The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, answers some of the most common and pressing questions surrounding the recent coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China
Tag Archives: Health
Heathcare Podcasts: An Inside Look At Benefits & Costs Of Hospice (NPR)
According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, seven in 10 Americans say they would prefer to die at home. And that’s the direction the health care system is moving, too, hoping to avoid unnecessary and expensive treatment at the end of life.
Hospice allows a patient deemed to have fewer than six months to live to change the focus of their medical care — from the goal of curing disease to a new goal of using treatments and medicines to maintain comfort and quality of life. It is a form of palliative care, which also focuses on pain management, but can be provided while a patient continues to seek a cure or receive treatments to prolong life.
World Economic Forum: “Building Resilient Health Systems” (Davos 2020)
The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.
Medical Procedures: Inside Look At “Total Hip Replacement” Surgery
Head “Inside the OR” with Michael D. Stover, MD, and see what it takes to tackle a total hip replacement. Sound on for this one!
Mayo Clinic Health Video: Dangers Of “Sepsis” Now Require Response Teams In Intensive Care Units
Our bodies are very good at fighting infection. The immune system reacts and attacks bacteria and viruses that make us sick. But sometimes the immune reaction is so strong that it damages the body. This is called a septic reaction or sepsis, and the mortality rate associated with it can be high.
In fact, a new study suggests that sepsis is responsible for 20 percent of all deaths worldwide. That’s more deaths than are estimated to be attributable to cancer. At Mayo Clinic, doctors like Kannan Ramar, M.B.B.S., M.D., are trying to change that with a sepsis response team in intensive care units. Their goal: to stop sepsis and save lives.
More health and medical news on the Mayo Clinic News Network. https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/
Medical Procedures: How “Gamma Knife” Surgery Treats Brain Tumors
It’s called gamma knife surgery, but there’s no cutting involved. It’s been used at Mayo Clinic for 30 years as an alternative to open brain surgery.
The patient’s head is held still during the procedure with a headframe, which also serves as a map for the radiation. Using 3D imaging — typically an MRI — as a guide, the gamma knife is targeted directly at the tumor. And with no hospital stay and minimal side effects, it’s a procedure that is efficient and can be lifesaving.
Digital Medicine: Apps For Smartphones, Machine Learning To Treat Kidney Disease (The Lancet)
From a The Lancet online article (January 18, 2020):
Smartphone app-based platforms for urine testing could improve adherence to albumin creatinine ratio (ACR) testing. One study showed screening of at-risk patients almost doubled with a home urine test kit that uses a smartphone camera to easily and accurately quantify ACR from a user-performed urine dipstick. If independently validated in a large, diverse population, this low-cost strategy could change the often dim trajectory for individuals with declining kidney function. 
In the outpatient setting, a Japanese team used machine learning and natural language processing to predict disease progression and need for dialysis over 6 months in patients with diabetic nephropathy. And while the increased risk of contrast-induced acute kidney injury has been long appreciated, a machine learning algorithm trained and tested on 3 million adults effectively quantified the degree of kidney injury on the basis of the volume of contrast used and individual patient-level characteristics.
Study: “Probiotic Drink” Developed That Thwarts Antibiotic Resistance
From a Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News online article:
“We were able to show that if you can stop the plasmid from replicating, then most of the bacteria lose the plasmid as the bacteria grow and divide. This means that infections that might otherwise be hard to control, even with the most powerful antibiotics available, are more likely to be treatable with standard antibiotics.”
Researchers headed by a team at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. have developed a probiotic drink containing genetic elements that are designed to thwart antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in gut bacteria at the genetic level. The drink targets small DNA elements called plasmids that carry antibiotic resistance genes, and which are able to replicate independently and spread between bacteria. By preventing these plasmids from replicating, the antibiotic resistance genes are displaced, effectively resensitizing the bacteria to antibiotics.
Studies: Alzheimer’s Disease Linked To Poor Sleep In Older Adults
From a MedPageToday online article:
“Amyloid is important in initiating disease, but the actual damage in the brain is probably due to the accumulation of tau,” Holtzman told MedPage Today. “Normally, tau protein is inside cells, but there is more and more evidence suggesting that its spread to different parts of the brain is responsible for the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Two studies in January explored how sleep might be associated with Alzheimer’s tau pathology. The first, led by Brendan Lucey, MD, and David Holtzman, MD, both of Washington University in St. Louis, found that older adults who had less slow-wave sleep had higher levels of brain tau.
The findings, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggested that poor quality sleep in late life may signal deteriorating brain health.
Sleep patterns predicted amyloid and tau burden, reported Matthew Walker, PhD, of the University of California Berkeley, and co-authors, in June.
Health Studies: Women’s Blood Vessels Age Faster Than Men’s, Increasing Heart Disease Risks
From a Cedars-Sinai.org online release:
“Our data showed that rates of accelerating blood pressure elevation were significantly higher in women than men, starting earlier in life,” said Cheng, the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Women’s Cardiovascular Health, who also serves as director of Cardiovascular Population Sciences at the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center. “This means that if we define the hypertension threshold the exact same way, a 30-year old woman with high blood pressure is probably at higher risk for cardiovascular disease than a man with high blood pressure at the same age.”
(January 15, 2020) – New research from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai showed for the first time that women’s blood vessels – including both large and small arteries – age at a faster rate than men’s. The findings, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Cardiology, could help to explain why women tend to develop different types of cardiovascular disease and with different timing than men.
Boomers Daily 