News

The Los Angeles Harbor Commission has approved nine “Healthy Harbor Grants” totaling $550,000 that will help promote health care, health education, community outreach, and access to respiratory care in the harbor communities of San Pedro and Wilmington.  The grants were funded from the Port Community Mitigation Trust Fund, administered through the Port of Los Angeles’ partnership with San Pedro based Harbor Community Benefit Foundation (HCBF), an independent non-profit organization created to mitigate the environmental impacts of port operations.

Richard J. Glassock, MD, a member of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute’s Board of Directors, will receive the 2014 Medal of Excellence from the American Association of Kidney Patients at a March conference and will be honored throughout the year at a series of events.

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.