beams penetrate human tissue more effectively than short-wavelength blue light. ETH Zurich researchers exploit this fact in a new kind of nanoparticles: so-called plasmonic particles, which heat up when they absorb near-infrared light. This could enable them to kill tumour tissue with heat, for instance.
Gold is a popular material for nanoparticles used therapeutically, as it is well tolerated and does not usually trigger any undesirable reactions. In the characteristic ball or sphere shape of nanoparticles, however, gold does not have the necessary properties to work as a plasmonic particle that absorbs sufficiently in the near-infrared spectrum of light to heat up. To do so, it needs to be moulded into a special shape, such as a rod or shell, so that the gold atoms adopt a configuration that starts absorbing near-infrared light, thereby generating heat. Producing such nanorods or nanoshells in sufficient amounts, however, is complex and expensive.
A team of researchers headed by Sotiris Pratsinis, Professor of Particle Technology at ETH Zurich, has now discovered a trick to manufacture plasmonic gold particles in large amounts. They used their existing know-how on plasmonic nanoparticles and made sphere-shaped gold nanoparticles that display the desired near-infrared plasmonic properties by allowing them to be aggregated. Each particle is coated with a silicon dioxide layer beforehand, which acts as a placeholder between the individual spheres in the aggregate. Through the precisely defined distance between several gold particles, the researchers transform the particles into a configuration that absorbs near-infrared light and thus generates heat.
‘The silicon dioxide shell has another advantage’, explains Georgios Sotiriou, first author on the study and, until recently, a postdoc in Pratsinis
April 2024
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