July 6th, 2011 by John Mandrola, M.D. in News, Research
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I have said that the best tool for treating atrial fibrillation (AF) is education. I still strongly believe this, perhaps more then ever.
AF presents itself to people in so many different ways–from no symptoms to incapacitation. Likewise, the treatments for AF range from simple reassurance and lifestyle changes, to taking a medicine, and on to having a complex ablation[s].
Because knowledge is so important to patients with AF, I encourage them to do outside research. This surely means going on-line. The problem, of course, comes with assessing the quality of information. It reminds me of what an old professor used to profess, “no data is better than bad data.”
What’s more, the vast diversity of AF makes comparing notes with friends problematic. One person’s wonder drug may be another’s poison.
Last week, this provocative AF headline came through on one of my Google Alert emails: 
“Flecainide Treatment Linked to Sudden Cardiac Death.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*
July 2nd, 2011 by DavedeBronkart in Opinion
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e-Patients who want to collaborate with their physicians, and be responsible for their medical decisions, need to clearly understand what constitutes good evidence. It’s not always easy.
Now Richard Smith, a 25 year editor of the British Medical Journal, has written another piece for the BMJ blog, citing a JAMA study showing “that of the 49 most highly cited papers on medical interventions published in high profile journals between 1990 and 2004 a quarter of the randomised trials and five of six non-randomised studies had been contradicted or found to be exaggerated by 2005.”
What’s an e-patient to do?? Especially when we “patients who google” are so often sneered at by physicians who rely on these same journals.
Well, we need to educate ourselves, and learn to speak calmly, confidently and understandingly to anyone who doesn’t understand – just as we expect clinicians to do with us.:–) In short, we need to Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*
July 1st, 2011 by Berci in News
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Did you know that Natalie Portman (under the name, Natalie Hershlag) published a paper in a scientific journal in 2002 while at Harvard?
Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy.
The ability to create and hold a mental schema of an object is one of the milestones in cognitive development. Developmental scientists have named the behavioral manifestation of this competence object permanence. Convergent evidence indicates that frontal lobe maturation plays a critical role in the display of object permanence, but methodological and ethical constrains have made it difficult to collect neurophysiological evidence from awake, behaving infants. Near-infrared spectroscopy provides a noninvasive assessment of changes in oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin and total hemoglobin concentration within a prescribed region. The evidence described in this report reveals that the emergence of object permanence is related to an increase in hemoglobin concentration in frontal cortex.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
June 14th, 2011 by Berci in Research
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While 23andMe brings down the price of consumer genetic tests and builds up relations with big pharma (doesn’t share individual data though), it seems the DTC genetic testing is neither accurate in predictions nor beneficial to individuals according to a study described on Medical News Today.
Working under the supervision of Associate Professor Cecile Janssens, together with researchers from Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston, USA, Ms Kalf examined the risk predictions supplied by two large DTC companies, deCODEme (Iceland) and 23andMe (USA). They simulated genotype data for 100,000 individuals based on established genotype frequencies and then used the formulas and risk data provided by the companies to obtain predicted risks for eight common multi-factorial diseases – age-related macular degeneration (AMD), atrial fibrillation, celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, heart attack, prostate cancer, and Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes (T2D). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
May 31st, 2011 by ErikDavis in Health Tips, Research
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Here at Skeptic North, we’ve often been a sharp critic of those herbal remedies that are unable to withstand the scrutiny of science. Yet nature does indeed house many pharmacologically active compounds, and it stands to reason that some of them will have medicinal value. So today, we’re going to turn the tables and look at 5 herbal remedies that have held up well in repeated studies and are generally regarded as effective.
1) St. John’s Wort for Depression
If there’s one herbal medicine that consistently gets high marks for effectiveness, it’s St. John’s Wort as a treatment for mild depression. A 2008 Cochrane Review looked at 29 trials totaling over 5000 patients, including 18 comparisons with placebo and 17 comparisons with synthetic standard antidepressants, and found significant effects in both cases. The Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database indicates that St. John’s Wort is likely as effective as both first generation antidepressants (low-dose tricyclics) and the current generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Skeptic North » Erik Davis*
