October 15, 2008, 5:48 PM CT

Improving health and lowering costs

INDIANAPOLIS Across the nation concerns about health-care quality and costs are growing. For the first time, both candidates aspiring to the nation's highest office are looking to greater reliance on electronic medical records as critical to any remedy.

In Indianapolis, they and the nation can see first-hand how significant a part of the solution electronic medical records can be, say Indiana University School of Medicine researcher-clinicians at the Regenstrief Institute. Regenstrief researchers have been working on and with electronic medical records since the infancy of the concept nearly 40 years ago.

Today the Regenstrief Medical Record System has a database of 9.6 million patients. It has given birth to the Indiana Network for Patient Care, the nation's only citywide health information exchange. This metropolitan system allows emergency department physicians, with the patient's permission, to view as a single virtual record all prior care at any of more than 25 hospitals, improving quality of care and the efficiency of delivery of that care.

Electronic medical records offer numerous advantages over paper records which are sometimes illegible and very often not where the patient is when he or she needs therapy. Because an electronic medical record allows the doctor to instantly see the patient's previous therapy, medicine history and other details critical to care, errors decrease......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

October 8, 2008, 9:32 PM CT

Exercise Programs Increases Benefits for Arthritis Patients

Arthritis is the nation's most common cause of disability. The number of adults with doctor-diagnosed arthritis is projected to increase to 67 million by 2030, and a large proportion of U.S. adults will limit their activity as a result, as per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, in a new study, University of Missouri scientists observed that adults with arthritis who received exercise interventions that included educational components significantly increased their physical activity levels and experienced improvements in pain and physical functioning.

"A number of scientists examine the effectiveness of exercise classes to encourage people with arthritis to start exercising, but these studies don't examine what the classes are teaching people and if those people continue exercising after the class is over," said Marian Minor, professor in the MU Department of Physical Therapy in the School of Health Professions. "All exercise programs should include educational components that teach people how to stay active for life. We know from other studies that exercise reduces pain and improves physical functioning and mental health, but if people stop exercising, the benefits will go away".

The scientists observed that patients with arthritis who learned exercise habits through physical activity interventions reported decreases in pain and increases in physical functioning, in comparison to patients who did not participate in interventions. Educational components helped patients maintain increased physical activity levels. Patients reported additional benefits, including increased muscle strength and better mental health, said Vicki Conn, lead author of the study, professor and associate dean of research in the MU Sinclair School of Nursing......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

October 3, 2008, 5:22 AM CT

Car or pedestrian -- How we can follow objects with our eyes

When an object moves fast, we follow it with our eyes: our brain correspondingly calculates the speed of the object and adapts our eye movement to it. This in itself is an enormous achievement, yet our brain can do even more than that. In the real world, a car will typically accelerate or brake faster than, say, a pedestrian. But the control of eye movement in fact responds more sensitively to changes in the speed of fast moving objects than slow moving objects. "Gain control" is the name for this phenomenon, which has been known for some time now, but which has now just been recently analyzed more closely by a group working with associate professor Dr. Stefan Glasauer from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt (LMU) Mnchen. The scientists determined the location in the brain where gain control is calculated, and what neuronal networks are behind this complex process. The results were postulated in a mathematical model and experimentally verified and could be of great help in the diagnosis of eye movement disorders.

Eye movement control is not exactly a new field of research. We already know, for example, that different regions of the cerebral cortex are involved in eye tracking movements. These include "Area MST" and the so-called frontal eye fields, or FEFs for short. Nerve cells in Area MST mainly reflect the speed of the eye or target motion, whereas cells in the FEFs mainly respond to changes in speed. These insights have been obtained mostly from human behavioral experiments and from neurophysiological studies......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

October 1, 2008, 9:42 PM CT

Groundbreaking Discovery May Lead to Stronger Antibiotics

The last decade has seen a dramatic decline in the effectiveness of antibiotics, resulting in a mounting public health crisis across the world. A new breakthrough by University of Virginia scientists provides physicians and patients a potential new approach toward the creation of less resistant and more effective antibiotics.

"As bacteria become more resistant to our current classes of antibiotics, there also has been a general lack of new targets for developing novel antibiotics," says John H. Bushweller, Ph.D., who led a new study appearing in the September 26, 2008, issue of Molecular Cell. "This is a dangerous situation, but our discovery provides a starting point for a completely novel class of antibiotics, acting via a different mechanism."

What Dr. Bushweller, professor of molecular physiology and biological physics, and fellow scientists at the UVA Health System and Harvard Medical School have determined is the structure of a particular integral membrane enzyme, called DsbB - one of the a number of proteins that reside in cell membranes. These so-called integral membrane proteins are important, because they account for roughly one-third of any genome in the human body and are the targets of more than half of all currently used drugs.

Until now, researchers have been unable to acquire much structural information about these types of proteins; yet determining a protein's structure is vital in order to understand how it functions and how it can potentially operate as a drug target......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

October 1, 2008, 8:35 AM CT

Will patients stick to physical therapy?

Patients' responses to a simple questionnaire can reliably predict whether they will adhere to physical treatment after spine surgery, Johns Hopkins scientists suggest in a new study. The findings could help physicians identify patients who might benefit from additional preoperative preparation to ensure they attend treatment sessions and follow through with prescribed exercise, a factor that can greatly affect their long-term recovery.

"It has long been known that physical treatment after spine surgery greatly improves outcomes, but to date, there has been no easy-to-administer, standardized method for assessing a patient's willingness to adhere to treatment," says Richard L. Skolasky, Sc.D., of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

In the study, published online in the Oct. 1 Spine, Skolasky and colleagues demonstrated that spine surgery patients who scored high on the Patient Activation Measure (PAM) questionnaire were 38 percent more likely to attend physical treatment and were rated as significantly more engaged in rehabilitation by their physical therapists in comparison to patients with low PAM scores.

The PAM, developed in 2004, is a participant-completed, 13-item questionnaire that assesses a patient's ability to play an active role in his or her health care. To date, it has been studied for use with chronic diseases such as HIV, type 2 diabetes and hypertension. This is the first time it has been applied to surgery and physical treatment......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

September 29, 2008, 9:39 PM CT

Hepatitis B and pancreatic cancer

Study Summary: Hepatitis B could be a risk factor for pancreas cancer

A new study has shown that evidence of past hepatitis B infection was twice as common in people with pancreas cancer than in healthy controls. This study is the first to report an association between past exposure to the hepatitis B virus and pancreas cancer, but scientists cautioned that more studies are necessary to evaluate the nature of the link.

"While our findings indicate that past exposure to hepatitis B is linked to the development of pancreas cancer, more studies are needed to determine whether this relationship is one of cause and effect," said lead author Manal M. Hassan, MD, PhD, assistant professor at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. "If these findings can be confirmed by other studies, hepatitis B could be another risk factor for pancreas cancer that is readily modifiable with therapy, and even preventable with a vaccine".

In this study, Dr. Hassan and her colleagues compared evidence of hepatitis B and C infection (as determined by blood tests assessing antibodies to these viruses) between 476 patients with pancreas cancer and 879 matched healthy individuals. Evidence of past exposure to hepatitis B was found in 7.6 percent of patients with pancreas cancer versus 3.2 percent of controls. The association between hepatitis B exposure and pancreas cancer remained statistically significant even after controlling for other risk factors, such as smoking. People with both diabetes (an established risk factor for pancreas cancer) and hepatitis B exposure had a 7-fold increase in pancreas cancer risk, in comparison to controls. No association was observed between hepatitis C exposure and pancreas cancer......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

September 17, 2008, 5:41 PM CT

Decrease in hysterectomy complications

UC Davis scientists who studied hospital discharge records for nearly 650,000 California women over a 13-year period have observed that complications from hysterectomies have significantly declined. The study appears in the recent issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, published by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

"This is very good news for women who need a hysterectomy," said Lloyd Smith, UC Davis professor of obstetrics and gynecology and lead author of the study. "We found the rates of surgical and medical complications declined significantly for these operations."

The research team also observed that the overall number of hysterectomies declined, as well as the rate based on population.

"Hysterectomies are being used more judiciously by California physicians thanks to alternatives for dealing with the pain and excessive bleeding women can experience as they age," Smith explained.

A hysterectomy the surgical removal of the uterus and sometimes the ovaries and fallopian tubes as well is the second most common major surgical procedure among reproductive-aged women in the United States. Nearly 600,000 American women undergo the procedure every year and more than one-fourth of U.S. women will have the procedure by the time they are 60 years of age. Hysterectomy can be recommended to correct fibroids, which are muscular tumors that grow in the wall of the uterus, as well as uterine prolapse, bleeding, pain and endometriosis that does not respond to other therapys......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

September 16, 2008, 10:28 PM CT

Incontinence affects a substantial proportion of women

Nearly one-quarter of women surveyed, and more than one-third of older women, report at least one pelvic floor disorder, which includes urinary and fecal incontinence and the shifting of a pelvic organ, as per a research studyin the September 17 issue of JAMA These disorders become more prevalent with increasing age and weight.

Pelvic floor disorders include urinary and fecal incontinence, pelvic organ prolapse (when a pelvic organ, such as the uterus, drops [prolapses] from its normal spot and pushes against the walls of the vagina), and other sensory and emptying abnormalities of the lower urinary and gastrointestinal tracts. Because no single national population-based survey has assessed the prevalence of major pelvic floor disorders in U.S. women, the national burden correlation to these diseases remains unknown, as per background information in the article.

Ingrid Nygaard, M.D., M.S., of the University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, and his colleagues conducted a study to provide prevalence estimates of symptomatic pelvic floor disorders in women. The study included 1,961 nonpregnant women (age 20 years or older) who participated in the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a nationally representative survey of the U.S. population. Women were interviewed in their homes and then underwent standardized physical examinations in a mobile examination center. Urinary and fecal incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse symptoms were assessed......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:58:09 GMT

New Youtube Channels

I wanted to share two new, medicine-related Youtube channels with you. The first one is managed by the Detroit Medical Center and focuses on medical animations, educational materials.

The second one was launched by Mark Senak, the blogger of Eye on FDA and focuses on:

The eyeonfda channel is an extension of my Weblog www.eyeonfda.com and is designed to collect video of interest to the pharmaceutical, biotech and public health communities and meant to aggregate health care videos along disease and issue specific lines. Posted by: Bertalan      Read more     Source

September 15, 2008, 10:26 PM CT

New method identifies meth hot spots

A researcher at Oregon State University has used a new method of combining multiple sources of data to identify counties in Oregon with high numbers of methamphetamine-related problems per capita, giving officials a new tool in fighting the illegal drug.

The study, presented today at a toxicology conference in Canada, examined statistics from four sources then identified five counties with the most meth-linked incidents per capita, such as deaths, poisonings and places where meth is made.

"This method of combining different types of data like health statistics and the location of illicit labs to assess Oregon's methamphetamine problem is a new approach toward studying a significant public health concern," said OSU associate professor Dr. Daniel Sudakin, the study's author. "There are a lot of people analyzing the issue of methamphetamine, but they do it from different angles. For example, some focus on health problems, others focus on hazardous chemical releases from meth labs.

"This OSU study incorporates information about when and where these incidents occurred, giving us a bigger picture of what's going on across the state," Sudakin added. "It also includes rural areas, which tend not to be studied as much as urban areas in terms of meth use and production"......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source