News

Changing the hospital orders for women who have just delivered a child led to a 69% increase in the new mothers’ pertussis vaccination rate, providing protection for themselves and their newborns against the disease, commonly known as whooping cough, according to a study in the March issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

In the pantheon of scariest things, my generation used to worry about getting vaporized in a nuclear attack. As we got older and the Cold War waned, we worried a little more about things like getting shot at or getting cancer. But not too many of us have been worrying about bacterial infections. Perhaps we ought to, because we’ve been living in a brief paradise — barely more than half a century — where we can get a shot or take a pill to cure ourselves of what used to be humanity’s worst horror.

Adding computed tomographic angiography (CTA) findings on coronary plaque extent to those on plaque presence and severity can greatly improve CAD risk evaluations, suggests a retrospective cohort study [1]

In it, whether or not coronary disease seen at CTA was deemed obstructive-that is, included a stenosis of at least 50% severity-adding data on CAD extent (number of diseased coronary segments) further stratified risk of CV death or nonfatal MI over several years, according to a report published online February 18, 2014 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging.

With antibiotic resistant infections on the rise and a scarce pipeline of novel drugs to combat them, researchers at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) are pursuing entirely new approaches to meet the challenge of drug-resistant infections by taming microbes rather than killing them. 

A promising new therapy has – for the first time – reduced damage to the brain that can be caused by Sanfilippo B (MPS IIIB), a rare and devastating genetic disease, Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) researchers reported today in a presentation at the Lysosomal Disease Network’s 10th Annual WORLD Symposium™.

With very few treatment options available to fight deadly mucormycosis infections, a new Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) study holds hope for adding to the arsenal of therapies physicians have to combat an increasingly common infection afflicting people with weakened immune systems.

Sense4Baby Inc. has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a CE mark from the European Commission to commercialize its maternal/fetal heart rate monitoring device.
The Sense4Baby System allows healthcare practitioners in the U.S. and Europe to monitor mothers and their fetuses in the third trimester of pregnancy using a cellular device anywhere wireless access is found.

For older men who suspect their flagging energy and sex drive might be due to low testosterone, or low T, as commercials and advertisements call it, getting a prescription for testosterone gel seems to be an easy way to put the spring back in their step.

In fact, the gel (brand name AndroGel) has become so popular (and so heavily marketed), it’s even outselling Viagra.

Unfortunately, recent research — including a large new study published this week — links the hormone therapy with a significantly higher risk of a heart attack.

By Megan Brooks

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Hanging a poster in exam rooms displaying a doctor’s picture and commitment not to prescribe antibiotics for likely viral illness cut inappropriate prescribing during an influenza season in a randomized controlled trial.

“One of the advantages of this approach is that it is relatively easy to implement and administer in comparison to other clinical quality improvement programs,” Dr. Daniella Meeker of RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, who worked on the study, told Reuters Health in an email.

Continuing to expand the role of endovascular aortic repair, Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE: MDT) has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the Valiant Captivia Thoracic Stent Graft System to be used in the treatment of type B aortic dissections, a serious cardiovascular condition associated with high morbidity and mortality in which the upper segment of the body’s main artery has become torn along the innermost layer of the vessel wall.