Posts tagged medicine
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Gel reduced daily tremors in Parkinson’s disease
An experimental treatment for Parkinson’s disease reduced by nearly two hours on average the period each day when medication failed to control patients’ slowness and shaking, according to results from a double-blind, phase III clinical trial published in December 2013, in Lancet Neurology.
The study compared AbbVie’s levodopa-carbidopa intestinal gel against the same medication in pill form in patients with advanced disease.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham was among the sites for the study, with David G. Standaert, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the UAB Department of Neurology, an author. Led by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, preliminary results from the study were first presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in April 2012.
Parkinson’s disease results from the loss of brain cells that make dopamine, which helps to control movement. As dopamine levels fall, patients experience tremors, muscle stiffness and loss of balance. A commonly prescribed treatment, the levodopa-carbidopa combination works as the body converts levodopa into dopamine and carbidopa escorts levodopa to the right part of the brain. The problem is that patients face hours of uncontrolled slowness, freezing and tremors each day — called “off-time” — as the treatment gets into place or wears off.
One reason for the break in treatment coverage is that it comes in a pill, and pills sit in the stomach for up to six hours waiting for it to empty into the small intestine. It is only there that levodopa encounters the proteins capable of transporting it into the bloodstream en route to the brain. Thus, researchers envisioned a system that steadily delivers levodopa gel directly into the small intestine through a surgically placed tube, and with the help of a pump worn on the belt.
“The results are very exciting, considering that other recently approved drugs on the market reduce off-time by, at most, just over an hour,” said Standaert. “In the study, the gel treatment helped patients who had run out of alternatives with current medications. We believe it may be an important new option for patients with severe Parkinson’s, with benefits comparable to more invasive techniques like deep brain stimulation.”
Patients using the gel system saw an average reduction in daily off-time of 1.91 hours, and an increase in “on-time” without troublesome dyskinesia of 1.86 hours compared with the pill form. Nearly all subjects experienced at least one side effect, although most were short-lived and moderate.
(Source: uab.edu)
Higher vitamin D levels in pregnancy could help babies become stronger
Children are likely to have stronger muscles if their mothers had a higher level of vitamin D in their body during pregnancy, according to new research from the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit (MRC LEU) at the University of Southampton.
Low vitamin D status has been linked to reduced muscle strength in adults and children, but little is known about how variation in a mother’s status during pregnancy affects her child.
Low vitamin D concentrations are common among young women in the UK, and although women are recommended to take an additional 10μg/day of vitamin D in pregnancy, supplementation is often not taken up.
In the research, published in the January edition of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, vitamin D levels were measured in 678 mothers in the later stages of pregnancy.
When the children were four years old, grip strength and muscle mass were measured. Results showed that the higher the levels of vitamin D in the mother, the higher the grip strength of the child, with an additional, but less pronounced association between mother’s vitamin D and child’s muscle mass.
Lead researcher Dr Nicholas Harvey, Senior Lecturer at the MRC LEU at the University of Southampton, comments: “These associations between maternal vitamin D and offspring muscle strength may well have consequences for later health; muscle strength peaks in young adulthood before declining in older age and low grip strength in adulthood has been associated with poor health outcomes including diabetes, falls and fractures. It is likely that the greater muscle strength observed at four years of age in children born to mothers with higher vitamin D levels will track into adulthood, and so potentially help to reduce the burden of illness associated with loss of muscle mass in old age.”
The 678 women who took part in the study are part of the Southampton Women’s Survey, one of the largest and best characterised such studies globally.
Professor Cyrus Cooper, Professor of Rheumatology and Director of the MRC LEU at the University of Southampton, who oversaw this work, added: “This study forms part of a larger programme of research at the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit and University of Southampton in which we are seeking to understand how factors such as diet and lifestyle in the mother during pregnancy influence a child’s body composition and bone development. This work should help us to design interventions aimed at optimising body composition in childhood and later adulthood and thus improve the health of future generations.”
(Source: southampton.ac.uk)
Your gut’s what you eat, too
As the saying goes, you are what you eat. But new evidence suggests that the same may also be true for the microbes in your gut.
A Harvard study shows that, in as little as a day, diet can alter the population of microbes in the gut — particularly those that tolerate bile — as well as the types of genes expressed by gut bacteria.
“What we are really excited about is we and others have shown in animal models that diet can rapidly have major effects on the microbes that are in the gut,” said Peter Turnbaugh, a Bauer Fellow at the Center for Systems Biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is senior author of the paper, which appeared in Dec. 11 edition of the journal Nature.
“But it still wasn’t clear how fast the microbes in the human gut respond to changes in diet, and to what degree those changes would be similar in different people. This study is really the first time we’ve seen that, over the course of days, a new diet can reshape the microbial community, and that those changes are consistent and reversible.”
Among Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients, female, black, and Asian patients are substantially less likely to receive proven deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery to improve tremors and motor symptoms, according to a new report by a Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania researcher who identified considerable disparities among Medicare recipients receiving DBS for Parkinson’s disease. The study, published in Neurology, found that patients from neighborhoods of lower socioeconomic status were less likely to receive DBS, regardless of race or sex. And patients of minority-serving physician practices were also less likely to receive DBS, irrespective of race. The study demonstrates a need to adjust policy and incentives to provide state of the art care for all Parkinson’s patients.
Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease, affects more than 2 million Americans and cannot be prevented or halted. DBS is often prescribed for PD patients when pharmacologic treatments are unable to control involuntary movements or decrease effectiveness over time. While DBS is effective, it requires extensive pre-operative testing, is contraindicated for PD patients who have evidence of cognitive impairment or dementia, and includes out-of-pocket costs that may not be covered by Medicare. DBS out-of-pocket costs average around $2,200 (2007 dollars) per year — 41 percent more than annual non-DBS costs —and would consume approximately 7 percent of the average income in the lowest socioeconomic quartile, potentially limiting the willingness of low-income seniors to consider DBS.
"There are widespread disparities among Parkinson’s patients that are restricting equal utilization of evidence-based care, limiting patients’ quality of life, and increasing societal and health care costs," said lead study author Allison Willis, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurology and of Epidemiology at Penn Medicine. Dr. Willis collaborated on the study with colleagues from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "Efforts to overcome these disparities, through policy or reimbursement changes, can benefit elders and socioeconomically disadvantaged patients with Parkinson’s disease, as well as other vulnerable groups," said Willis.
Analyzing more than 665,000 Medicare beneficiaries with a Parkinson’s diagnosis between 2007 and 2009 - a decade after DBS was approved for Parkinson’s disease patients - the team identified 8,420 patients treated with DBS (approximately 1 percent). Nearly 95 percent of DBS recipients were white, and 59 percent were male. Hispanic PD patients were nearly equally represented among DBS (2.2 percent of all cases) and non-DBS cases (1.7 percent), whereas black and Asian populations were significantly underrepresented among DBS cases. Black PD patients accounted for 1 percent of DBS cases, and 5.5 percent of non-DBS cases, while less than 1 percent of Asian PD patients received DBS, compared to 1.5 who did not. Women of all races accounted for 41 percent of DBS cases, but 50 percent of non-DBS cases.
Patients with PD of all races who were treated by physicians with the highest concentrations of minority (Asian, Hispanic or black) patients had at least a 15 percent lower likelihood of receiving DBS, compared to providers caring for a small percentage of minority patients. While the data may not account for those who were offered DBS and refused or who were evaluated and did not qualify for DBS, the study suggests that minority-serving providers may be unlikely to perform or refer any of their Medicare beneficiaries with PD for DBS.
In addition, early data suggest that socioeconomic challenges to patients with fixed incomes may also contribute to the treatment disparities. Further research is needed to compare DBS out-of-pocket costs with standard medical and surgical procedures for other conditions.
Penn researchers will continue to study clinical characteristics and progression of disease in minorities and women, to see if they may account for any of the DBS utilization differences. In addition, they hope to look further into physician and practice characteristics along with local medical resources to determine how care differences contribute to disparities in individual DBS use.
Obesity ballooning in developing world: report
The number of obese and overweight people in the developing world nearly quadrupled to almost a billion between 1980 and 2008, a think-tank report said on Friday.
There are now far more obese or overweight adults in the developing world than in richer countries, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) said.
The London-based institute said more than a third of all adults around the world — 1.46 billion people — were obese or overweight.
Between 1980 and 2008, the numbers of people affected in the developing world rose from 250 million to 904 million. In the developed world, the figure rose from 321 million to 557 million.
This represented a rise from 23 percent to 34 percent of the world population.
"The growing rates of overweight and obesity in developing countries are alarming," said ODI research fellow Steve Wiggins, who co-authored the Future Diets report.
"On current trends, globally, we will see a huge increase in the number of people suffering certain types of cancer, diabetes, strokes and heart attacks, putting an enormous burden on public healthcare systems."
The report said overweight and obesity rates have almost doubled in China and Mexico since 1980, and risen by a third in South Africa.
The study said the rise in obesity was down to diets changing in developing countries where incomes were rising, with people shifting away from cereals and tubers to eating more meat, fats and sugar.
The over-consumption of food, coupled with increasingly sedentary lives, was also to blame.
The report found that North Africa, the Middle East and South America saw overweight and obesity rates increase to a level similar to Europe, around 58 percent.
At 70 percent, North America still has the highest percentage of overweight adults.
The report said there seemed to be little will among the public and leaders to take action on influencing diet in the future.
"Governments have focused on public awareness campaigns, but evidence shows this is not enough," said Wiggins.
"The lack of action stands in stark contrast to the concerted public actions taken to limit smoking in developed countries.
"Politicians need to be less shy about trying to influence what food ends up on our plates. The challenge is to make healthy diets viable whilst reducing the appeal of foods which carry a less certain nutritional value."
The report gave the example of South Korea as having made efforts to preserve healthy elements of the country’s traditional diet, via public campaigns and education, providing large-scale training for women in preparing healthy, traditional food.
The report said it was “only a matter of time” before people would begin to accept and even demand stronger and more effective measures to influence diets.
Loss of function of a single gene linked to diabetes in mice
Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have found that dysfunction in a single gene in mice causes fasting hyperglycemia, one of the major symptoms of type 2 diabetes. Their findings were reported online in the journal Diabetes.
If a gene called MADD is not functioning properly, insulin is not released into the bloodstream to regulate blood sugar levels, says Bellur S. Prabhakar, professor and head of microbiology and immunology at UIC and lead author of the paper.
Type 2 diabetes affects roughly 8 percent of Americans and more than 366 million people worldwide. It can cause serious complications, including cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, loss of limbs and blindness.
In a healthy person, beta cells in the pancreas secrete the hormone insulin in response to increases in blood glucose after eating. Insulin allows glucose to enter cells where it can be used as energy, keeping glucose levels in the blood within a narrow range. People with type 2 diabetes don’t produce enough insulin or are resistant to its effects. They must closely monitor their blood glucose throughout the day and, when medication fails, inject insulin.
In previous work, Prabhakar isolated several genes from human beta cells, including MADD, which is also involved in certain cancers. Small genetic variations found among thousands of human subjects revealed that a mutation in MADD was strongly associated with type 2 diabetes in Europeans and Han Chinese.
People with this mutation had high blood glucose and problems of insulin secretion – the “hallmarks of type 2 diabetes,” Prabhakar said. But it was unclear how the mutation was causing the symptoms, or whether it caused them on its own or in concert with other genes associated with type 2 diabetes.
To study the role of MADD in diabetes, Prabhakar and his colleagues developed a mouse model in which the MADD gene was deleted from the insulin-producing beta cells. All such mice had elevated blood glucose levels, which the researchers found was due to insufficient release of insulin.
“We didn’t see any insulin resistance in their cells, but it was clear that the beta cells were not functioning properly,” Prabhakar said. Examination of the beta cells revealed that they were packed with insulin. “The cells were producing plenty of insulin, they just weren’t secreting it,” he said.
The finding shows that type 2 diabetes can be directly caused by the loss of a properly functioning MADD gene alone, Prabhakar said. “Without the gene, insulin can’t leave the beta cells, and blood glucose levels are chronically high.”
Prabhakar now hopes to investigate the effect of a drug that allows for the secretion of insulin in MADD-deficient beta cells.
“If this drug works to reverse the deficits associated with a defective MADD gene in the beta cells of our model mice, it may have potential for treating people with this mutation who have an insulin-secretion defect and/or type 2 diabetes,” he said.
(Source: news.uic.edu)
Vitamin E slows Alzheimer’s progression
Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease were able to care for themselves longer and needed less help performing everyday chores when they took a daily capsule containing 200 IUs of alpha tocopherol, or vitamin E, a study has found.
Compared with subjects who took placebo pills, those who took daily supplements of the antioxidant vitamin E and were followed for an average of two years and three months delayed their loss of function by a little over six months on average, a 19% improvement. And the vitamin E group’s increased need for caregiver help was the lowest of several groups, including those taking the Alzheimer’s drug memantine, those taking memantine and vitamin E, and those taking a placebo pill.
The new research, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. (JAMA), also cast doubt on earlier findings suggesting that vitamin E supplements hastened death in those with Alzheimer’s. The study found that subjects taking vitamin E were no more likely to die of any cause during the study period than those taking memantine or a placebo.
The findings offer a slim ray of hope that the progressive memory loss and mental confusion that characterizes Alzheimer’s can at least be slowed by an agent that is inexpensive and easily accessible. Far more expensive drugs that come with greater risks and more side effects have failed to do as well in altering the trajectory of the disease.
The authors of the study called the outcomes seen among those who took vitamin E “a meaningful treatment effect” that was on a par with those seen in clinical trials of prescription drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration. They expressed surprise that those taking memantine along with vitamin E did not show a delay in functional loss. Possibly, the researchers noted, memantine may disrupt or hinder the metabolism or absorption of vitamin E.
"For people who are in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease, I think any delay in the rate of progression is meaningful and important," said Maurice W. Dysken, the study’s lead author.
While memantine has shown itself effective in slowing loss of function among patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s, its effectiveness in earlier stages of the disease has been less well explored.
In an accompanying editorial in JAMA, Dr. Denis A. Evans, a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center, called the effects of vitamin E “modest” in that it appeared to ameliorate symptoms rather than disrupt or reverse the inexorable march of the disease. Given the expected swelling numbers of those at risk and the discouraging record of progress in finding therapies that could reverse or cure Alzheimer’s, Evans wrote, a shift in emphasis toward the prevention “seems warranted.”
The study is one of the largest and longest to track participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s. It followed 561 patients, 97% of them men, from 14 Veterans Affairs medical centers around the country. Researchers tracked each subject for as little as six months and as long as four years after diagnosis with possible or probable Alzheimer’s disease of mild to moderate severity.
Subjects were assigned randomly to one of four groups: 139 subjects got a hard-gelatin, liquid-filled capsule of 200 IUs of DL-alpha-tocopherol acetate (“synthetic” vitamin E) and a maintenance dose of 10 mg. of memantine; 140 got the vitamin E capsule and a memantine placebo; 142 got a placebo vitamin E capsule and memantine; and 140 got placebo vitamin E and placebo memantine.
Using a 78-point inventory of “activities of daily living,” researchers evaluated subjects’ function every six months, and asked caregivers to report on dementia-related behavioral problems and how much assistance the subjects needed in six major areas of activity. They also assessed subjects’ memory, language, gait and general mental function.
While subjects on memantine and those on the placebo required increased caregiver assistance ranging from 2.2% to 2.43% annually, caregivers of those taking vitamin E reported their time spent assisting the patient increased annually by 1.48%.
What Does Compassion Sound Like?
“Good to see you. I’m sorry. It sounds like you’ve had a tough, tough, week.” Spoken by a doctor to a cancer patient, that statement is an example of compassionate behavior observed by a University of Rochester Medical Center team in a new study published by the journal Health Expectations.
Rochester researchers believe they are the first to systematically pinpoint and catalogue compassionate words and actions in doctor-patient conversations. By breaking down the dialogue and studying the context, scientists hope to create a behavioral taxonomy that will guide medical training and education.
“In health care, we believe in being compassionate but the reality is that many of us have a preference for technical and biomedical issues over establishing emotional ties,” said senior investigator Ronald Epstein, M.D., professor of Family Medicine, Psychiatry, Oncology, and Nursing and director of the UR Center for Communication and Disparities Research.
Epstein is a national and international keynote speaker and investigator on mindfulness and communication in medical education.
His team recruited 23 oncologists from a variety of private and hospital-based oncology clinics in the Rochester, N.Y., area. The doctors and their stage III or stage IV cancer patients volunteered to be recorded during routine visits. Researchers then analyzed the 49 audio-recorded encounters that took place between November 2011 and June 2012, and looked for key observable markers of compassion.
In contrast to empathy – another quality that Epstein and his colleagues have studied in the medical community — compassion involves a deeper and more active imagination of the patient’s condition. An important part of this study, therefore, was to identify examples of the three main elements of compassion: recognition of suffering, emotional resonance, and movement towards addressing suffering.
Emotional resonance, or a sense of sharing and connection, was illustrated by this dialogue: Patient: “I should just get a room here.” Oncologist: “Oh, I hope you don’t really feel like you’re spending that much time here.”
Another conversation included this response from a physician to a patient, who complained about a drug patch for pain: “Who wants a patch that makes you drowsy, constipated and fuzzy? I’ll pass, thank you very much.”
Some doctors provided good examples of how they use humor to raise a patient’s spirits without deviating from the seriousness of the situation. In one case, for example, a patient was concerned that he would not be able to drink two liters of barium sulfite in preparation for a CT scan.
Doctor: “If you just get down one little cup it will tell us what’s going on in the stomach. What I tell people when we’re not being recorded is to take a cup and then pour the rest down the toilet and tell them you drank it all (laughter)… Just a creative interpretation of what you are supposed to take.”
Patient: “I love it, I love it. Well, I thank you for that. I’m prepared to do what I’ve got to do to get this right.”
Researchers evaluated tone of voice, animation that conveyed tenderness and understanding, and other ways in which doctors gave reassurances or psychology comfort.
Here’s an instance in which an oncologist encouraged a reluctant patient to follow through with a planned trip to Arizona: “You know, if you decide to do it, break down and allow somebody to meet you at the gates and use a cart or wheelchair to get you to your next gate and things like that. And having just sent my father-in-law off to Hawaii and told him he had to do that, he said no, no, I can get there. Just, it’s okay. Nobody is gonna look at you and say, ‘What’s an able-bodied man doing in a cart?’ Just, it’s okay. It’s part of setting limits.”
Researchers also observed non-verbal communication, such as pauses or sighs at appropriate times, as well as speech features and voice quality (tone, pitch, loudness) and other metaphorical language that conveyed certain attitudes and meaning.
Compassion unfolds over time, researchers concluded. During the process, physicians must challenge themselves to stay with a difficult discussion, which opens the door for the patient to admit uncertainty and grieve the loss of normalcy in life.
“It became apparent that compassion is not a quality of a single utterance but rather is made up of presence and engagement that suffuses an entire conversation,” the study said. First author, Rachel Cameron, B.A., is a student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry; the audio-recordings were reviewed by a diverse group of medical professionals with backgrounds in literature and linguistics, as well as palliative care specialists.
(Source: urmc.rochester.edu)
How Ultrasound Became the Newest Weapon Against Stroke
Ischemic strokes, caused by blood clots that can develop in the brain and cut off blood flow, make up more than 80 percent of strokes suffered in the U.S. annually. To date, the most effective treatment is the clot-dissolving thrombolysis drug tissue plasminogen activator, tPA. But tPA is a far-from-perfect solution, says Andrew Barreto, a neurologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. “IV-tPA will help about 30 of 100 patients who receive it within the first 4.5 hours after stroke symptom onset,” Barreto says. “But, many patients are still disabled, so we need better treatments.”
Barreto and some of his colleagues think that ultrasound could be one of those treatments. Ultrasound has been a valuable tool for diagnosing and tracking strokes in the brain for years. Now, a wide variety of new technologies are making it possible for neurosurgeons to use ultrasound waves, which travel at frequencies too high for the human ear to pick up, to not only identify the signs of stroke such as blood clots in the brain but also to help treat them.
Barreto was a principal researcher in the recent study of the Clotbust device, a headband-like piece of equipment placed on a patient’s head that aims to use ultrasound directed to increase tPA’s effectiveness in breaking up clots in the brain. A preliminary test of the device, which fires 2-MHz pulses of ultrasound from a series of 18 transducers at 5-second intervals, found that it was safe to use in stroke patients. Now, the device is in the midst of effectiveness testing on a group of 830 stroke patients worldwide.
One of the sites involved in testing the device is Swedish Neuroscience Center in Seattle, where chief of neuroscience David Newell notes that preliminary results from the trial were promising. In safety trials, the Clotbust device combined with the thrombolysis drug tPA cleared 40 percent of clots in ischemic strokes in the first two hours after being used. That’s twice as effective as the 20 percent clearance rate usually achieved by tPA alone.
Clotbust isn’t the only tool of its kind being tested at Swedish. Newell and his colleagues are involved in testing three different types of ultrasound technologies for a variety of neurological ailments. Those include one technique devised by. Newell in collaboration with EKOS corporation, a Seattle-area company specializing in ultrasound-emitting catheters, which are designed to travel up a blood vessel and transmit ultrasound from an emitter at its tip, to help loosen blood clots. Newell and his colleagues have been testing a modified version of the EkoSonic catheter, which can more easily be placed directly in the brain and used to detect a different type of stroke known as intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH).
Caused by bleeding from ruptured blood vessels deep in the brain, ICH strokes are much harder to treat because of their location. They are also particularly deadly, with a mortality rate north of 50 percent. Even those who survive are likely to be left disabled or with long roads to recovery. The tPA may be effective in treating these strokes as well, breaking up the clots in the brain that form around the bleed and allowing fluid to be drained off before it can do lasting harm.
While the effectiveness of tPA in treating ICH is still being studied, Newell and his team used the repurposed EkoSonic catheter to improve delivery of clot-busting drugs to bleed sites deep in the brain, and their early results are promising. In an introductory round of tests on nine patients at Swedish, Newell and his colleagues found that clots accompanying hemorrhagic strokes were cleared three times faster by a combination of ultrasound and tPA than they were by drugs alone. By combining the two techniques, Newell said, he and his team could clear clots from most patients in the first day of treatment. He’s now working with the company that developed the technology on creating a new type of catheter, designed specifically for use within the brain, that combines drug delivery, ultrasound emission, and drainage in one tool.
Neither Clotbust nor the EkoSonic catheter uses ultrasound to physically destroy clots. Instead, the blasts of high-frequency sound produce “a micromechnical action that makes the lytic effect of tPA a lot more effective,” by improving the efficiency with which it is delivered. “Injecting tPA is like putting an ice cube in a drink and waiting for it to melt,” says Newell. “With ultrasound, it’s more akin to creating a snow flurry. The drug binds to more binding sites, and it does so a lot faster.”
That’s not the case in the third ultrasound device being tested at Swedish. The ExAblate Neuro device developed by Israeli company InsighTec uses thousands of beams of ultrasound focused on one spot to create intense heat at a targeted point in the brain. The ExAblate Neuro mimics the effects of a tool used in neurosurgery for years, the gamma knife, which uses highly focused radiation energy to cut out material like tumors or to create lesions that can lessen the effects of diseases like Parkinson’s or epilepsy. In the case of stroke, the Neuro could potentially superheat solidified clots, turning them to more easily cleared liquid.
Since it uses focused ultrasound rather than the dangerous radiation associated with the gamma knife, says Newell, ExAblate has the potential to perform similar surgeries that are more easily repeatable. Current gamma knife surgeries have to get it right the first time, as exposing patients to powerful radiation over and over again can be dangerous. Since ultrasound energy doesn’t carry the same exposure dangers, doctors could potentially do the same sort of treatments in smaller steps without raising concerns over patient health.
All three of these new methods are still in their experimental phases, but each one has the potential to transform—and improve—the way strokes and other ailments in the brain are treated. And that may be only the beginning of the potential for the techniques. “Ultrasound technology represents almost a whole new field in neurosurgery,” said Newell.
(Source: popularmechanics.com)
Celebrities and health: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Celebrities frequently give medical advice and people often follow it. Whether motivated by good intentions or financial rewards, celebrities can generate much publicity for health campaigns by virtue of their visibility, public interest, and perceived newsworthiness.
Steven Hoffman an assistant professor, and Charlie Tan a medical student, both at McMaster University, have attempted to find out why we seem so keen to follow their lead
Read the full research
Following celebrities’ medical advice: meta-narrative analysis