October 31st, 2011 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in News, Opinion
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If you want a glimpse at a company putting precision medicine into practice look no further than Prometheus Labs. They make diagnostic products for personalized care in digestive disease and oncology. I use their products to diagnose and target therapy in children with inflammatory bowel diseases (crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis).
IBD offers a nice place to see the evolution of precision diagnostics:
Early biomarker testing. Initially we had ASCA and pANCA antibodies to discern crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.
Advanced biomarker testing. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
June 29th, 2011 by Mark Crislip, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
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At home the kids’ current TV show of choice is How I Met Your Mother, supplanting Scrubs as the veg out show in the evening. Both shows are always on a cable channel somewhere and are often broadcast late at night. Late night commercials can be curious, and as I work on projects, I watch the shows and commercials out of the corner of my eye.
Law firms trolling for business seem common. If you or a family member has had a serious stroke, heart attack or death from Avandia, call now. The non-serious deaths? I suppose do not bother. One ad in particular caught my eye: anyone who developed ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease (collectively referred to inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD) after using Accutane, call now. Millions have been awarded.
My eye may have been caught because of my new progressive lenses, but I will admit to an interest in inflammatory bowel disease, having had ulcerative colitis for years until I took the steel cure. It also piqued my interest as these were three conditions among which I could not seen any connections. Accutane, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s. One of these is not like the other. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
May 20th, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Health Tips, Research
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I stumbled across this review article (first full reference below) earlier this week.
Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States. Most skin cancers form in older people on parts of the body exposed to the sun or in people who have weakened immune systems (such as inflammatory bowel disease patients on immunosuppressive therapy).
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), in there were more than one million new cases of nonmelanoma skin cancers (NMSC) in the United States in 2010. There were less than 1,000 NMSC deaths during the same time.
NMSC includes squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and basal cell carcinoma (BCC). Both occur more frequently on sunlight-exposed areas such as the head and neck. BCC is far more common than SCC and accounts for approximately 75% of all NMSC. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
