Lung damage in babies with congenital heart disease under study
Trying to understand and stop the collateral lung damage that can occur in babies with congenital heart disease is the focus of a new study.
When a baby’s heart defect results in too much blood in the lungs, more blood vessels are made, apparently to handle the increased volume, then new blood vessel growth is abruptly halted.
“You get this burst in the first month of life of blood vessel activity, then we think the system gets shut down and the lungs don’t get any bigger,” says Dr. Stephen M. Black, cell and molecular physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia Vascular Biology Center. “What we are trying to work out is what are the mechanisms.”
Malignant tumor or benign cyst?
The results of a study presented today at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology’s 39th Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer offer a promising development on the path toward better management of ovarian cancer. Researchers say testing women suspected of having ovarian cancer for a combination of proteins, or biomarkers in the blood called HE4 and CA 125, could be the key to predicting a woman’s risk for the disease dubbed the “silent killer.” Currently there is no adequate diagnostic test for ovarian cancer.
“Roughly 20 percent of women will be diagnosed with an ovarian cyst or tumor at some point in their life, and only a small percentage of these women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer,” said Lead Researcher Richard Moore, M.D., assistant professor at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a gynecologic oncologist in the Program in Women’s Oncology at Women & Infants’ Hospital of Rhode Island. “The problem is that current methods for distinguishing benign ovarian tumors from malignant ones are limited and as a result, women must undergo surgery without an accurate assessment as to their risk for having ovarian cancer prior to their surgery.”
Statins exert class effect in heart failure
Research shows that statins, as a class and at relatively low doses, appear to reduce death among elderly people with congestive heart failure (CHF).
“We believe such results, given the cost differences among agents, have potentially important health policy implications,” Dr. Louise Pilote from the University of Montreal, Canada and colleagues write in the American Heart Journal.
They examined the relative effectiveness of different statins in elderly patients to determine whether statins exert a class effect on long-term survival in patients hospitalized with a primary diagnosis of CHF—a chronic condition in which the heart fails to pump blood efficiently to the body’s organs. It can be caused by a number of things including clogged arteries, heart attack and high blood pressure.
Finally, a reason to start drinking alcohol
People who do not drink alcohol may finally have a reason to start—a study published on Friday shows non-drinkers who begin taking the occasional tipple live longer and are less likely to develop heart disease.
People who started drinking in middle age were 38 percent less likely to have a heart attack or other serious heart event than abstainers—even if they were overweight, had diabetes, high blood pressure or other heart risks, Dr. Dana King of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and colleagues found.
Yoga program benefits breast cancer survivors
In a small study of breast cancer survivors, researchers found that a tailored yoga program helped relieve severe hot flashes and other bothersome menopausal symptoms.
Women who participated in the 8-week “Yoga of Awareness” program not only had greater declines in the frequency and severity of their hot flashes than did a comparison “control” group, they also experienced less fatigue, joint pain, sleep disturbance, and symptom-related distress. They also reported increased vigor.
These improvements were still evident 3 months after the yoga sessions ended.
Virtual reality and computer technology improve stroke rehabilitation
Israeli hospitals have recently started to use virtual reality therapy for stroke patients. One commonly used program has the patient watch his virtual image on a screen. For example, tennis balls are virtually thrown at the patient from all directions and the patients’ actual hand motions are recorded on screen. In the first stage of development of this new program, computer scientists Dr. Larry Manevitz of the University of Haifa, together with Dr. Uri Feintuch, a neuroscientist from Hebrew University and a research fellow at the Haifa’s Caesarea Rothschild Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science, and Eugene Mednikov, a computer science graduate student, fed video sessions of this virtual reality therapy into their newly developed program. With the new program, the computer “learned” to differentiate between different types of brain injuries: cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). During further testing, the computer was able to accurately diagnose, between 90%-98% of the time, whether the patient was healthy, or had suffered a traumatic brain injury or a stroke.
Diagnosis, says Dr. Manevitz, is the most basic part of treatment – any doctor and many healthcare workers can correctly diagnose severe brain injuries. While this study is an important advance in the field of computer science, it will not directly help society.
