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‘Aggressive’ new advance directive would let dementia patients refuse food

Treading into ethically and legally uncertain territory, a New York end-of-life agency has approved a new document that lets people stipulate in advance that they don't want food or water if they develop severe dementia.

30 Mar 2018

New guidelines intend to provide template for optimal, most up-to-date DMD care

Diagnostic and treatment advances are helping patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy-;one of nine major types of muscular dystrophy that affects males-;live into their 30s and beyond, raising challenges in such areas as education, vocation, levels of independence, personal relationships, emotional health, and intimacy.

13 Mar 2018

Inadequate oxygen levels during sleep increase risk of developing Alzheimer's disease

Inadequate oxygen levels during sleep can damage the brain and increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, University of Queensland researchers have found.

31 Jan 2018

Home care agencies often wrongly deny Medicare help to the chronically ill

Colin Campbell needs help dressing, bathing and moving between his bed and his wheelchair. He has a feeding tube because his partially paralyzed tongue makes swallowing "almost impossible," he said.

18 Jan 2018

Novel antifungal shows promise to stave off drug-resistant superbugs

Microscopic yeast have been wreaking havoc in hospitals around the world- creeping into catheters, ventilator tubes, and IV lines- and causing deadly invasive infection.

11 Jan 2018

Brokers tout mix-and-match coverage to avoid high-cost ACA plans

Health insurance a la carte? As the Affordable Care Act open-enrollment season moves into its final weeks, some consumers looking for lower-cost alternatives are considering a patchwork approach to health insurance. The products may secure some basic protection but leave patients on the hook for high medical bills.

7 Dec 2017

Quality-improvement initiative could enhance safety of newborns, provide significant savings

Sick newborns often rely on a ventilator to supply oxygen and are tethered to the life-saving device by a plastic endotracheal tube. The American Academy of Pediatrics has counseled health care providers that ordering a chest X-ray daily simply to verify positioning of the ETT ratchets up costs without improving patient safety.

15 Sep 2017

Sodium channels play important role in keeping tiny lung capillaries from leaking, worsening pneumonia

Sodium channels in the cells that line the tiny capillaries in our lungs play an important role in keeping those capillaries from leaking and potentially worsening conditions like pneumonia, scientists report.

6 Sep 2017

PolyU researchers uncover new hyper-resistant, hypervirulent superbug

The Partner State Key Laboratory of Chirosciences at the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University discovered a newly emerged superbug, hyper-resistant and hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae, which may cause untreatable and fatal infections in relatively healthy individuals and will pose enormous threat to human health.

31 Aug 2017

Study could lead to improved treatment protocols for elderly patients requiring mechanical ventilation

Mechanical ventilation can be a lifesaver for patients suffering from lung disorders such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and pneumonia. Unfortunately, the use of ventilators to support breathing can cause further lung injury, particularly in elderly patients.

29 Aug 2017

Intensive Care Medicine

Intensive care medicine is a young specialty that deals with the medical treatment of the sickest patients in the hospital. Intensive care medicine doctors are called intensivists and are expert physicians with special skills in the management of organ failure.

29 Aug 2017

Researchers explore ways for computers to help improve patient care

Doctors are often deluged by signals from charts, test results, and other metrics to keep track of. It can be difficult to integrate and monitor all of these data for multiple patients while making real-time treatment decisions, especially when data is documented inconsistently across hospitals.

21 Aug 2017

Drug puts a $750,000 ‘price tag on life’

Jana Gundy and Amanda Chaffin live within two hours of each other in Oklahoma. Each has a child with the same devastating disease, one that robs them of muscle strength, affecting their ability to sit, stand or even breathe.

2 Aug 2017

Depression among heart attack survivors can be deadly, yet is often ignored

Clyde Boyce has been hospitalized 14 times in the past four years. Boyce, 61, survived two strokes and five operations to unblock arteries around his heart, including three procedures in which doctors propped open his blood vessels with stents. He takes 18 pills a day and gets injections every two weeks with a powerful drug to lower cholesterol.

20 Jul 2017

Millions of kids fall outside Senate plan to shield disabled from Medicaid cuts

Aidan Long is a 13-year-old from Kalispell, Mont., who has suffered multiple daily seizures since he was 4. The seizures defy medical cure, and some of them continue for weeks, requiring Aidan to be airlifted to children's hospitals in Denver or Seattle, said his father, Ben Long.

10 Jul 2017

Study reveals safety of patient-administered sedatives during mechanical ventilation

New research takes a novel approach to traditional, clinician-only sedative delivery, finding that select critically ill patients can safely self-administer sedatives to manage their anxiety during mechanical ventilation.

3 Jul 2017

The new war on sepsis

Dawn Nagel, a nurse at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, Calif., knew she was going to have a busy day, with more than a dozen patients showing signs of sepsis.

21 Jun 2017

Johns Hopkins researchers find ways to curb common and deadly hospital-acquired infections

For some hospital patients, going on a ventilator is often the difference between life and death. About 800,000 hospital patients undergo mechanical ventilation each year in the United States due to a variety of illnesses or conditions, such as a brain injury, stroke or pneumonia.

23 May 2017

Clinical trial offers new hope for patients suffering from severe lung disease

Patients suffering from severe lung disease could see their lives transformed thanks to a 'game-changing' clinical trial carried out by UK experts and led by the team from the Lane Fox Respiratory Service based at Guy's and St Thomas' in London.

22 May 2017

Simulation techniques improve brain death diagnostic, communications skills of neurologists

One of the most difficult skills a neurologist must learn is how to diagnosis brain death and communicate the bad news to family members.

12 May 2017