Medicine News and Research

RSS

WHO hand-hygiene compliance strategy easy for health-care workers to practise

WHO's strategy for improving hand hygiene is easy for health-care workers to practise, according to a new study published today in "Lancet Infectious Diseases". Health care-associated infections are a major threat to patient safety worldwide and transmission in these settings is mainly from the hands of health-care workers.

23 Aug 2013

Number of child refugees fleeing Syrian civil war tops one million, says Save the Children

Children trapped amid fighting in Syria are being killed, maimed, and denied access to food and medicine as the number of child refugees fleeing the civil war tops one million, Save the Children said today.

23 Aug 2013

Tufts Health Plan provides positive coverage decision and in-network provider status to bioTheranostics

bioTheranostics, a leading provider of molecular diagnostic solutions for cancer, has received a positive coverage decision and in-network provider status from Tufts Health Plan for its CancerTYPE ID molecular cancer classifier.

23 Aug 2013

Stem cell therapy improves radiation-induced cognitive impairment

Patients receiving cranial irradiation treatment for brain cancer may find the treatment life-saving, but often suffer progressive and debilitating cognitive detriments, including spatial learning and memory deficits. The cognitive deficits are a contributing factor to the often significant adverse impacts on the surviving patients' quality of life after radiation therapy. In an effort to improve post-irradiation cognitive impairment, scientists at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues at Neuralstem, Inc. (Rockville, MD), have transplanted fetal stem cells into laboratory animals with radiation-induced cognitive impairments and found that this led to a number of cognitive improvements.

23 Aug 2013

Challenges of studying health and mortality risks of obesity

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine point out that the body mass index, based on the weight and height, is not an accurate measure of body fat content and does not account for critical factors that contribute to health or mortality, such as fat distribution, proportion of muscle to fat, and the sex and racial differences in body composition.

23 Aug 2013

NYU Langone Medical Center announces opening of new wound healing center

NYU Langone Medical Center announces the opening of the new Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Hyperbaric and Advanced Wound Healing Center at 240 East 38th Street. One of only two Hyperbaric Centers in Manhattan providing treatment to patients with chronic non-healing wounds, patients now have access to surgical and non-surgical expertise within one location.

23 Aug 2013

New technique may convert cells from heart disease patients into heart muscle cells

Researchers have developed a new technique that might one day be used to convert cells from heart disease patients into heart muscle cells that could act as a personalized treatment for their condition.

23 Aug 2013

MFDCs have advantages over adult skin cells, including proliferation and differentiation

Multipotent fetal dermal cells (MFDCs) may be an ideal source for cell therapy for repairing damaged tissues and organs. Their performance is superior to that of adult dermal cells, said a research team in Italy that developed a cell isolation technique for MFDCs and subsequently published a study that appears as an early e-publication for the journal Cell Transplantation.

23 Aug 2013

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins-published journals win 13 APEX Awards

Wolters Kluwer Health, a world leader in healthcare information solutions, is pleased to announce that nine of its Lippincott Williams & Wilkins-published journals won 13 highly regarded awards in the 25th annual APEX Awards for Publication Excellence Competition.

23 Aug 2013

Age, sex and race may predict risk factor reduction in patients with coronary heart disease

Risk factor modification efforts could help reduce the chance of another heart attack and death among the more than 15 million Americans with coronary heart disease. Yet some patients-especially women and minorities-leave the hospital with poorly managed risk factors.

23 Aug 2013

New radiation treatment can reduce bone pain, extend lives of prostate cancer patients

Prostate cancer that has spread to the bones can cause pain and fractures. Loyola University Medical Center is among the first hospitals in Chicago to offer a new targeted radiation treatment that can reduce bone pain and the incidence of fractures - and also extend patients' lives.

23 Aug 2013

Study: Gene variants linked with increased risk for kidney complications in patients with lupus

Variants in a particular gene are linked with an increased risk for kidney complications in patients with lupus, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. The findings could lead to better treatments to protect the kidney health of patients with the disease.

23 Aug 2013

Study confirms exposure to arsenic in drinking water can impair lung function

A new study confirms that exposure to low to moderate amounts of arsenic in drinking water can impair lung function. Doses of about 120 parts per billion of arsenic in well water-about 12 times the dose generally considered safe-produced lung damage comparable to decades of smoking tobacco. Smoking, especially by males, made arsenic-related damage even worse.

23 Aug 2013

MC1R mutation responsible for red hair phenotype also promotes cancer-causing pathway

A person's skin pigment, which determines hair color and skin tone, is influenced by the melanocortin-1 (MC1R) gene receptor. For the population's one to two percent of redheads, a mutation in MC1R accounts for their red hair color and typical light skin.

23 Aug 2013

Noninvasive urine test can accurately monitor risk of kidney rejection

Levels of a protein in the urine of kidney transplant recipients can distinguish those at low risk of developing kidney injury from those at high risk, a study suggests. The results also suggest that low levels of this protein, called CXCL9, can rule out rejection as a cause of kidney injury.

23 Aug 2013

Brain size can predispose person to develop eating disorders

New research indicates that teens with anorexia nervosa have bigger brains than teens that do not have the eating disorder. That is according to a study by researchers at the University of Colorado's School of Medicine that examined a group of adolescents with anorexia nervosa and a group without.

23 Aug 2013

Scientists identify molecular mechanism that contributes to pancreatic cancer

New research led by scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and Baylor College of Medicine could aid efforts to diagnose and treat one of the most lethal and hard-to-treat types of cancer.

23 Aug 2013

Aromatherapy, IV dextrose may relieve nausea and vomiting after surgery

Two simple, non-drug treatments-aromatherapy and intravenous administration of a simple sugar solution-may offer effective new approaches to relieving nausea and vomiting after surgery, report a pair of studies in the September issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS).

22 Aug 2013