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GMC child protection guide launched

New guidance from the GMC offers doctors advice and support to help them protect children from abuse or neglect.

11 Jul 2012

Health risks associated with H1N1 vaccine investigated

Results from two studies published in JAMA show that the H1N1 vaccination is associated with a small, but significant, increase in risk for Guillain-Barré syndrome in adults, but does not increase the risk for birth defects or problems when given to pregnant women.

11 Jul 2012

Saponins may increase lamb growth rates

Study results show that the growth rate of female lambs given feed drenched with Agave extract or Quillaja saponaria – both of which contain saponins – increased over 2 months, indicating they may act as natural defaunating agents.

11 Jul 2012

Thrombopoietin mimetic offers aplastic anemia hope

Eltrombopag significantly improves blood counts in some patients with refractory severe aplastic anemia, suggests research published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

11 Jul 2012

Symptom relief at the core of prostate patient management

More focus should be placed on relieving the most bothersome or “core” symptom for patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia, report Korean researchers.

11 Jul 2012

Visual, auditory hallucinations often co-occur in psychosis patients

Visual hallucinations are common in patients with psychosis spectrum disorders and often co-occur with auditory hallucinations, researchers report.

11 Jul 2012

Substance use linked to poor memory, reasoning in BD

The presence of comorbid substance use disorder is associated with significantly poorer visual memory and conceptual reasoning skills in patients with bipolar disorder, US study results show.

11 Jul 2012

Corneal graft survival better after ALK than PK

Patients treated with anterior lamellar keratoplasty for tectonic indications have better physiologic graft survival outcomes than their counterparts treated with penetrating keratoplasty, despite the former procedure raising the risk for anatomic failure, report researchers.

11 Jul 2012

Collaboration is key to effective cancer palliation

Collaborative decision-making and frequent meetings between palliative care teams and oncology staff are the most critical factors for improving end-of-life care, say French researchers.

11 Jul 2012

Experts call for add-on to athletes’ cardiac screening

Modified echocardiography should be included as part of the screening process for athletes at risk for sudden cardiac death, say researchers presenting at the annual meeting of the American Society of Echocardiography in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.

11 Jul 2012

Pain rehab may boost children’s ownership of self management

Pediatric pain rehabilitation may lead to an increased willingness to self-manage pain, which is associated with improvements in function and psychologic wellbeing, say researchers.

11 Jul 2012

PCR assay ‘superior’ to culture for neonatal sepsis, meningitis

In neonates with probable sepsis or meningitis, a realtime polymerase chain reaction assay specific for a virulence gene in Streptococcus agalactiae is superior to standard bacterial culture identification, results of a pathology study show.

11 Jul 2012

Oligodendroglia cells: An interview with Jeffrey Rothstein

There are three principle cells in the brain: neurons and two types of glial cells. One type is called an astrocyte. These were well known to inactivate neurotransmitters like glutamate, and provide metabolic support to neurons.

11 Jul 2012

Research into “insulating” brain cells could help to cure neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS

Johns Hopkins researchers say they have discovered that the central nervous system's oligodendroglia cells, long believed to simply insulate nerves as they "fire" signals, are unexpectedly also vital to the survival of neurons. Damage to these insulators appears to contribute to brain injury in neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease for the Yankee baseball great who died from the disease.

11 Jul 2012

Breast cancer drug bevacizumab slows progression but has no overall survival benefit

The cancer drug bevacizumab (Avastin®) offers only a modest benefit in prolonging disease progression in patients with advanced stage breast cancer, according to a systematic review by Cochrane researchers. The researchers assessed the efficacy of bevacizumab in combination with chemotherapy, an established cancer treatment in this indication, and found no overall survival benefit when adding bevacizumab to chemotherapy.

11 Jul 2012

African-American youths in public housing communities more likely to use tobacco

Today, nearly 4,000 adolescents in the United States will smoke their first cigarette, and about a fourth of those youth will become daily smokers, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports. A recent study by a University of Missouri researcher found that African-American youths who live in public housing communities are 2.3 times more likely to use tobacco than other African-American youths.

11 Jul 2012

Mixed-race adolescents report fewer behavioral problems

Researchers who studied a large sample of middle- and high-school students in Washington state found that mixed-race adolescents are more similar to their white counterparts than previously believed.

11 Jul 2012

Connections between daily stressors of police work and obesity, suicide

The daily psychological stresses that police officers experience in their work put them at significantly higher risk than the general population for a host of long-term physical and mental health effects. That's the overall finding of a major scientific study of the Buffalo Police Department called Buffalo Cardio-Metabolic Occupational Police Stress (BCOPS) conducted over five years by a University at Buffalo researcher.

11 Jul 2012

Agencies place unqualified, possibly criminal caregivers in homes of vulnerable seniors

If you hire a caregiver from an agency for an elderly family member, you might assume the person had undergone a thorough criminal background check and drug testing, was experienced and trained for the job.

11 Jul 2012