medicine
clock | December 17, 2006Sensory Nerve Discovery In Diabetes Opens Door To New Treatment Strategies:
Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), the University of Calgary and The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine have found that diabetes is controlled by abnormalities in the sensory nociceptor (pain-related) nerve endings in the pancreatic islet cells that produce insulin. This discovery, a breakthrough that has long been the elusive goal of diabetes research, has led to new treatment strategies for diabetes, achieving reversal of the disease without severe, toxic immunosuppression. This research is…
omnibrain | December 17, 2006
Valentina Sivryukova knew her public service messages were hitting the mark when she heard how one Kazakh schoolboy called another stupid. "What are you," he sneered, "iodine-deficient or something?"
I think I'm going to start using this insult!
I always knew iodine was added to salt at some point for some health reason - but I was never sure actually why that was. It looks like iodine deficiencies can cause all sorts of nasty health problems:
Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women…
omnibrain | December 16, 2006
A number of people have noticed that after getting transplants their personality changes - and not only that- their personality changes to reflect the donors personality.
...though she was born and raised in Tucson, she never liked Mexican food. She craved Italian and was a pasta junkie. But three years ago, all that changed for Jaime Sherman, 28, when she underwent a heart transplant at University Medical Center, after battling a heart defect since birth. "Now I love football, baseball, basketball. You name it, I follow it," said Sherman, a psychology student at Arizona State University. "…
oracknows | December 16, 2006I must have fallen behind in my blog reading, which led me not to notice that Abel Pharmboy over at Terra Sigillata just celebrated his first blogiversary on Friday. Here's to another successful year of science blogging!
If you want to get a taste of what Abel's about, he just posted two good analyses of articles that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology this month, one about the ethics of dealing with situations when parents choose quackery over efficacious treatment for children with good prognosis cancers and another discussing a review article covering the evidence base for the…
oracknows | December 16, 2006Here's an interesting little tidbit of a study:
Newswise -- Lead chelation therapy -- a chemical treatment to remove lead from the body -- can significantly reduce learning and behavioral problems that result from lead exposure, a Cornell study of young rats finds.
However, in a further finding that has implications for the treatment of autistic children, the researchers say that when rats with no lead in their systems were treated with the lead-removing chemical, they showed declines in their learning and behavior that were similar to the rats that were exposed to lead.
Chelating drugs,…
omnibrain | December 15, 2006It seems warning labels might be popping up in a few more places - one of which is on the inside of clothing for larger people? I wonder if they're going to put pictures on the label? I can't see a warning label doing much good there.
Check out their other recommendations:
Clothes made in larger sizes should carry a tag with an obesity helpline number, health specialists have suggested. Sweets and snacks should not be permitted near checkouts, new roads should not be built unless they include cycle lanes and food likely to make people fat should be taxed, they say in a checklist of what we…
purepedantry | December 15, 2006On Wednesday evening, Senator Tim Johnson (D) -- the junior Senator from South Dakota -- suffered what appeared to be a stroke and was rushed to the hospital. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with intracerebral hemorrhaging as the result of a burst arteriovenous malformation. He underwent surgery to repair this bleed and is in the process of recovering.
People have been talking about this to death on the news -- which I find a bit morbid -- because should the Senator pass away or become incapacitated, the Governor of South Dakota would be allowed to appoint a new Senator to take his place…
oracknows | December 15, 2006This week sucked.
OK, it was the last two or three days that sucked, but they were bad enough to ruin the whole week. The only reason my blogging didn't reflect this is because most of the posts over the last couple of days were actually written earlier this week, and the true magnitude of this week's suckitude didn't hit me until yesterday. Suffice it to say that my lab minions have caused me considerable aggravation and angst this week by doing something really, really dumb, a problem whose effect was amplified by the response of a colleague. (That's all I'm going to say about it.) To top…
clock | December 15, 2006The Abortion Pill Could Prevent Cancer:
In women with BRCA-1, the naturally occurring female hormone progesterone speeds the proliferation of mammary cells. "If we block the progesterone pathway using an antiprogesterone, it could prevent breast cancer," says Eva Lee, lead author of the study. That's exactly what mifepristone did for the experiment's mice, all of which had the BRCA-1 gene. At age 1, none of those treated with mifepristone had developed tumors. But all the untreated mice had tumors by the time they were 8 months old.
From what I have heard on NPR, all 14 of the treated mice…
clock | December 14, 2006Identification Of Carbon Dioxide Receptors In Insects May Help Fight Infectious Disease:
Mosquitoes don't mind morning breath. They use the carbon dioxide people exhale as a way to identify a potential food source. But when they bite, they can pass on a number of dangerous infectious diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, and West Nile encephalitis. Now, reporting in today's advance online publication in Nature, Leslie Vosshall's laboratory at Rockefeller University has identified the two molecular receptors in fruit flies that help these insects detect carbon dioxide. The findings could…
oracknows | December 14, 2006It appears that I'm even further behind in my reading than Abel Pharmboy, because he pointed me to a couple of articles in an issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology that I haven't even cracked open yet. It's probably still sitting in the pile of journals on my desk that haven't been touched yet because I haven't gotten around to them. The issue contains two articles of interest, but I think I'll only touch on one of them for now because it's highly relevant to my previous posts about Abraham Cherrix, the 16 year old with relapsed Hodgkin's disease and refused additional chemotherapy in…
terrasig | December 14, 2006Tara at Aetiology just posted a few minutes ago that today's New England Journal of Medicine has published a free-access, Perspective article on the case of the Tripoli Six, who awaiting their 19 December sentencing.
oracknows | December 13, 2006Believe it or not, I missed my own blogiversary.
It's true. It was two days ago. For some reason, as the date approached I got the idea that it was the 13th, when in fact this blog was born on December 11, 2004 on a dreary Saturday afternoon when, after reading the TIME Magazine story about how 2004 was supposedly the "year of the blog" and, given my long history on Usenet pontificating on various topics, on a whim, I decided that I'd dip my toe into this thing called the blogosphere.
Thus was Respectful Insolence⢠born, and I've never looked back since.
Since then, this thing has grown…
j7uy5 | December 13, 2006Pay-for-performance is one of the buzzwords in health care financing
these days. I haven't been following it much, but Dr. Gault
has, over at
target="_blank">retired doc's thoughts.
His latest:
title="Site: retired doc's thoughts"
href="http://mdredux.blogspot.com/2006/12/ama-president-nails-p4p-for-what-it-is.html"
target="_blank">AMA President nails P4P for what it is at
AMA Interim meeting. Needless to say, the President
of the AMA is skeptical, as are many physicians. Dr. Reider,
at Family
Medicine Notes, wonders if the President's
statements reflect the overall position…
oracknows | December 12, 2006Fellow finalist for a 2006 Weblog Award for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog Flea sure stepped into it the other day. A reader e-mailed him a discussion found on the dreaded Mothering.com discussion boards, you know, the same boards that horrified me with the sheer level of antivaccination wingnuttery and HIV/AIDS denialism routinely supported by the discussants there.
After expressing sympathy for a mother's loss of a child, he then goes on to show why it was not, as the mother claimed in the discussion boards, the vaccine that caused her child's death:
What follows is a very sad story of a…
clock | December 12, 2006Scientists building a better mosquito:
Without mosquitoes, epidemics of dengue fever and malaria could not plague this planet.
The skin-piercing insects infect one person after another while dining on a favorite meal: human blood.
Eliminating the pests appears impossible. But scientists are attempting to re-engineer them so they cannot carry disease. If they manage that, they must create enough mutants to mate with wild insects and one day to outnumber them.
Researchers chasing this dream, including an N.C. State University entomologist, know they may court controversy. Genetically modified…
clock | December 12, 2006A paper in CMAJ on the medical ethics of muggles just came out:
Duty of care to the undiagnosed patient: Ethical imperative, or just a load of Hogwarts?
Here is the abstract - the entire paper is freely available:
With the restoration of You-Know-Who to full corporeal form, the practice of the dark arts may lead to multitudes being charmed, befuddled and confounded. At present, muggle ethics dictate that aid may be rendered in a life-or limb-threatening situation, but the margins are blurred when neither is at stake. Muggle and wizard healers, fearful of being labelled ambulance chasers, may…
omnibrain | December 12, 2006
I was reading this great post from Shrink Rap about sex with fish:
Being close to our nation's capitol we also sometimes get folks with politician-related delusions. They get arrested while traveling to Washington to confront the "devil-worshipers" controlling the government, or to get in touch with their "relatives" who happen to live in the White House. (Bush and Clinton would be surprised to learn how many patients they've fathered.) Presidential threateners are rare, but do show up occasionally. I understand the Secret Service even has a team that functions as something of an assertive…
clock | December 12, 2006You can post your nominations in the comments here. There is no Nursing category, though, which makes me quite mad.