Health & WellnessS


Health

US: Implant firms pay doctors millions

Josh Goldstein
The Inquirer
Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:52 UTC
[First of two articles]

As joint replacements have increased, so have payments to surgeons.

Artificial knee
©CLEM MURRAY / Inquirer Staff Photographer
Robert E. Booth Jr. with an artificial knee during surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital. Booth says he performs about 1,200 knee replacements a year.

In the past decade, hip- and knee-replacement surgery has exploded - nearly doubling to about 750,000 operations a year and fueling a multibillion-dollar implant industry with profit margins approaching 20 percent.

With so much money in play, competition among artificial hip and knee manufacturers has fostered a system of five-, six- and seven-figure payments to doctors in royalties, consulting deals and speaking fees.
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Evil Rays

US: Neural Implant That Learns With The Brain May Help Paralyzed Patients


Science Daily
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:44 UTC
Devices known as brain-machine interfaces could someday be used routinely to help paralyzed patients and amputees control prosthetic limbs with just their thoughts. Now, University of Florida researchers have taken the concept a step further, devising a way for computerized devices not only to translate brain signals into movement but also to evolve with the brain as it learns.

Instead of simply interpreting brain signals and routing them to a robotic hand or leg, this type of brain-machine interface would adapt to a person's behavior over time and use the knowledge to help complete a task more efficiently, sort of like an assistant, say UF College of Medicine and College of Engineering researchers who developed a model system and tested it in rats.
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Magnify

Newly Described 'Dragon' Protein Could Be Key To Bird Flu Cure


Science Daily
Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:58 UTC
Scientists and researchers have taken a big step closer to a cure for the most common strain of avian influenza, or "bird flu," the potential pandemic that has claimed more than 200 lives and infected nearly 400 people in 14 countries since it was identified in 2003.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in conjunction with scientists from China and Singapore, have crystallized and characterized the structure of one of the most important protein complexes of the H5N1 virus, the most common strain of bird flu.

Image
©DOE/Argonne National Laboratory
The overall structure of the PAC--PB1 N complex. The structure is colored according to secondary structure and elements are labeled. Helices are shown as cylinders and are red in the brain domain and blue in the mouth domain; strands are yellow and loops are green. The PB1 N peptide is magenta.

All viruses, including H5N1, contain only a small number of proteins that govern all of the viruses' functions. In H5N1, perhaps the most important of these proteins is RNA polymerase, which contains the instructions that allows the virus to copy itself along with all of its genetic material. The Argonne study focused on H5N1's RNA polymerase protein, which contains three subunits: PA, PB1 and PB2.
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Question

It's true - Your brain lies to you

Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt
International Herald Tribune
Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:54 UTC
False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories - and mislead us along the way.
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Health

Quiet, Please! How Noise Pollution Could Send You to the Hospital

Ursula Sautter and Mary Desmond Pinkowish
Ode Magazine
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:27 UTC


Quiet
©Unknown

A leaf blower, snow blower, lawn mower and two huge dogs - Peter D'Epiro can describe in excruciating detail how his neighbour's lawn equipment and pets ruined summer afternoons and dinner parties for him and his wife for more than a decade in Ridgewood, New Jersey. But he'd rather not. "I can barely think about that situation without rushing for the Valium or the IV gin drip," he says.
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Bulb

Sleep loss produces false memories; But caffeine helps to boost accurate recall

Kerri Smith
Nature
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:13 UTC
Sleepless nights can increase your chances of forming false memories, according to researchers in Germany and Switzerland. But, as for so many aspects of life, it seems that coffee can save the day.

Although neuroscientists know that memories can be strengthened while we are asleep, it's been unclear whether false memories form as we slumber or whether they are only consolidated when we are asked to recall the information the following morning.
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Heart

Faces, empathy and ownership in the brain


FENS/Swiss Society for Neuroscience
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:50 UTC
Scientists in Switzerland and the UK have made valuable discoveries into how the human brain responds to faces, feels empathy for others, and represents the concept of the self. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity, to understand how the brain works in real time. The results, presented Sunday 13 July at FENS 2008, will be relevant in disorders of social functioning such as autism and low self-esteem.
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Health

New research shows associations between exposure to traffic-related air pollution and the onset of allergic diseases in children


Helmholtz Zentrum München
Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:08 UTC
Allergic diseases appear more often in children who grow up near busy roads. This is the result of a study of several thousand children, now published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Under the direction of the Helmholtz Zentrum München, a German research group studied in a longitudinal study, over six years, whether associations are identifiable between the onset of atopic diseases and exposure to air pollutants originating from traffic. The scientists based their analysis, on the one hand, on the corresponding distance of the parental home to streets busy with traffic, and on the other hand, modeled values, for the respective residencial addresses of the children, of air pollution with fine dust, diesel soot and nitrogen dioxide.
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Health

Drugs to Build Bones May Weaken Them

Tara Parker-Pope
New York Times
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:42 UTC
New questions have emerged about whether long-term use of bone-building drugs for osteoporosis may actually lead to weaker bones in a small number of people who use them.

The concern rises mainly from a series of case reports showing a rare type of leg fracture that shears straight across the upper thighbone after little or no trauma. Fractures in this sturdy part of the bone typically result from car accidents, or in the elderly and frail. But the case reports show the unusual fracture pattern in people who have used bone-building drugs called bisphosphonates for five years or more.

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Attention

Ebola-like virus 'Marburg' returns to Europe after 40 years

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:11 UTC
Marburg, a deadly haemorrhagic fever closely related to Ebola, is back in Europe, after a four-decade absence.

On Friday, 11 July, a 40-year old Dutch woman died in a quarantined ward of a hospital in Leiden, the Netherlands, less than two weeks after she returned from Uganda.

She had visited caves where she may have contracted the virus on 16 and 19 June, but she developed a fever and chills - early symptoms of Marburg - only after her return, on 2 July. More severe symptoms - such as liver failure and bleeding from multiple sites - struck two days after she was admitted to the hospital on 5 July.

New Scientist takes a closer look at this mysterious and deadly virus.
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