Patients with early stage, non-small cell lung cancer who are not able to undergo surgery, now have a highly effective treatment option. Physicians say that option, radical stereotactic radiosurgery performed with CyberKnife, leads to a 100 percent overall survival after three
years in patients with good lung function before treatment. These results were presented today at the annual CHEST meeting in San Diego.
For patients with small tumors characterized as early-stage disease, surgical removal of the affected lobe (lobectomy) is the standard of care. However, surgery is sometimes not an option because of other pre-existing medical conditions such as emphysema or heart disease.
Richard P. Phipps, Ph.D., professor of Environmental Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and of Pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center cautions that during flu vaccination season many common pain killers – Advil, Tylenol, aspirin – at the time of injection may blunt the effect of the shot and have a negative effect on the immune system.
A study by researchers in the Czech Republic reported similar findings in the Oct. 17, 2009, edition of The Lancet. They found that giving acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, to infants weakens the immune response to vaccines.
This post is not even remotely about a cephalopod, but because I mentioned polyps yesterday I feel justified in discussing a cnidarian. Besides, these headlines really got me steamed, and what better place to vent than a blog?
Enormous Jellyfish Sink Japanese Fishing Boat (Fox News)
Japanese fishing trawler sunk by giant jellyfish (Telegraph)
Researchers at the PSG College of Technology Peelamedu in Coimbatore, India have devised a dedicated, embedded system that uses the short-range Bluetooth wireless networking protocol
to connect patient data to the network in order to make it available to healthcare providers.
According to a paper in the forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, a telemedicine system based on a modified version of the Bluetooth wireless protocol can transfer patient data for assessment almost four times as fast as conventional Bluetooth and without the intermittent connectivity problems.
The increase in the number of overweight Americans has led to a so called epidemic of type 2 diabetes that shows no signs of slowing. More than two-thirds of adults are now overweight or obese. About 11 percent of adults ─ 24 million people ─ have diabetes, and up to 95 percent of them have type 2 diabetes, according to the National Institutes of Health. Diabetes is a major cause of heart disease and stroke and the major cause of kidney failure, limb amputations and new-onset blindness.
According to a new report published in the November issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, individuals who experience both adversity as children and traumatic events as adults are more
likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those individuals who experience
only one of these kinds of incidents.
The report also found that the risk was greater for individuals with a particular genetic mutation that may influence the way the brain processes the neurotransmitter serotonin, affecting an individual's anxiety levels and changing the way neurons react to fearful stimuli.
These days the Higgs boson search is a bit over-hyped, with the impending competition between Tevatron and LHC on the discovery of the fabled boson making headlines every time there is a new, even minor, update in the results of the CDF and D0 experiment. But the hunt is on for many other, maybe even more interesting, rare processes.
