A Possible Diagnosis for Dry Eyes and Mouth
Most everyone can relate to an occasional bout of dry eyes or dry mouth. But if you live with both every day, it could be Sjo’gren’s (SHOW-grins) syndrome.
Typical signs and symptoms include dry, gritty or burning eyes, intermittent blurry vision, a dry mouth that causes difficulty swallowing, dental cavities and enlarged parotid glands. The parotids are a pair of salivary glands behind your jaw and in front of your ears. Other signs and symptoms may include dry skin or vaginal dryness in women, joint pain and stiffness and fatigue.
Researchers Get to Heart of Tropical Disease
A new study found that mice lacking a gene crucial to the normal functioning of their immune systems didn’t become ill when they were exposed to a pathogen that causes a horrendous infection in the liver and the spleen.
The pathogen, called Leishmania donovani, infects certain internal organs. The parasite causes visceral leishmaniasis which, if left untreated, is almost always fatal. Cases in the United States are extremely rare, but the disease, which is transmitted through the bite of a sand fly, is common in tropical and subtropical countries such as Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
The finding may lend insight into creating new drugs to treat different diseases that affect the liver, said Abhay Satoskar, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of microbiology at Ohio State University.
Tracking Computer-based Error Reports Improves Patient Safety
To err is human, but asking nurses, physicians and other hospital staff to report medication errors and log them into a computer database can help improve patient safety systems as well as human error rates, according to a study from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. Voluntary error-reporting systems are not new, but few studies have looked at the accuracy of the reporting and its impact, the Hopkins investigators say.
“Our goal was to explore the validity of this voluntary error-reporting system and whether front-line error-reporters were capturing the essence of the actual errors that occurred,” says author Marlene Miller, M.D., M.Sc., director of quality and safety initiatives for the Children’s Center. “There were some incorrect reports, but the overall trends were accurate, which allows us to say that this reporting system is a reliable index of problematic areas.” The findings are reported in the June issue of Quality & Safety in Healthcare.
Miller emphasizes that error data are valuable only if consistently monitored for patterns and used to create safety checks that prevent common errors from happening again.
Blacks have poorer survival rate for skin cancer
Researchers have found that among patients suffering from melanomas, those from a black or Hispanic background were more likely than whites to have the advanced stage of melanoma at the time of diagnosis.
Experts say that the skin cancer melanoma has become increasingly common in the last decade with incidence rates increasing 2.4 percent annually in the United States.
Because light-skinned individuals are at higher risk for melanoma, much of the prevention and early detection efforts have targeted white populations and this may explain improving survival rates which are up to 92 percent from 68 percent in the 1970 among whites.
