Medical Thought Leaders

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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.

Valproic acid metabolism and obesity: an interview with Dr. Namandjé Bumpus, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Valproic acid is one of the most widely prescribed drugs for the treatment of epilepsy. It has also been shown to be effective for the treatment of mood disorders and migraine headaches.

17 Feb 2014

Prions and their shadow proteins: an interview with Dr Jiri Safar, Co-Director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center

The prion diseases were originally discovered by Dr Gajdusek and Dr Gibbs. The first disease discovered was Kuru, which was affecting native tribes in the Papua New Guinea highlands in the 1950s.

9 Feb 2014

Communication for people with impaired speech: an interview with Professor Mark Hawley, Professor of Health Services Research, Director of CATCH and lead researcher for VIVOCA

There are many different causes of speech impairment but the one we are particularly interested in is actually the most common cause of speech impediment, which is dysarthria.

5 Feb 2014

Psoriasis registry: an interview with Dr. Andrew D. Robertson, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, National Psoriasis Foundation

Psoriasis is the most common autoimmune disease in the US, affecting 2 to 3% of all Americans. What causes psoriasis in any one individual will stem from a mixture of their genetic background and their environment.

4 Feb 2014

Addressing antibiotic resistance: an interview with Professor Otto Cars, Uppsala University, Sweden

Antibiotic resistance is a consequence of antibiotic use. Bacteria adapt to the threat of antibiotics using mechanisms to overcome the drug. These bacteria, which we call resistant bacteria, then survive.

3 Feb 2014

REM sleep, memory and depression: an interview with Dr Penny Lewis, University of Manchester

Usually you don’t go into REM until you’ve passed through all the other stages of sleep. The stage immediately before REM is slow-wave sleep.

From The University of Manchester 29 Jan 2014

Anxiety, depression and meditation: an interview with Dr Madhav Goyal, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

We wanted to be broadly inclusive of any kind of meditation program, so we defined a meditation program to be any kind of structured meditation program that involved at a minimum 4 hours of training, with instructions to practice outside the classroom.

28 Jan 2014

Childhood brain cancer (ETMR/ETANTR): an interview with Dr. Nada Jabado, Department of Pediatrics at McGill University

Embryonal tumours with multilayered rosettes (ETMR) are rare, deadly brain tumours that affect mainly children below the age of 4 years. There are 300 cases reported but probably there are many more as this tumour is often misdiagnosed.

21 Jan 2014

Smoking and cancer: an interview with Dr. Lewis Foxhall, VP of Health Policy, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

The report Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General, identified tobacco as the predominant cause of lung cancer in men. This was the first widely disseminated report based on scientific studies showing the clear link between smoking tobacco and serious health conditions including cancer, chronic lung diseases and heart disease.

13 Jan 2014

Gastric bypass and cardiovascular disease risk: an interview with Dr. Brethauer, Cleveland Clinic

Gastric bypass surgery is a type of bariatric operation that results in weight loss and stimulates metabolic effects that treat diabetes and other cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes, high cholesterol, and hypertension.

9 Jan 2014

C. parvum and cryptosporidiosis: an interview with Dr. Momar Ndao, McGill University

Cryptosporidium parvum is one of the most common enteropathogens to affect humans in the world. The protozoan parasite causes a gut infection referred to as cryptosporidiosis.

8 Jan 2014

Crowdsourcing fungal metabolites with antitumor activity: an interview with Dr. Robert H. Cichewicz, University of Oklahoma

Fungi have played a large role in the development of many important drugs that are in wide use today. The most well-known of these are the penicillins.

7 Jan 2014

The fight against HIV/AIDS: an interview with Dr. Mit Philips, HIV/AIDS Policy Analyst, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

People mainly speak about the progress in HIV/AIDS. We at MSF know and are very conscious of the fact that there has been enormous progress, but the progress is very uneven.

6 Jan 2014

Chronic pain amongst different ethnic groups: an interview with Professor Martin Underwood, Warwick Medical School

Conventionally chronic pain is defined as pain that lasts beyond the expected period of healing. Most experts consider a pain to be chronic after three months.

18 Dec 2013

HIV self-test screening strategy: an interview with Dr. Nitika Pant Pai, McGill University

Conventional health facility based HIV testing is plagued with poor rates of testing and has been around for the past 15+ years. Further, about 40-60% of individuals tested in facilities are lost to follow up.

17 Dec 2013

HIV stigma: an interview with Dr. Vargas-Jackson, M.D. Howard University Hospital

Stigma has been defined as a social opportunistic disease that attaches to many illnesses and increases morbidity and mortality rates. Stigma is the shame or disgrace attached to illnesses and diseases regarded as socially unacceptable.

11 Dec 2013

Auditory processing disorder diagnosis: an interview with Dr Doris-Eva Bamiou, UCL Ear Institute

It is a listening or hearing disorder, which is due to the brain’s defective analysis of sounds, so that individuals who are affected with this disorder cannot make sense of what they hear.

26 Nov 2013

Anti-epileptic drugs, bone loss and supplements

Antiepileptic drugs are medications used to prevent and control seizure disorders. These medications are also frequently used for other diagnoses other than seizures, however this current study concentrated on patients with a seizure disorder.

25 Nov 2013

Brain signals in fibromyalgia patients: an interview with Dr. Marco Loggia from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston

Fibromyalgia patients suffer from a variety of symptoms, including widespread body pain and myofascial tenderness. They are ‘hyperalgesic’, which means that if you give them a stimulus that in healthy subjects is just mildly painful (or even completely innocuous), they may perceive it as excruciatingly painful.

19 Nov 2013

Sunscreen application and skin cancer: an interview with Dr Michelle Hunt, Inner Sydney Dermatology

Unfortunately the incidence of skin cancer has risen in Australia over the past decades. From 1982 to 2007, melanoma diagnosis increased by around 50%, and in 2011, 1544 people died due to melanoma.

13 Nov 2013