Research
The European Ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, has welcomed the European Medicines Agency's (EMA) release of adverse reaction reports related to Septrin, a medicine for the treatment of bacterial infections. This follows a...
Official assessments of a doctor's professionalism should be considered carefully before being accepted due to the tendency for some doctors to receive lower scores than others, and the tendency of some groups of patient or colleague assessors...
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) leads to persistent inflammation of the airways and is typically managed with corticosteroids, a class of anti-inflammatory medication. However, corticosteroids do not improve survival nor alter the...
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) leads to persistent inflammation of the airways and is typically managed with corticosteroids, a class of anti-inflammatory medication. However, corticosteroids do not improve survival nor alter the...
An international team of scientists led by Monash University researchers has uncovered how a common hospital bacterium becomes a deadly superbug that kills increasing numbers of hospital patients worldwide and accounts for an estimated $3.2 billion...
Interactive video games, already known to improve motor function in recovering stroke patients, appear to safely enhance physical therapy for patients in intensive care units (ICU), new research from Johns Hopkins suggests.
In a report published...
Patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are at a higher risk of death if they are underweight.
A new study, which will be presented September 26, 2011 at the European Respiratory Society's Annual Congress in...
Scientists at la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M -- Carlos III University in Madrid) who participate in the LOBIN consortium have developed an 'intelligent' T-shirt that monitors the human body (temperature, heart rate, etc.) and...
Time is of the essence when it comes to stroke treatment. But a new image guided technique could help shift the criterion from one that is determined by how long after the start of symptoms a patient receives medical care, suggests a small US study...
Cognitive impairment, even when detected at an early, mild stage, is a significant predictor of decreased life expectancy.
According to a new, long-term study from Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University researchers, cognitive impairment,...
More than 60 percent of hospital nurses' and doctors' uniforms tested positive for potentially dangerous bacteria, according to a study published in the September issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication...
The adverse effect of right ventricular pacing on implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) patient survival is sustained long-term; however, the impact appears to be mitigated by cardiac resynchronisation therapy (CRT), based on a scientific...
Antibiotics can help ward off serious bacterial infections in kidney disease patients who use tubes called catheters for their dialysis treatments. But if antibiotics are used too often, "super bugs" may crop up that are resistant to the...
Measuring the levels of a natural body chemical may allow doctors to reduce the duration of antibiotic use and improve the health outcomes of critically ill patients.
"Infection is a common and expensive complication of critical illness and we...
Dr. Max Harry Weil, called the father of the critical care movement, died of prostate cancer at his home at age 84. The founder of the Weil Institute of Critical Care, he is credited with developing the first ICUs and introducing computerised...
A Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) scientist who has previously discovered antimicrobial compounds in the skin of frogs and in the dogfish shark has now turned his attention to the remarkable wound healing abilities of dolphins.
A...
A team led by University of Maryland School of Medicine Institute for Genome Sciences researchers has unraveled the genomic code of the E. coli bacterium that caused the ongoing deadly outbreak in Germany that began in May 2011.
To date, 53 people...
Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital have put forward a new theory as to what causes sepsis, an often fatal condition that occurs when infection spreads throughout the body.
Leaking blood vessels may actually be a cause of sepsis, rather than...
In the war between drugs and drug-resistant diseases, is the current strategy for medicating patients giving many drug-resistant diseases a big competitive advantage?, asks a research paper that will be published in the Proceedings of the National...
Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have pioneered a new needle-free test to take the sting out of medicine testing in premature babies. The research will not only lead to greater accuracy in prescribing, but will also significantly...
There's a wealth of health information hiding in the human immune system. Accessing it, however, can be very challenging, as the many and complex roles that the immune system plays can mask the critical information that is relevant to addressing...
A new biomarker-based diagnostic test is more effective than the current best practice for early detection of adverse outcomes after acute kidney injury (AKI), which can be fatal for an estimated 50 percent of the critically ill patients who get the...
Recruiting thousands of patients to collect health data for genetic clues to disease is expensive and time consuming. But that arduous process of collecting data for genetic studies could be faster and cheaper by instead mining patient data that...
For people, being touched can initiate many different reactions from comfort to discomfort, from intimacy to aggression. But how might people react if they were touched by a robot? Would they recoil, or would they take it in stride? In an initial...
Clinicians have often referred to ultrasound technology as the "stethoscope of the future," predicting that as the equipment shrinks in size, it will one day be as common at the bedside as that trusty tool around every physician's neck...
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new sampling device that could prevent thousands of people worldwide from dying of pneumonia each year.
Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech is a solution to...
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Northeast Georgia Medical Center are one step closer to their goal of automating the management of sedation in hospital intensive care units (ICUs). They have developed control algorithms...
Researchers from Rhode Island Hospital have identified a protein that plays a dual role in the liver during sepsis. The protein, known as RIP1, acts both as a "death switch" and as a pro-survival mechanism. The ability to identify the...
Where MRSA Colonises on the Human Body: Study Identifies Quantity and Locations of MRSA Colonisation
When methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) is carried in the nose (nares), it is a risk factor for an invasive infection, including a surgical site infection. Some studies have found that the heavier the carriage of MRSA in the nose, the greater...
ZOLLMedical Corporation, a manufacturer of medical devices and related software solutions, has announced the successful conclusion of the ZOLL-sponsored CIRC trial. The trial’s Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) closed enrollment when an...
Severely injured patients transported by helicopter from the scene of an accident are more likely to survive than patients brought to trauma centers by ground ambulance, according to a new study published in The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection...
The brain under general anaesthesia isn't "asleep" as surgery patients are often told -- it is placed into a state that is a reversible coma, according to three neuroscientists who have published an extensive review of general...
Blood poisoning can be fatal. If you suffer from sepsis, you used to have to wait as much as 48 hours for laboratory findings. A new diagnostic platform as big as a credit card will now supply the analysis after as little as an hour. This system is...
"Staph" bacteria feed on blood. They need the iron that's hidden away inside red blood cells to grow and cause infections. It turns out that these microbial vampires prefer the taste of human blood,
The researchers report in the...
Cold plasma jets could be a safe, effective alternative to antibiotics to treat multi-drug resistant infections, says a study published in the January issue of the Journal of Medical Microbiology.
The team of Russian and German researchers showed...
Patients who need assistance to breathe through mechanical ventilation may benefit from listening to music, a new review published in The Cochrane Library shows. The researchers found that music listening may relax patients, potentially resulting in...
Boston University researchers have developed a simple diagnostic tool that can quickly identify dangerous viruses like Ebola and Marburg. The biosensor, which is the size of a quarter and can detect viruses in a blood sample, could be used in...
Potential gender differences in clinical management are under-researched. A systematic analysis of the incorporation of sex and gender into research design, published in the open access journal BMC Medicine, has found that, although there has been a...
The prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections is well known, causing an estimated 19,000 deaths and $3-4 billion in healthcare costs per year in the U.S. What is less well known is that this increased infection and...
Using the same technology found in clothing tags used in retail store tracking systems, a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that surgical sponges with implanted radio frequency (RF) tags may be an effective...
Treatment with vitamin C rapidly improves the emotional state of acutely hospitalised patients, according to a study carried out by researchers at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital (JGH) and the affiliated Lady Davis Institute for Medical...
Duke University Medical Center researchers have found two genes in mice which might help identify why some people are more susceptible than others to potentially deadly staph infections.
The researchers uncovered important genetic clues...
Daily use of probiotics reduced ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in critically ill patients by almost half, according to new research from Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska.
The study was published on...
To prevent blood clots during therapeutic hypothermia, scientists have developed what may be the first drug activated by cool temperatures and turned off by warm ones, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's...
Aside from the obvious and immediate health problems that patients undergoing mechanical ventilation face, those who recover often do so with profound loss of strength and mobility that can impair their daily functioning and even lead to...
A combination of sorafenib and vitamin K had an effect in vitro on both human pancreas cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma, according to researchers from the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson. Data from the two studies were presented at the AACR...
