Aspirin Shows Promise in Combating Antibiotic-Induced Hearing Loss
Around the world, inexpensive antibiotics known as aminoglycosides have been used for the past 60 years in the battles against acute infections and tuberculosis, as antibacterial prophylaxis in cystic fibrosis and other patients, and in and other conditions. But for all of the good they do, the drugs also have been widely linked to irreversible hearing loss.
Now, researchers at the University of Michigan’s Kresge Hearing Research Institute and their Chinese colleagues, working under the leadership of Jochen Schacht, Ph.D., and Su-Hua Sha, M.D., have found that the hearing loss can be prevented in many people with the use of another inexpensive, widely available medication: aspirin. The results appear in the April 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The researchers studied 195 patients in China who received 80 to 160 milligrams of gentamicin (a type of aminoglycoside) intravenously twice daily, typically for five to seven days. Of those, 89 patients were given aspirin along with the antibiotic, and 106 were given placebos along with the antibiotic. The results were dramatic: The incidence of hearing loss in the group that was given placebos was 13 percent, while in the aspirin group it was just 3 percent, or 75 percent lower.
Expert says fetuses cannot feel pain and fetal pain relief is not required during abortions
There is good evidence that fetuses cannot feel pain, says an expert in the BMJ.
Proposals to tell women seeking abortions that their unborn child will feel pain, or to provide pain relief during abortions, are therefore scientifically unsound and may put women at unnecessary risk, argues Stuart Derbyshire, a senior psychologist at the University of Birmingham.
He examined the neurological and psychological evidence to support a concept of fetal pain.
Older hearts suitable for transplantation
Long-term outcomes after transplantation of hearts from donors aged 50 years or older are broadly comparable to those achieved with hearts from younger donors, according to Canadian researchers.
“This is good news for people who are waiting for a heart transplant—knowing more than 20 percent of patients die waiting for a heart,” Dr. Shaoha Wang told Reuters Health.
In the March/April issue of the Journal of Cardiac Surgery, Wang and colleagues at the University of Alberta Hospital, Edmonton report on their analysis of all 338 adult heart transplants performed at their institution over a 15-year period.
Four subtypes of blood cancer identified
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and collaborators have identified four distinct genetic subtypes of multiple myeloma, a deadly blood cancer, that have different prognoses and might be treated most effectively with drugs specifically targeted to those subtypes.
A new computational tool based on an algorithm designed to recognize human faces plucked the four distinguishing gene patterns out of a landscape of many DNA alterations in the myeloma genome, the researchers report in the April issue of Cancer Cell.
These results “define new disease subgroups of multiple myeloma that can be correlated with different clinical outcomes,” wrote the authors, led by Ronald DePinho, MD, director of Dana-Farber’s Center for Applied Cancer Science.
