Medical Thought Leaders

RSS

News Medical's "Thought Leaders" series is a selection of articles written by national and international experts and trusted advisers in health and medicine. All the articles are written by experts who have been invited as recognised leaders in their fields to provide a "state of the art" contribution.

Pelvic prolapse surgery using mesh no more effective than standard repair?

Women who have surgery for their prolapse have a 3 in 10 chance of needing at least one more operation, so the success rate is not great. Gynecologists hoped that using non-absorbable synthetic mesh or biological graft material as a patch to reinforce their standard repairs, the success rate would get better.

27 Mar 2017

Postnatal depression in dads

Latest research suggests that 1 in 10 dads will suffer from postnatal depression (PND), and as many as 1 in 7 women will be diagnosed. This was from a survey by NCT released in 2015. This also revealed that as many as 38% of new dads have concerns surrounding their mental health.

23 Mar 2017

Why don’t patients always discuss hyperglycemia with their doctor?

Hyperglycemia occurs when a patient has higher than normal blood sugar levels. If the levels are very high, consistently 13-14 or above, the patient will start to feel tired, thirsty and feel the urge to go to the toilet frequently to pass urine (micturition).

17 Mar 2017

Can dancing improve your mental health?

Dance psychology is the study of dance and dancers from a scientific and psychological perspective. What we're trying to understand is what happens when people dance and why, we are looking at it from a healthcare perspective, which might suggest dancing is good for you.

8 Mar 2017

Benefits of compact MRI

The kind of research I'm interested in is a technique called diffusion MRI and this technique is sensitive to the microstructure of the tissue. Particular clinical applications that it is used for are cancer and looking at neurodegenerative diseases.

From Bruker BioSpin - NMR, EPR and Imaging 3 Mar 2017

Advances in Optogenetics

Optogenetics is a way of introducing information into the brain using light, it targets specific cells or connections across the brain. It is fast, like brain signaling, and helps you communicate with neural circuitry in a language more similar to what is normally used within the brain.

From Pittcon 2 Mar 2017

Using Spherical Nucleic Acids to Track and Treat Disease

Spherical nucleic acids are structures that are made by taking a nanoparticle template and using chemistry to arrange short strands of DNA or RNA on the surface of those particles. The spherical core of the nanoparticle creates a spherical arrangement of DNA or RNA, similar to tiny little balls of nucleic acids.

From Pittcon 1 Mar 2017

Diagnosing Infections Through Molecules in Patient Breath

Over the past couple of decades, the analytical technology and the clinical microbiology insight needed to create a breath test for infections has seen a considerable number of advances and there are now numerous research teams focused on evaluating patient breath as a diagnostic fluid for infectious diseases. Significant challenges still need to be overcome.

From Pittcon 27 Feb 2017

Decoding the Exposome Through Breath Biomarkers

The human exposome is probably best defined as “everything that is not the genome.” This is a bit tongue in cheek, but basically, the exposome is comprised of all of the chemicals in your body from the environment, food, consumer products, their metabolites, the endogenous “housekeeping” chemicals, the cellular wastes from energy production, as well as all of the messenger compounds and life supporting chemicals.

From Pittcon 24 Feb 2017

Listening technique for cochlear implant users in noisy situations

The listening tactic that we investigated is the idea that if you turn your head away from the person that you're talking to, rather than directly facing them, that it would help you to understand what they're saying a little better. At the same time as still looking at them, of course, because you need to be able to lip read.

23 Feb 2017

Routine small animal MR imaging using the ICON

I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the Complutense University, Madrid. Until five years ago I had been working here at the university, part time with a private clinic, where I worked in MRI and MR spectroscopy for clinical applications.

From Bruker BioSpin - NMR, EPR and Imaging 22 Feb 2017

Rapid patient recruitment and reduced trial costs: is LDS the answer?

LDS stands for Linked Database System, which essentially describes what it does. Our LDS technology uses multiple sources of information from hospitals, GPs and pharmacies. However in the future this information could also come from other health data sources e.g. your smartphone, Fitbit etc.

21 Feb 2017

Targeting RNA repeats

RNA repeats are stretches of code in the body that incrementally repeat. For example, in the most common cause of adult-on-set muscular dystrophy a RNA has a repeat of r(CUG) and this three letter code can repeat thousands of times.

20 Feb 2017

Why do children with autism make less eye contact?

Reduced eye contact is one of the hallmark symptoms of autism and often one of the earliest red flags for parents and physicians. The reason why has been a longstanding debate in the field.

16 Feb 2017

Ten steps for a healthy pregnancy

The Ten Steps for a Healthy Pregnancy, aims to offer mums-to-be essential advice to adopt good habits for healthy growth and development for both mum and baby.

14 Feb 2017

Exosome isolation using ultracentrifugation

In the outpatient clinic and lab, our research studies aim to understand biological functions of exosomes and membrane particles.

From Beckman Coulter Life Sciences - Centrifugation 9 Feb 2017

Could we really reverse aging to prolong life?

It's only a matter of time before we can reverse the aging process. It hasn't been already achieved because the human body is extremely complex and does itself a lot of different types of damage.

7 Feb 2017

Single Molecule Detection of Proteins in Single Cells

We developed this technology almost 10 years ago. It was developed after a key experiment was carried out by David Rissin, who was a PhD candidate in my laboratory at the time.

From Pittcon 3 Feb 2017

Increasing idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis research

IPF is an incurable lung condition with the average life expectancy following diagnosis being just three years. It’s one of the many types of interstitial lung disease (ILD). Interstitial means that the disease affects the interstitium, a lace-like network of tissue that supports the air sacs (alveoli) in your lungs.

From Asthma + Lung UK 25 Jan 2017

Advanced NMR-based methods for studying RNPs and drug design

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful analytical tool widely used in chemical research to investigate the structure and dynamics of molecules.

From Bruker BioSpin - NMR, EPR and Imaging 24 Jan 2017