The researchers from Imperial have designed a video game called Balloon Buddies, which is a tool that enables those recovering from conditions such as a stroke to engage and play together with healthy volunteers such as therapists and family members as a form of rehabilitation. Balloon Buddies is designed to level the playing field by...
Category: <span>Miscellaneous</span>
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Odds Are, They’re Taking Your Blood Pressure All Wrong
Emily Blair, a medical assistant at the Colon, Stomach and Liver Center in Lansdowne, Va., takes a blood pressure reading for Robert Koenen. New guidelines say that patients should have their arm resting on a surface while taking a reading and both feet should be placed flat on the ground. When was the last time...
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Stem cells fail to alleviate peripheral artery disease
A stem cell therapy did not improve walking ability in people with peripheral artery disease, although exercise did lead to significant improvements, according to the results of a new Northwestern Medicine clinical trial. The study, which will be published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was led by Dr. Mary McDermott, the Jeremiah...
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U.S. Health Care System Unprepared to Move Future Alzheimer’s Treatment into Rapid Clinical Use
The U.S. health care system lacks the capacity to rapidly move a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease from approval into wide clinical use, a shortcoming that could leave millions of people without access to transformative care if such a breakthrough occurs, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The primary problem is that there are too few...
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No, there has not been a successful human head transplant
Body transplant? Head transplant? Neither. In a 2015 TEDx talk, Sergio Canavero made a bold and tantalizing claim: by 2017, he swore, he would conduct the first human head transplant. And if you’ve been paying attention to trending headlines today, you might think he’s followed through on that promise. He has not. Canavero has not...
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Research finds injury from contact sport has harmful, though temporary effect on memory
Melissa McCradden, a neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University. McMaster University neuroscientists studying sports-related head injuries have found that it takes less than a full concussion to cause memory loss, possibly because even mild trauma can interrupt the production of new neurons in a region of the brain responsible for memory. Though such losses...
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Average cost of care in year after ovarian cancer surgery around $100K
(HealthDay)—For women with ovarian cancer who underwent both surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy, the average medical expenditures are about $100,000 in the first year after surgery, according to a study published online Nov. 7 in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Alexandra S. Bercow, M.D., from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, and colleagues conducted...
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So long chart audits
Ask health plan executives about chart audits and you are certain to hear a collective groan. They are labor-intensive, quite expensive and a significant pain point for physicians. And it’s seemingly become an annual event with no end in sight. Until now. Advanced analytics with clinical integration offers health plans and providers the ability to...
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Healthy mother-of-three died of freak cardiac arrest after paramedics enrolled her in medical study WITHOUT her consent
Cristina Belmonte, a healthy 45-year-old, went into cardiac arrest and died suddenly in August 2017 The paramedics that treated her used a different method to intubate Cristina as a part of a trial that she didn’t consent to taking part in Cristina died from cardiac arrest, but her husband, Manuel, did not find out that...
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Advancing Personalized Medicine Research in RA and Beyond: A Q&A with Dr. Sean E. Connolly
Chances are when people think of biomarkers, they think of cancer, thanks to the explosion of research and targeted diagnostics and treatment in recent years. But scientific understanding of biomarkers in autoimmune diseases is also rapidly advancing, and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) scientists are leading the charge. We sat down with Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Sean E. Connolly,...