Health News

A new initiative improves asthma control in teenagers

Date: Jan-27-2014
What is believed to be the first quality improvement initiative focusing exclusively on asthmatic teenagers - conducted by researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Ohio - has reported significant improvements in asthma outcomes.Asthma is the most common chronic disease in childhood, affecting 9% of all children (approximately 7 million children in total) in the US. Statistics suggest that 10.5 million school days are missed each year due to asthma.

Information Governance & eDiscovery for Healthcare
, April 28-30, 2014, Santa Monica, CA

Date: Jan-27-2014
The healthcare industry is highly regulated, involves many moving parts and ultimately has an impact on people's health and well-being. IQPC's Information Governance and eDiscovery for Healthcare is designed to bring together the legal, compliance, privacy, HIM and IT professionals that need to work together to govern the masses of information healthcare organizations create and use.

Bad version of 'good' cholesterol causes disease

Date: Jan-27-2014
Studies have suggested that a form of so-called good cholesterol, or high-density lipoprotein, can become dysfunctional and instead of protecting against heart disease becomes a promoter of it, actively clogging up and hardening arteries.Now, new research led by the Cleveland Clinic in the US has discovered the molecular process that makes "good" cholesterol start behaving badly.

Older people more likely to regard public behavior as antisocial

Date: Jan-27-2014
A UK study that compares teenagers' perceptions of what constitutes antisocial behavior with those of adults - the first to do so - finds they differ significantly.Dr. Susie Hulley, currently at the Institute of Criminology of the University of Cambridge, is the author of the study, which is published in the Journal of Crime Prevention and Community Safety. She conducted the research while studying at University College London.She found adults were more likely than teenagers to regard public behavior as antisocial, particularly when displayed by young people.Dr.

Tracing unique cells with mathematics

Date: Jan-27-2014
Stem cells can turn into heart cells, skin cells can mutate to cancer cells; even cells of the same tissue type exhibit small heterogeneities. Scientists use single-cell analyses to investigate these heterogeneities. But the method is still laborious and considerable inaccuracies conceal smaller effects. Scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, at the Technische Unitversitaet Muenchen and the University of Virginia (USA) have now found a way to simplify and improve the analysis by mathematical methods.Each cell in our body is unique.

The origin of the evil conformation of prion proteins

Date: Jan-27-2014
"When they are healthy, they look like tiny spheres; when they are malignant, they appear as cubes" stated Giuseppe Legname, principal investigator of the Prion Biology Laboratory at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Trieste, when describing prion proteins. Prions are "misfolded" proteins that cause a group of incurable neurodegenerative diseases, including spongiform encephalopathies (for example, mad cow diseases) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Legname and coworkers have recently published a detailed analysis of the early mechanisms of misfolding.

Are enough women included in medical device studies, as required by the FDA?

Date: Jan-27-2014
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandates adequate enrollment of women in post-approval studies (PAS) of medical devices to ensure that any sex differences in device safety and effectiveness are not overlooked. A group of authors from the FDA report the results of a study evaluating the participation of women and analysis of sex differences in PAS in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

Patients receiving androgen deprivation therapy should be counseled to improve mental and emotional well-being

Date: Jan-27-2014
A new study published in The Journal of Urology® reports that prostate cancer patients treated with androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) experienced changes in mental and emotional well-being during treatment, although there was no meaningful decline in emotional quality of life two years after treatment. Investigators at the University of California-San Francisco recommend counseling men about the potential adverse effects of ADT as well as the interventions to improve mental and emotional health such as exercise programs and diet.

Dietary treatment shows potential in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease

Date: Jan-27-2014
New research findings indicate that an early onset of dietary treatment may slow down the progression of Alzheimer's disease. The study was conducted on mice, and the results will be published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland played a key role in the study, which was carried out as part of the LiPiDiDiet project funded by the European Union.According to current understanding, Alzheimer's disease develops slowly and it may take up to 20 years before the first obvious symptoms occur.

Birch helps wounds heal faster

Date: Jan-27-2014
Extracts from the birch tree have served for centuries as a traditional means of helping the damaged skin around wounds to regenerate more quickly. Prof. Dr. Irmgard Merfort from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Freiburg and her team have now explained the molecular mechanism behind the wound-healing effect of an extract from the outer white layer of the tree's bark. The scientists published their findings in the journal Plos One.