‘An Australian teenage girl has become the world’s first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a “one-in-six-billion miracle.”
Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed. [..]
Brennan’s body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ by her body’s immune system.
Her new liver’s blood stem cells then invaded her body’s bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs.’
‘An eyeball sent from Queensland for a transplant operation in Hobart went astray this week – arriving at a pub instead of the hospital.
A hotel guest in the Tasmanian city of Hobart was shocked when he received a foam box on Tuesday night containing a single human eyeball.
The box marked “Live human organs for transplant” was delivered by mistake by an unwitting taxi driver.
Hotel worker Gabriel Winner – who requested the name of the hotel not be used – says the agitated guest brought the esky to reception early yesterday morning.
“The guy left with me with a box with an eyeball in it,” he said.
“He got the box and signed for it and opened it in the middle of the night.
“I thought this is just too weird. I went and put it in the fridge because I didn’t know what else to do with it. It was more than a little disconcerting.”
A courier arrived shortly after and took the esky away.’
‘After two nose jobs and thousands of dollars, Debra Dunn hated her face so much that she avoided mirrors, didn’t want to leave the house and hid behind her long hair anytime she had to be out in public.
“Every time I saw myself, I wanted to punch myself in the nose to make it all go away,” said the 40-year-old New Yorker, referring to the five years that followed a cosmetic surgery intended to even out a bump on her nose from a childhood injury. “I just kept thinking, ‘Why did I do this to myself?'”
Doctor after doctor told Dunn her new nose was lovely. “Anyone would kill for a cute little nose like that,” she remembers many of them saying, despite the fact her new nose was so narrow that it whistled when she breathed. But Dunn deeply regretted messing with what nature had given her and felt she no longer bore any resemblance to herself.’
‘Too much caffeine during pregnancy may increase the risk of miscarriage, a new study says, and it suggests that pregnant women may want to reduce their intake or cut it out entirely.
Many obstetricians already advise women to limit caffeine, although the subject has long been contentious, with conflicting studies, fuzzy data and various recommendations given over the years.
The new study, to be published Monday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, finds that pregnant women who consume 200 milligrams or more of caffeine a day — the amount in 10 ounces of coffee or 25 ounces of tea — may double their risk of miscarriage.’
‘In 2006 Sean Paul’s “Temperature” was hot, rising to the top of the Billboard charts. But the pop song had a much more chilling effect on 25-year-old Stacey Gayle.
Gayle, a customer service employee at a bank in Alberta, Canada, was suffering as many as 10 grand mal seizures a day, despite being treated with medications designed to control them. The condition became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang.
Appearing on CBS’ The Early Show, Gayle told co-anchor Harry Smith that she was 21 when she first started having seizures, but it was in the summer of 2006 when she began to suspect a possible trigger.
She recalled, 18 months ago, being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper Sean Paul’s music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she had heard his music. “I would get that aura before that song would come on,” she said.’
‘Scientists at a California company reported yesterday that they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.
Creation of the embryos — grown from cells taken from the company’s chief executive and one of its investors — also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.
Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman’s womb: a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.’
‘An Eastern Kentucky man has filed a lawsuit against the Bourbon County Sheriff’s Department, claiming two deputies shot him because they believed his prosthetic leg was a weapon.
Robert Shane Brewer Jr. alleges he was sitting under a tree on a farm near his home in Bourbon County on the night of Sept. 20, with his leg propped against a tree, when two deputies approached him on a trespassing call.
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Lexington, claims the deputies told Brewer to “get out from under the tree” and “drop his weapon.”
Brewer said he told the deputies he didn’t have a weapon and crawled around the tree to face them, when they opened fire without warning, shooting Brewer twice in the neck and chest.
Brewer claims he never threatened or provoked the deputies and that after paramedics arrived, one of the deputies said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe we shot Robbie Brewer.”‘
‘In American pop culture, the face of abortion is often a frightened teenager, nervously choosing to terminate an unexpected pregnancy. The numbers tell a far more complex story in which financial stress can play a pivotal role.
Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to least one child prior to getting an abortion.
A disproportionately high number are black or Hispanic. And regardless of race, high abortion rates are linked to hard times.
“It doesn’t just happen to young people, it doesn’t necessarily have to do with irresponsibility,” said Miriam Inocencio, president of Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island. “Women face years and years of reproductive life after they’ve completed their families, and they’re at risk of an unintended pregnancy that can create an economic strain.”‘
‘John and Martha Hucko were found dead in their Colonial Park Drive home on Tuesday night. Police said the couple had intravenous lines with a barbiturate hooked to their ankles, and Demerol was found near the bodies.
Police said the couple’s daughter called them after receiving a suicide note from her father.
The case is being treated as murder-suicide or double-suicide, pending the results of autopsies and toxicology tests, police said.
John Hucko was a dentist and a former anesthesiologist. He had a dental office on Brownsville Road, and his wife worked there as an assistant.’
‘Diseases carried to North America by Spanish explorers killed millions of the continent’s original inhabitants, but the trip cut both ways: scientists say Christopher Columbus took syphilis back to Europe.
In a study published in the January 14 issue of the journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases, Emory University geneticists studied 26 strains of treponema, the bacterial genus to which the infamous venereal disease belongs. After comparing their differences and evolutionary history, they decided that modern syphilis-causing strains most closely resembled those found in South America.
The findings give ammunition to adherents of the so-called Columbian theory of syphilis, which holds that the disease arrived in Europe with Columbus. Their opponents point to earlier European evidence, especially syphilitic lesions in skeletons from a 14th century English monastery, as absolving the notorious explorer of this particular scourge.’
There’s a lot of strange and cool stuff to look at.
When I build my time machine I’m gonna go be a doctor in the past for a while. Medicine was classy back then. They don’t make urethral dilators out of ivory in this day and age, that’s for sure. 🙂
‘It sounds like a freakish ailment from a horror movie: Sores erupt on your skin, mysterious threads pop out of them, and you feel like tiny bugs are crawling all over you. Some experts believe it’s a psychiatric phenomenon, yet hundreds of people say it’s a true physical condition. It’s called Morgellons, and now the government is about to begin its first medical study of it. [..]
Morgellons sufferers describe symptoms that include erupting sores, fatigue, the sensation of bugs crawling over them and – perhaps worst of all – mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. They’ve documented their suffering on Web sites.
Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.’
‘A construction worker claimed in a lawsuit that when he went to a hospital after being hit on the forehead by a falling wooden beam, emergency room staffers forcibly gave him a rectal examination.
Brian Persaud, 38, says in court papers that after he denied a request by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital emergency room employees to examine his rectum, he was “assaulted, battered and falsely imprisoned.”
His lawyer, Gerrard M. Marrone, said he and Persaud later learned the exam was one way of determining whether he had suffered spinal damage in the accident.
Marrone said his client got eight stitches for a cut over his eyebrow.
Then, Marrone said, emergency room staffers insisted on examining his rectum and held him down while he begged, “Please don’t do that.” He said Persaud hit a doctor while flailing around and staffers gave him an injection, which knocked him out, and performed the rectal exam.’
‘Bad news for Coco and Blinko — children don’t like clowns and even older kids are scared of them.
The news that will no doubt have clowns shedding tears was revealed in a poll of youngsters by researchers from the University of Sheffield who were examining how to improve the decor of hospital children’s wards.
The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between four and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary.
“As adults we make assumptions about what works for children,” said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university.
“We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”‘
‘Shinzo Abe would like the world to know that he did not resign last year because of failed policies or election losses. The real reason reason for his resignation was crippling diarrhea that forced him to go to the toilet 30 times a day:
Abe said he has been struck by ulcerative colitis, a bowel illness caused by ulcers, at least once a year since he was 17. [..]
“To mention an indelicate matter, I rushed to the lavatory after having keen abdominal pains and saw the basin all red with tremendous bleeding,” he said.
“Bleeding causes slight anaemia. More than anything else, though, you feel depressed as you see fresh blood every time you go to the toilet,” he said in an article contributed to the major conservative monthly Bungei Shunju.
Abe said the illness usually made him “feel the need to relieve my bowels every 30 minutes.” [..]
“The need to go to the toilet many times a day hampers election and other political activities very much,” he said, adding his wife, Akie, once made a tearful plea to him to quit his political career.’
‘Scientists at the University of Minnesota have taken a big step toward making replacement organs with the recipients’ cells. In experiments performed on rats and pigs, the researchers stripped donor hearts of their cells to create scaffolds on which the recipients’ cells were grown. The hope is that a similar approach might someday prove useful to human patients with end-stage heart disease. In theory, these novel hearts could prove to be better than traditional donor hearts because they are less likely to cause an immune response.
“It’s an audacious, gutsy, exciting piece of work,” says Buddy Ratner, a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research. Still, substantial hurdles remain before the approach might be applicable to human patients.’
‘One of the greatest challenges neurologists face is successful delivery of drugs to the brain. This is because a special filtering layer of tissue, called the blood brain barrier, protects the brain and spinal cord. The barrier acts like a molecular sieve, allowing only properly sized molecules through. This means that any medication needing to reach the brain (for example, to kill a brain tumor) needs to be small enough, and even then, it is difficult to target the drug to specifically reach the brain.
Kumar and his colleagues from Harvard Medical School have developed a potentially revolutionary drug delivery method, taking advantage of a known master infiltrator of the brain: the virus responsible for rabies, also known as the rhabdovirus. Rabies viruses travel from the site of infection (a local wound bite) to the nerves, through which it gains access to the brain. [..]’
‘Earthquake-prediction techniques could help develop a way to forecast epileptic seizures, according to research which found striking similarities between the electrical activity in the brain before and during seizures and seismological data around earthquakes.
Both are usually preceded by small, barely detectable tremors and, as with an earthquake, the longer it has been since a seizure, the longer it will be until the next one. According to scientists, these shared features mean that the patterns are not random and could even be governed by similar mathematical rules.
Epilepsy comprises a set of conditions which disrupt the electrical activity in the brain and the main symptoms are recurrent, unprovoked seizures. It is one of the most common long-term neurological disorders, affecting 456,000 people in the UK and around 50 million worldwide.
The condition can often be controlled by drugs that damp down the brain’s electrical activity, although surgery to remove the affected part of the brain is sometimes used in the most hard-to-treat cases.’
‘Malaria has long been endemic to Kenya’s humid coast and swampy lowland regions, but it has only rarely reached Njoki’s village on the slopes of Mount Kenya (see Kenya map).
In recent decades, however, scientists have noted an increase in epidemics in the region, as well as in sporadic cases like Njoki’s.
Many medical and environmental experts attribute the spike in malaria to climate change, in the form of warmer temperatures and variations in rainfall patterns. (See a map of global warming’s effects.)
“We are now finding malaria in places that we did not expect to find it, particularly the highland regions that used to be too cool for malaria,” said Dorothy Memusi, deputy director of the Malaria Division in Kenya’s Ministry of Health.’
‘A number of organ donation groups said Monday that they are unaware of new Health Canada regulations that mean sexually active gay men, injection drug users and other groups considered high risk will no longer be accepted as organ donors.
The new rules, which came into effect in December, are similar to the regulations for determining who can donate blood. Those rules exclude groups that are at high risk of transmitting infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C and B.
Officials at several transplant programs in the country said because they were unaware of the new regulations, they would continue to consider all potential donor organs.
“We have not been informed, first of all, that Health Canada is considering this,” said Dr. Gary Levy, who heads Canada’s largest organ transplant program at Toronto’s University Health Network. “Obviously if Health Canada wishes to discuss that, we would hope they would engage all stakeholders.”‘
‘An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
This new study highlights the importance of certain soluble proteins, called cytokines, in Alzheimer’s disease. The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF), a critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses in the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interfere with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept. Excess TNF-alpha has been documented in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s.’
‘OK, I am not going to lecture you about the dangers of narcotic pain medicines. We both know how addictive they are: you because you know how it feels when you don’t have your vicodin, me because I’ve seen many many many people just like you. However, there are a few things I can tell you that would make us both much happier. By following a few simple rules our little clinical transaction can go more smoothly and we’ll both be happier because you get out of the ER quicker.
The first rule is be nice to the nurses. They are underpaid, overworked, and have a lot more influence over your stay in the ER than you think. When you are tempted to treat them like shit because they are not the ones who write the rx, remember: I might write for you to get a shot of 2mg of dilaudid, but your behavior toward the nurses determines what percent of that dilaudid is squirted onto the floor before you get your shot. [..]’
‘Two Baylor College of Medicine researchers in Houston are working on a cocaine vaccine they hope will become the first-ever medication to treat people hooked on the drug. “For people who have a desire to stop using, the vaccine should be very useful,” said Dr. Tom Kosten, a psychiatry professor who is being assisted in the research by his wife, Therese, a psychologist and neuroscientist. “At some point, most users will give in to temptation and relapse, but those for whom the vaccine is effective won’t get high and will lose interest.” [..]
The immune system — unable to recognize cocaine and other drug molecules because they are so small — can’t make antibodies to attack them.
To help the immune system distinguish the drug, Kosten attached inactivated cocaine to the outside of inactivated cholera proteins.
In response, the immune system not only makes antibodies to the combination, which is harmless, but also recognizes the potent naked drug when it’s ingested. The antibodies bind to the cocaine and prevent it from reaching the brain, where it normally would generate the highs that are so addictive.’
‘Alone in her one-room cabin high in the mountains of southern Mexico, Ines Ramirez Perez felt the pounding pains of a child insistent on entering the world.
Three years earlier, she had given birth to a dead baby girl. As her labour intensified, so did her concern for this unborn child.
The sun had set hours ago. The nearest clinic was 80km away over rough roads, and her husband, her only assistant during a half-dozen previous births, was drinking at a cantina. She had no phone and neither did the cantina.
So at midnight, after 12 hours of constant pain, the petite, 40-year-old mother of six sat down on a low wooden bench. She took several gulps from a bottle of rubbing alcohol, grabbed a 15-cm knife and began to cut.
By the light of a single dim bulb, Ramirez sawed through skin, fat and muscle before reaching inside her uterus and pulling out her baby boy. She says she cut his umbilical cord with a pair of scissors, then passed out.’
‘We’re guessing that headline caught your attention! Cow farts are a source of greenhouse gases, while kangaroo farts are methane free thanks to a particular bacteria in their stomachs. Now, in a bizarre twist of science-reality, scientists from Australia are trying to neutralize cow-produced methane by transferring that kangaroo bacteria to cattle and sheep’s guts. According to the government of Queensland, almost 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions from Australia come from cow farts, so this seemingly silly idea could actually make a big difference.’
‘Scientists have discovered that taking a sugar pill is more effective than routine medications in treating aggression in people with intellectual disabilities.
Until now, patients with intellectual disabilities have been prescribed antipsychotic drugs — normally given to people with a psychiatric disease like schizophrenia — to treat aggressive behaviour such as head banging. But evidence for the drugs’ effectiveness has been thin. [..]
A careworker who did not know which medication the patients had taken assessed their behaviour against a standard measure of aggression at 4 weeks, 12 weeks, and 26 weeks. Aggression decreased substantially at 4 weeks with all three treatments, with the placebo actually coming out top with a 79% success rate, compared to 58% for respiridone and 65% for haloperidol. At later stages all three treatments had similar effects, they report in the Lancet.’
‘Pop star Britney Spears was taken to hospital for tests to see if she was under the influence of alcohol or drugs and for a psychological evaluation after police were called to her home Thursday night to mediate a custody dispute, a police spokesman said.
Spears appeared to be conscious as she was rolled out of her Studio City home on a gurney about three hours after police and ambulances arrived there. [..]
Doctors at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles will decide whether to invoke a California law that allows a patient to be held for psychological evaluation for 72 hours, the police spokesman said.
Aerial video provided by local television station helicopters showed Spears on a stretcher and surrounded by police and paramedics as it was rolled to an ambulance near her home.’
‘A recent study has found that an older, commonly prescribed bipolar drug — lithium — can significant increase the lifespan of a certain type of worm. Researchers at the Buck Institute said nematode worms treated with lithium showed a 46 percent increase in lifespan.
It is not yet known whether people taking lithium might also benefit in a similar manner with an increased lifespan.
In the study, scientists discovered the worms’ longevity increased when the lithium reduced the activity of a gene that modulates the basic structure of chromosomes.
“Understanding the genetic impact of lithium may allow us to engineer a therapy that has the same lifespan extending benefits,” said Gordon Lithgow, the lead researcher in the study. “One of the larger questions is whether the lifespan extending benefits of the drug are directly related to the fact that lithium protects neurons.”‘
’44-year-old man presented to his local emergency department wearing a baseball cap and complaining of headaches that had progressively worsened over the preceding 11 weeks. After we provided generous analgesia and performed simple investigations that failed to identify a diagnosis, the patient removed his cap to reveal an assortment of metallic objects embedded in his scalp. Plain radiographs showed 11 nails penetrating into his brain. A detailed history revealed a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and the patient confirmed that he had hammered a nail into his head each week for the past 11 weeks to rid him of evil. The nails were removed with the patient under general anesthesia, and he made an uncomplicated recovery with no neurological deficits.’
‘A cat piano or Katzenklavier (German) is a hypothetical musical instrument consisting of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard. Nails would be placed under the keys, causing the cats to cry out in pain when a key was pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.
The instrument was described by German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) for the purpose of treating patients who had lost the ability to focus their attention. Reil believed that if they were forced to see and listen to this instrument, it would inevitably capture their attention and they would be cured (Richards, 1998).’
