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10 future web trends including personalized medicine
In 10 years time, we won’t have to worry about RSS Readers at all - everything we need to know on a daily basis will be automatically input into our brains each morning while we’re eating our breakfast. Pregnancy Without Multiple Births
More than half the women in a retrospective study became pregnant after undergoing the procedure, called a single blastocyst transfer, which transferred just one embryo into the womb. Nearly 60 percent of IVF procedures in the United States are performed on women older than 35, and the study's senior author, Amin Milki, MD, believes the findings are good news for those women who wish to become pregnant with just one child. "Eventhough these results represent a selected group of patients, we think that they should serve as encouragement to patients and providers who are considering single blastocyst transfer in the older IVF population," Milki and his co-authors noted in the study, which was recently published online in the journal Fertility and Sterility. During the transfer procedure, an embryo is bathed in a culture of nutrients for five days until it reaches a developmental landmark known as the blastocyst stage. At that point, doctors are able to determine which embryos are most likely to thrive long term; they then transfer the best-quality ones into a woman's uterus......... Lower metabolism, eating behavior possible cause of overweight in narcolepsy
The study, authored by Dorothe Chabas, MD, PhD, of the Fdration des Pathologies du Sommeil, Hpital Piti-Salptrire, Paris, France, focused on 13 patients with narcolepsy and nine healthy controls matched for age, gender and ethnicity. Energy balance was reviewed by measuring the subjects body mass index (BMI), rest energy expenditure with calorimetry, daily food and water intake and plasma hormone levels. Eating behavior was reviewed using psychometric tests. As per the results, more narcoleptics than controls tended to be overweight. Seven of 13 narcoleptics and one of nine controls were overweight. Overall, narcoleptics had lower metabolism than controls. Only typical narcoleptic patients (those with narcolepsy with clear cataplexy and with suspected hypocretin deficiency) tended to eat less than controls. Plasma glucose, cortisol, thyroid and sex hormone levels did not differ between groups. However, prolactin levels were twice as high in patients with narcolepsy as in controls. Narcoleptic patients had higher psychometric scores and more frequent features of bulimia nervosa than controls, suggesting a mild eating disorder, classified as Eating Disorder Not Other Specified......... Alcohol and sleep restriction can affect young men's alertness
The study, authored by Andrew Vakulin, of the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health at Repatriation General Hospital in Australia, focused on 21 healthy young men, aged 18-30 years, who all had normal sleep patterns and no sleep disorders. The participants completed a 70-minute simulated driving session, which included steering deviation, braking reaction time, and number of collisions, and underwent repeated measures with four experimental conditions: normal sleep without alcohol, sleep restriction alone (four hours) and sleep restriction in combination with two different low BACs (0.025 g/dL and 0.035 g/dL). As per the results, steering deviation increased significantly when sleep restriction was combined with the higher dose alcohol. This combination also resulted in a greater subjective sleepiness and negative driving performance ratings in comparison to control or sleep restriction alone. The ability to keep the car in the middle of the lane is critical to safe driving, and is one of the more sensitive measures of driving impairment, said Vakulin. Eventhough steering deviation was not significantly affected by sleep restriction alone, alcohol at a BAC as low as 0.025 g/dL in combination with sleep restriction was sufficient to significantly impair steering ability. This combination may considerably reduce the threshold for safe driving, as suggested by the steering deviation data and an increase in off-road collisions following sleep restriction and alcohol ingestion in this study......... Disturbed sleep linked to poorer daytime function
The study, authored by Suzanne E. Goldman, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh, was based on a total of 2,889 women, who participated in the 2002-2004 examination of the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures. The subjects wore actigraphs, which measured sleep variables including total sleep time and hours awake after sleep onset during the night and daytime napping behavior. Neuromuscular performance measurements included gait speed, chair stands and grip strength, while functional limitations were assessed as self-reported difficulty with one or more of six instrumental activities of daily living. As per the results, women who slept less than six hours per night walked 3.5 percent slower than those who slept six to 6.8 hours. Those who slept greater than or equal to seven-and-a-half hours took 4.1 percent longer to complete five chair stands than those who slept 6.8 to seven-and-a-half hours. With higher wake after sleep onset, gait speed was 9.1 percent slower. It took 7.6 percent longer to complete five chair stands, and odds of functional limitation were 1.8 percent higher. Women with one to 1.8 hours of daytime sleep had higher odds of a functional limitation than those with less than 0.5 hours......... R rating and teens exposure to smoking in movies
Significantly, we observed that 94 percent of the 14 to 15 year olds in our sample watched R-rated movies, and 38.5 percent did so on a weekly basis. Therefore, limiting smoking to R-rated movies will likely not eliminate the influence of smoking in the movies, said Joseph R. DiFranza, MD, professor of family medicine & community health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who conducted the study with colleagues from New Zealand. The study, published in Preventive Medicine, was conducted to follow up on prior reports from the U.S. that demonstrated an increased risk of smoking among youth who watched movies that depict smoking. Almost all of the movies screened in New Zealand come from the U.S. The New Zealanders conducted surveys of 88,505 high school students of largely European, Maori, Asian or Pacific Islander ethnicity. They asked students how often they watched R-rated movies and also about their intention to smoke, past experiences with smoking and their current smoking habits......... European directive will halt use of MRI scans
The Directive was drafted by DG Employment, with the aim of minimising workers exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF). Currently eight million MRI patient examinations per year are carried out in Europe, said Professor Dag Rune Olsen, who works in experimental radiation treatment at the Norwegian Radiation Hospital, Oslo, Norway, and is chairman of the physics committee of the European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ESTRO). But these are likely to have to stop, since the Directive sets limits to occupational radiation exposure which will mean that anyone working or moving near MRI equipment will breach them, thus making it possible for them to sue their employers. Even those maintaining or servicing the equipment may be affected, he said. A British study into operator exposure to electromagnetic fields from MRI, published by the Heath and Safety Executive in June 2007, and carried out by Professor Stuart Crozier from Brisbane University, Australia, observed that anyone standing within about one metre of an MRI scanner in use would breach the exposure limits laid down in the directive. The Commission has accepted this, and said that it will consider the HSE report together with the study it has commissioned itself, and which is due for publication in October 2007, when deciding whether and how to propose amendments to the directive or to extend the implementation period......... Smoking can harm oral surgery procedures
The study followed 10 smokers and 10 non-smokers for two years to evaluate the effects of cigarette smoke on the long term outcomes of a therapy to help soft tissue reattach to the root surface of the teeth. After two years, residual gum recession around the area which received the surgery was greater in smokers as in comparison to non-smokers. Studies have shown that smoking can impair the bodys ability to heal itself immediately after surgery; but, this most recent study also showed that when a patient haccording toiodontal plastic surgery, smoking can damage the ability of that procedure to stay intact over a long period of time. People who smoke and have had some sort of periodontal plastic surgery should be aware of the negative side effects of smoking. It can be costly to have to repeat a surgery because the desirable outcomes might have been undone by smoking, explained Preston D. Miller, Jr., DDS, President of the American Academy of Periodontology. Therefore, it is important patients and doctors agree to a smoking cessation program previous to any periodontal surgery. This will help a patients chance of achieving optimal results......... Sexual function affected by stem cell transplant
Survival without a sex life should not be what cancer survivors settle for or what health-care professionals consider a successful outcome of cancer therapy, stated lead study author, Karen Syrjala, PhD, co-director of the Survivorship Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Sexual dysfunction in survivors of cancer needs to become a priority for research funding and a routine topic of discussion between doctors and their patients after cancer therapy. In an allogeneic hematopoeitic stem cell transplantation, patients with diseases of the blood, bone marrow, or certain types of cancers receive an infusion of new stem cells from a sibling or tissue-matched unrelated donor to replace the damaged or destroyed cells in their bone marrow needed for the production of blood cells. Before the transplant, high-dose chemotherapy is administered to kill residual cancer cells and to suppress the immune system so that the patients body will not reject the new tissue......... Bone-Growing Nanomaterial
A titanium surface covereed by carbon nanotubes could lead to faster, better growth of implanted bone-growing cells and an improved success rate for orthopaedic surgery. The carbon nanotubes could could even self-report, keeping doctors informed about the healing process.
Image: Sirinrath Sirivisoot/Brown University The secret: carbon nanotubes on anodized titanium. The team took titanium - the most popular implant material around - and chemically treated it and applied an electrical current to it. This process, called anodization, creates a pitted coating in the surface of the titanium. Webster and his team packed those pits with a cobalt catalyst and then ran the samples through a chemical process that involved heating them to a scorching 700 degree C. That caused carbon nanotubes to sprout from each pit. Scientists then placed human osteoblasts, or bone-forming cells, onto the nanotube-covered samples as well as onto samples of plain and anodized titanium. The samples were placed in an incubator. After three weeks, the team observed that the bone cells grew twice as fast on the titanium covered in nanotubes. Cells interacting with the nanotubes also made significantly more calcium - the essential ingredient for healthy bones. "What we found is possibly a terrific new material for joint replacement and other implants," said Webster, associate professor of engineering at Brown. "Right now, bone doesn't always properly meld to implants. Osteoblasts don't grow or grow fast enough. Adding carbon nanotubes to anodized titanium appears to encourage that cell growth and function"......... Older Blog Entries Older Blog Entries 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 |
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