Poland wants more babies, hospitals can’t cope
Heavily pregnant Karolina Mrowiec went to a Polish hospital in an advanced stage of labor and was surprised when the nurse asked her what was wrong.
“I am having a baby. Isn’t it obvious?” she replied.
Her story shows how an overstretched hospital system is struggling as Poland experiences its first baby boom in years.
Patient choice and treatment alternatives for arthritis
Patients with osteoarthritis (OA) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) face different treatment options and determining which ones to try can be confusing. Two new studies published in the July 2007 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism examined patients’ decisions regarding therapy for RA and glucosamine for OA and found that most RA patients are reluctant to change their treatment as long as their condition didn’t worsen, and that there are discrepancies in clinical trial results for glucosamine.
Recent advances in RA treatment include multi-drug therapy with anitrheumatic drugs such as methotrexate, as well as improved tools for measuring the response to therapy. Although high-dose aggressive therapy seems to hold promise, patients’ decisions often do not follow this recommendation. Frederick Wolfe and Kaleb Michaud, of the National Data Bank for Rheumatic Diseases in Wichita, KS, queried over 6,000 RA patients about their acceptance and satisfaction with therapy, their willingness to change and their reasons for not changing.
Sperm abnormalities seen in male lupus patients
The prognosis for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), an autoimmune disease that mainly affects women in their reproductive years, has improved recently, prompting a shift toward improving quality of life. For men with SLE, concerns have been raised about their future fertility. However, no studies have been conducted to date on testes function and its relevance to sperm abnormalities in male SLE patients. A new study published in the July 2007 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism examined gonad function in male SLE patients and found that they have a high frequency of sperm abnormalities associated with reduced testicular volume.
In addition, the study identified intravenous treatment with the immunosuppressant cyclophosphamide (IV CYC) as the major factor in permanent damage to the testes.
Penn researchers develop new method for screening drug-resistant forms of HIV
A growing number of drug-resistant strains of HIV are a threat to the effectiveness of current treatments despite anti-HIV drug cocktails decreasing the number of HIV-related deaths and improving the quality of life for HIV patients. Existing methods of detecting drug-resistant forms of HIV are expensive, time consuming, and often fail to identify small populations of drug-resistant HIV. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have developed a drug resistance screening method that analyzes multiple HIV variants at the same time, while also saving time and money.
By combining two genetic tests, Frederic D. Bushman, PhD, Professor of Microbiology, and colleagues, rapidly obtained gene sequences from multiple drug-resistant HIV samples at once. The study appeared online this month in Nucleic Acids Research.
Tainted toothpaste had wider reach than thought
Chinese-made toothpaste tainted with a potentially poisonous chemical was distributed to more places in the United States than initially thought, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
About 900,000 tubes of toothpaste containing diethylene glycol, an ingredient in antifreeze, were distributed to hospitals for the mentally ill, prisons, juvenile detention centers and some hospitals serving the general population, the Times said.
Triple therapy useful for blindness disorder
A single session of photodynamic therapy plus injections of the drugs bevacizumab (Avastin) and triamcinolone into the eye may improve or stabilize the vision of patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a study shows.
AMD is the most common cause of blindness in adults 55 years of age and older. Neovascular or “wet” AMD accounts for just 8 percent of cases, but is responsible for 85 percent of the severe vision loss caused by the disease. Photodynamic therapy, a popular treatment for the condition, uses light energy to reduce the abnormal blood vessel formation that occurs in the disease.
