An unexpected discovery out of Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, UK showed that deep brain stimulation (DBS) can lower blood pressure, even in cases in which drugs are unsuccessful.
The discovery reportedly occurred when a 55-year-old patient received a deep brain stimulator to treat his pain from central pain syndrome that developed after a stroke. At the time of the stroke, the patient was diagnosed with high blood pressure, which could not be controlled despite taking four different drugs. The deep brain stimulator was largely unsuccessful at controlling the patient’s pain, but amazingly it decreased his blood pressure enough that he could stop taking all four medications.
Researchers confirmed the effects of the deep brain stimulator by turning it on and off over a three-year period, which showed an average of a 32/12 mmHg decrease in blood pressure when the stimulator was turned on and an 18/5 mmHg increase when the device was turned off.
This breakthrough could lead to a new form of treatment for those whose hypertension cannot be controlled by drugs.
Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, a thoracic surgeon and director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, showed the amazing miracle of modern lung transplantation at TEDMED 2010. Here’s his fascinating talk where an actual living, breathing set of porcine lungs were brought on stage for hands-on inspection by the audience:
Here’s a quick interview we were able to get with Dr. Keshavjee just after the talk: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
Anyone who’s ever watched football, the American variety, knows how rough of a sport it can be. With 22 fast-moving players (some weighing as much as 350 pounds) scrambling and tackling for possession of the pigskin, injuries are inevitable.
One of the scariest injuries a football player can get is a concussion. With its commonly insidious onset, concussions of the brain are often difficult to diagnose, or immediately treat to avoid long-term consequences.
The National Football League (NFL) has announced that they will be launching a pilot program next season in which accelerometers will be placed in players’ mouthpieces, earpieces, and helmets to analyze how blows to the head relate to the effects and severity of concussions and other traumatic brain injuries. The data could potentially help team doctors diagnose the severity of a concussion within a few minutes. Collected long-term from groups of players, the impact data could help coaches and doctors determine how players get injured and the possible effects of such injuries. Such data could also help engineers design a better football helmet.
As long as the game of football continues to be played, concussions will be pretty much impossible to avoid. However, changing technology and increasing knowledge of traumatic brain injury will hopefully only make football a safer, more enjoyable sport.
Genome-wide profiling is increasingly being marketed towards consumers to assess their risk of developing certain diseases. However, there has been little research into the psychological effects of these tests.
Researchers from Scripps Translational Science Institute have now looked into these effects in a large group of patients. They followed 2,037 participants who took the Navigenics Health Compass, a test that assesses the risk for about 20 common diseases, for a period of three months.
Taking the test did not increase anxiety symptoms, dietary fat intake, or exercise behavior. There was some test-related distress correlated with the average estimated lifetime risk of getting the diseases tested for, but at the same time 90.3 percent of all subjects had no test-related distress at all. The use of screening tests did not change among the group and notably health effects of the test were not studied.
In conclusion, personal genetic testing does not seem to generate a lot of distress, although the study was clearly limited by a high dropout percentage of 44 percent and the self-selection of participants who opted to do the test.
An international team of researchers has developed a rather reliable test that predicts the future improvement of reading abilities in kids with dyslexia. The method uses functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) to scan the brain, and data crunching software to interpret the data. The researchers hope that the finding will help parents and therapists uniquely identify which learning tools are best for each child.
From the announcement by Vanderbilt University :
The 45 children who took part in the study ranged in age from 11 to 14 years old. Each child first took a battery of tests to determine their reading abilities. Based on these tests, the researchers classified 25 children as having dyslexia, which means that they exhibited significant difficulty learning to read despite having typical intelligence, vision and hearing and access to typical reading instruction.
During the fMRI scan, the youths were shown pairs of printed words and asked to identify pairs that rhymed, even though they might be spelled differently. The researchers investigated activity patterns in a brain area on the right side of the head, near the temple, known as the right inferior frontal gyrus, noting that some of the children with dyslexia activated this area much more than others. DTI scans of these same children revealed stronger connections in the right superior longitudinal fasciculus, a network of brain fibers linking the front and rear of brain.Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
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Anyone who’s ever watched football, the American variety, knows how rough of a sport it can be. With 22 fast-moving players (some weighing as much as 350 pounds) scrambling and tackling for possession of the pigskin, injuries are inevitable.
An international team of researchers has developed a rather reliable test that predicts the future improvement of reading abilities in kids with dyslexia. The method uses functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) to scan the brain, and data crunching software to interpret the data. The researchers hope that the finding will help parents and therapists uniquely identify which learning tools are best for each child.
