Health News

Increased reliance on polypharmacy for bipolar patients

Date: Feb-06-2014
A study of 230 patients with bipolar I disorder whose symptoms were severe enough to warrant admission to a Rhode Island psychiatric hospital in 2010 reveals that more than a third were there despite taking four or more psychiatric medications. Including medicines for other conditions, such as cardiometabolic diseases, the average patient came to the hospital taking six different drugs.

Memory is not like a video camera; it edits the past with present experiences

Date: Feb-06-2014
Your memory is a wily time traveler, plucking fragments of the present and inserting them into the past, reports a new Northwestern Medicine® study. In terms of accuracy, it's no video camera.Rather, the memory rewrites the past with current information, updating your recollections with new experiences.Love at first sight, for example, is more likely a trick of your memory than a Hollywood-worthy moment.

Studying concussion in college ice hockey players using susceptibility-weighted imaging

Date: Feb-06-2014
Using susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI), researchers have identified microstructural changes in the brains of male and female college-level ice hockey players that could be due to concussive or subconcussive trauma. Until now, SWI has been used to detect signs of more severe cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI). This is the first time SWI has been used to detect signs of concussion (or mild TBI), and the first time it has been used to detect changes in the brain prospectively over an entire sports season in athletes of both sexes.

How cancer cells thrive in oxygen-starved tumors

Date: Feb-06-2014
A new study identifies the molecular pathway that enables cancer cells to grow in areas of a tumor where oxygen levels are low, a condition called hypoxia.The findings by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC - James), might offer a new strategy for inhibiting tumor growth by developing agents that reverse this hypoxia-related pathway.The study focuses on how cancer cells use the amino acid glutamine, the most common amino acid found free in the bloodstream.

Predicting cardiovascular events in sleep apnea

Date: Feb-06-2014
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) generally is associated with increased risk for cardiovascular (CV) disease. OSA is usually measured using the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), the number of times that breathing pauses or severely slows per hour of sleep. However, sleep studies using to diagnose OSA produce a number of other measures. Whether those measures are associated with CV disease, and whether they predict CV disease as well or better than AHI, is not known.

Connection discovered in pathogenesis of neurological diseases, HIV

Date: Feb-06-2014
A new study by George Washington University (GW) researcher Michael Bukrinsky, M.D., Ph.D., shows similarities in the pathogenesis of prion disease - misfolded proteins that can lead to neurological diseases - and the HIV virus.The research, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, looks at the relationship between cholesterol metabolism and prion infection as a follow-up to previous research on the relationship between cholesterol metabolism and HIV.

Correctly defining fear to understand it

Date: Feb-06-2014
Understanding and properly studying fear is partly a matter of correctly defining fear itself, New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux writes in a new essay published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His analysis points to ways research can be better geared to address a range of fear-related afflictions, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and commonly experienced phobias.

Educational toolkit for treating patients with diabetes did not improve quality of care or outcomes

Date: Feb-06-2014
An educational toolkit designed to improve care of patients with diabetes was not effective, Baiju R Shah and colleagues (University of Toronto) found in a cluster randomized trial conducted in 2009-2011. During 10 months of follow-up, patients of Canadian family physicians who had been cluster-randomized to receive the toolkit did not receive improved care and their outcomes did not differ compared with patients of physicians who did not receive the toolkit.

Nanomedicine testing with blood cells on a microchip

Date: Feb-06-2014
Designing nanomedicine to combat diseases is a hot area of scientific research, primarily for treating cancer, but very little is known in the context of atherosclerotic disease. Scientists have engineered a microchip coated with blood vessel cells to learn more about the conditions under which nanoparticles accumulate in the plaque-filled arteries of patients with atherosclerosis, the underlying cause of myocardial infarction and stroke.In the research, microchips were coated with a thin layer of endothelial cells, which make up the interior surface of blood vessels.

Taking a cue from Apple and Coca-Cola, pharmaceutical firms are humanizing their brands

Date: Feb-06-2014
By 2018, it is estimated that the global pharmaceutical market will be worth more than $1.3 trillion USD. To corner their share of profits, established drug companies have to fight fierce competition from generic products, adhere to stringent government regulations and sway a consumer base that is better informed than ever before.