Posts tagged medical

As some experts quickly pointed out, the new gel could be used to engineer human tissue. No doubt, that would be huge. We could someday use a version for skin grafts for burn victims, or to grow tissue for other needs, like organ transplants. But I’m more excited about a much more immediate use for the hydrogel one that could benefit the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from osteoarthritis.

This is a painful condition in which cartilage wears out around the joints such as the knees and elbows. The risk of osteoarthritis onset grows with age, particularly for people over the age of 45.

Not only that, but it can actually heal itself, too. Given time to relax between stretches, the bonds in the compound are able to “re-zip,” self-repairing any cuts or breaks. Think about the major impact this could have on medicine. As I see it, in the very near future, doctors will be able to go in and actually remove the bad or torn cartilage that’s causing you pain. They’ll replace it with a hydrogel that is much stronger and more resilient than the original organic substance with which you were born.

In the Era of Radical Change, we will continue to see a steady stream of advances like this, breakthroughs that will help us live longer and healthier lives.

(Source: futurenow321)

So far this year, 1,993 cases have been reported to federal health officials, up from 1,590 reported the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its weekly update of outbreak data. A total of 87 people have now died from the disease, compared with 66 reported one week ago.

The disease has been reported in people, birds or mosquitoes in 48 U.S. states, so far absent only in Alaska and Hawaii. About half of all human cases are in Texas, the CDC said.

Of the nearly 2,000 cases reported to the CDC this year, 1,069, or 54 percent, are of the severe neuroinvasive form of the disease, which can lead to meningitis and encephalitis.

(Source: futurenow321)

Science magazine and the National Science Foundation have just announced the winners of the 2010 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The annual international competition is set up to award outstanding artistic efforts to visualize complex scientific concepts. The event also highlights the innovation and technical expertise of scientists who have abilities to visually attract a large number of audiences and encourage them to experience the complex nature as well as beauty of science. The 3-D images of HIV virus, plant-gene map, centipede robot, rough waters, tomato-seed “hair” and so on are some among the best science images of 2010

(Source: futurenow321)

Children who get several CT scans have a slightly higher chance of brain cancer and leukemia in later life, though the risk is still small and probably outweighed by the need to get the test, researchers reported.

The use of CT scans has risen rapidly since they were introduced 30 years ago. For children, they’re used to evaluate head, neck or spine injuries or neurological disorders.

International researchers studied nearly 180,000 patients under age 22 who had a CT scan in British hospitals between 1985 and 2002. They followed those patients until 2008. They found 74 of them were diagnosed with leukemia while 135 had brain tumors.

The scientists didn’t measure the number of scans, which were mostly of the head, but looked at data measuring radiation doses from the scans. That’s because the amount of radiation received by body parts such as the brain and bone marrow depends on the age and size of the patient.

The children who later developed leukemia or brain tumors were compared to a group of people who got a very low dose of radiation to the same parts of their bodies.

(Source: futurenow321)

One of the top suspects behind killer vascular diseases is the victim of mistaken identity, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who used genetic tracing to help hunt down the real culprit.

The guilty party is not the smooth muscle cells within blood vessel walls, which for decades was thought to combine with cholesterol and fat that can clog arteries. Blocked vessels can eventually lead to heart attacks and strokes, which account for one in three deaths in the United States.

Instead, a previously unknown type of stem cell — a multipotent vascular stem cell — is to blame, and it should now be the focus in the search for new treatments, the scientists report in a new study appearing June 6 in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time, we are showing evidence that vascular diseases are actually a kind of stem cell disease,” said principal investigator Song Li, professor of bioengineering and a researcher at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center. “This work should revolutionize therapies for vascular diseases because we now know that stem cells rather than smooth muscle cells are the correct therapeutic target.”

The finding that a stem cell population contributes to artery-hardening diseases, such as atherosclerosis, provides a promising new direction for future research, the study authors said.

(Source: futurenow321)

Ateam of researchers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is the first in Africa to establish groundbreaking biomedical stem cell technology, which could hold the key to finding cures for some of Africa’s most prevalent diseases.

The CSIR Department of Biological Sciences’ Gene Expression and Biophysics Group, led by Dr Musa Mhlanga, success- fully generated the first induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in Africa, in December last year.

The iPS cell technology involves inducing adult cells (like skin cells) to revert back to stem cells that can differentiate into specialised cell types. This means that the early stem cells can be programmed to become any type of adult cell, such as skin, heart, brain and blood cells.

Dr Janine Scholefield, one of the key researchers involved in generating iPS cells at the CSIR, was the first biologist in South Africa to record video footage of cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells, generated from adult skin cells.

Scholefield was recently recruited to join Mhlanga’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow, and started with the experimental protocol at the end of October. By early December, the team had generated iPS cell lines, each line indicating a single genetic background. “It was remarkable and completely took my breath away,” says Scholefield, describing the moment she saw evidence of the first cardiomyocytes.

(Source: futurenow321)

The FDA should approve the first HIV test for at-home use and over-the-counter sale, the agency’s advisory committee said today in a unanimous 17-0 vote. The test is OraQuick from OraSure. It’s a home version of a rapid HIV test already being used by health care professionals in community settings. The committee’s opinion was summed up by panel member Steven W. Pipe, MD, of the University of Michigan.

“I can’t get past the quarter of a million people in the U.S. who have HIV and are not tested,” Pipe said at the meeting. “If we make any dent in that, the answer is yes, we realize the [OraQuick At-Home] benefit outweighs its risks.” The price tag of the at-home test has not yet been set but will be a good bit more than the $20 cost of the professional version. That’s partly because it will come with a detailed instruction booklet, and because OraSure will set up a call center with trained counselors available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “The price will be substantially lower than $60,” Stephen R. Lee, PhD, OraSure executive vice president and chief science officer, told the committee.

Now anybody concerned about whether they have the AIDS virus and who can afford OraQuick may be able to take the test at home. But there’s a catch. In clinical trials enrolling regular people at risk of HIV infection, some 7% of people with HIV infection are wrongly told they don’t have HIV. With a professional test, that happens only 2% of the time.

According to FDA calculations, this means that in the first year after approval, the test will wrongly tell about 3,800 people with HIV infection that they are not infected.

The FDA calculates that in the first year after OraQuick is approved for home use, an extra 45,000 people will correctly learn they have HIV. That’s a big deal. The CDC estimates that there are 50,000 new HIV infections every year. About 1.2 million Americans are HIV-infected, and about 1 out of 5 don’t know they carry the AIDS virus. Such people may be more likely to spread the virus than those who know they are infected.

Panel member Susan Buchbinder, MD, director of HIV research at San Francisco’s health department and a long-time AIDS researcher, noted that while some people may get inaccurate results, the test likely will alter people’s HIV risk behavior.

“A positive HIV test does reduce risk behavior. A negative test doesn’t have much of an influence,” Buchbinder said. “We must assume there will be some incorrect results. The question is how do we help people understand a negative result might not truly mean a person is negative for HIV.”

There’s another catch to the OraQuick in-home test: the “window period.” The test detects anti-HIV antibodies, but these antibodies appear many weeks after infection.

A recent study suggests that rapid HIV tests such as OraQuick will be accurate two months after infection. OraSure says that to be safe, people should assume the OraQuick test will miss any new HIV infection contracted in the past three months. This means that people with any HIV risk behavior such as unprotected sex or needle sharing will need regular retesting, as is true with any HIV test. And confirmatory testing at a doctor’s office or free clinic is strongly advised for those who test positive but also for those who test negative despite high-risk behavior.

(Source: futurenow321)

Last June, an 83-year-old Belgian woman suffering from oral cancer and an infection that was eating away at her jaw received a jawbone transplant that took a team of 10 surgeons 11 hours to complete. The BBC reported on the story on Monday.

The operation was a success. Reportedly, the patient was able to eat and speak with the new jaw within hours. The operation was an even more remarkable success in one other respect: The jaw itself was manufactured with a 3-D printer.

It was built of titanium powder by a surgical team from Belgium’s Hasselt University and engineers from LayerWise, a Belgian provider of engineering and production services for industrial, dental, and medical applications.

(Source: futurenow321)

A man who had been paralyzed from the waist down and had lost all function in both his hands can move his fingers after doctors rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones in a pioneering surgical procedure, according to a case study published on Tuesday.

The 71-year-old man, who had become paralyzed after he was injured in a car accident in 2008, still had limited arm, elbow and shoulder movement, but because the C7 vertebrae in his spinal cord had been crushed, the nerve circuits responsible for sending signals from the brain to the muscles in his hands were severed and all control was lost.

However, the nearby nerves had not been injured in the accident and surgeons were able to cut an undamaged nerve in the man’s elbow and connect it to the damaged nerve responsible for activating muscles in the hand responsible for grasping objects. 

“The circuit [in the hand] is intact, but no longer connected to the brain,” Surgeon Ida Fox, an assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Washington University, explained to the BBC. “What we do is take that circuit and restore the connection to the brain.”

(Source: futurenow321)