Newsline — Friday, December 14, 2012 13:00
Study Paves Way to Design Drugs with Multiple Protein Targets
American Medical Society for Sports Medicine Issues Position Statement on ‘Concussion in Sports’
Friday, December 14, 2012 8:00
The American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) has released its latest position statement, “Concussion in Sport,” which recommends that health-care professionals apply a more individualized approach in the diagnosis and care management of sports concussion — a traumatic head injury with a reported 3.8 million occurrences per year. This is because the severity of injury and the individual’s risk factors vary from athlete to athlete. Lead author Kimberly Harmon, MD, who serves as associate head team physician for the University of Washington and is a former AMSSM president, says there are a variety of tests physicians use to evaluate athletes with sports concussion; however, one of the most valuable factors is the physician’s close knowledge of the individual athlete. “It’s important that whoever works most regularly with the athlete reviews his or her treatment against the athlete’s history, behavior and risk factors to understand the best person-centered care plan,” Dr. Harmon says. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Neuroimaging Study Reveals Link Between Stress, Epileptic Seizures
Thursday, December 13, 2012 13:00
A study presented at the 66th American Epilepsy Society Annual Meeting has identified a significant difference in the brain response to stress in patients who believe stress is an important factor in their seizure control compared to patients who do not hold this belief. To better understand the potential role of stress among these patients, researchers in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati conducted a functional neuroimaging study of patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy under imposed psychosocial stress. All subjects in the study were given math exercises to complete — simple problems during the control task and difficult problems during the stress task. Subjects were provided with positive feedback during the simple math problems and negative feedback during the difficult ones, regardless of how well they were doing. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Mayo Clinic Researchers Discover Toxic Process that Leads to Dementia, ALS
Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:00
Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida have uncovered a toxic cellular process by which a protein that maintains the health of neurons becomes deficient and can lead to dementia. The findings shed new light on the link between culprits implicated in two devastating neurological diseases: frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The study appears in the Dec. 10 online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There is no cure for frontotemporal dementia — a disorder that affects personality, behavior and language, and is second only to Alzheimer’s disease as the most common form of early-onset dementia. While much research is devoted to understanding the role each defective protein plays in these diseases, the team at Mayo Clinic took a new approach to examine the interplay between TDP-43, a protein that regulates messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) — biological molecules that carry the information of genes and are used by cells to guide protein synthesis — and sortilin, which regulates the protein progranulin. For more information, click…
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Concussion Liability May Cost Athletic Teams, Leagues, Schools at all Levels
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 15:16
As the National Football League (NFL) confronts a large number of lawsuits brought by thousands of former players accusing the league of hiding information about the dangers of concussions, a less visible battle that may have a more widespread effect in the sport is unfolding between the league and 32 of its current and former insurers. The dispute revolves around how much money, if any, the insurers are obliged to pay for the league’s mounting legal bills and the hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages that might stem from the cases brought by the retired players. Regardless of how the issue is resolved, the dispute could hurt teams, leagues and schools at all levels if insurers raise premiums to compensate for the increased risk of lawsuits from the families of athletes who play football, hockey, lacrosse and other contact sports. For more information, click here to read the full article from The New York Times.
Experts Urge Early Evaluation for Swallowing, Speaking Issues After Benign Brain Tumor Surgery
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 14:00
Johns Hopkins experts are recommending early post-surgical assessment — preferably within 24 hours — for trouble chewing and swallowing food or speaking normally among patients who have had benign tumors removed from the base of the brain. Such early assessments, they say, may minimize complications associated with the sometimes hazelnut-sized tumors, called vestibular schwannomas. Damage can arise when the tumors themselves press on the nearby cranial nerves — which are key to controlling the tongue, lips, mouth and throat — or from the surgery itself. The researchers’ recommendation is based on study results from three surveys they conducted, the most recent of which is appears in the December edition of the journal The Laryngoscope. The survey showed that such complications after brain tumor surgery were several times more common than previously thought. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Neurosurgeons Operate on Newborn with Extreme Hydrocephalus, Macrocephaly
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 14:01
Neurosurgeons at All Children’s Hospital/Johns Hopkins Medicine (St. Petersburg, Fla.) and the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine (Tampa, Fla.) recently achieved excellent physical and aesthetic results after surgery on an infant born with extreme macrocephaly due to hydrocephalus. This was accomplished with routine implantation of a ventriculoperitoneal shunt, followed by a new operation to stabilize and reduce the size of the baby’s head. Both surgeries were performed during the infant’s first week of life. The surgeons report that as far as they know, this is the first reported case of cranial fixation in such a young child with extreme hydrocephalus. Full details of the surgical procedures and their successful outcomes can be found in the article “Cranial reduction and fixation with a resorbable plate combined with cerebrospinal fluid shunting for difficult-to-manage macrocephaly related to hydrocephalus,” by Jotham Manwaring, MD, and colleagues, available online, ahead of print, in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics. In the article, the authors report the case of an infant born with extreme macrocephaly. The baby’s head measured 50…
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Johns Hopkins Surgeons First to Implant Brain ‘Pacemaker’ for Alzheimer’s
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 11:08
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have surgically implanted a pacemaker-like device into the brain of a patient in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease — the first such operation in the U.S. The device provides deep brain stimulation and has been used in thousands of people with Parkinson’s disease. It is seen as a possible means of boosting memory and reversing cognitive decline. The surgery is part of a federally funded, multicenter clinical trial marking a new direction in clinical research designed to slow or halt the disease, which steals from its mostly elderly victims of a lifetime of memories and the ability to perform simple daily tasks, Johns Hopkins researchers say. Instead of focusing on drug treatments, many of which have failed in recent clinical trials, the research focuses on the use of the low-voltage electrical charges delivered directly to the brain. For more information, click here to read the full release.
Pioneering Surgery Repairs Five-Year-Old Girl’s Spine with Leg Bone
Monday, December 10, 2012 13:00
A five-year old girl has had pioneering surgery to repair a large gap in her spine using bone taken from her legs. Before the operation, Rosie Davies, from Walsall in the West Midlands of the U.K., was “basically a time bomb,” her family said. Missing bones in her spine meant her upper body weight was unsupported and her inner organs were being crushed. The lifesaving surgery came at the cost of her lower legs, which she never has been able to move. Rosie was born with a rare disorder called spinal segmental dysgenesis. Five bones that made up part of her spine were missing, leaving a 10-cm gap in her backbone. Her legs also were contorted up against her belly, and she had very little feeling in them. Rosie was slowly running out of space in her chest — and running out of time. Eventually, the internal crush would have led to her organs failing, which would have killed her. For more information, click here to read the full article.
Children’s Author Roald Dahl Led Invention of Device to Combat Hydrocephalus
Monday, December 10, 2012 8:00
In “Marvelous Medicine: the Untold Story of the Wade-Dahl-Till Valve,” which appears in the May issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics, lead author Adam L. Sandler, MD, chronicles children’s writer Roald Dahl’s extraordinary and largely unknown contribution to the treatment of hydrocephalus. In the early 1960s, prompted by his infant son’s struggle with the condition following a traffic accident, Dahl joined forces with a British toymaker and neurosurgeons from both sides of the Atlantic to develop an innovative valve and shunt system that would be used to treat more than 3,000 children and ignite a sea change in the field of valve technology. Dr. Sandler, a resident in the department of neurological surgery at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center, was gathering information on hydrocephalus valves when he came across a mention of the Wade-Dahl-Till (WDT) valve. With his background as an undergraduate history major and an affection for the prolific storyteller (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Matilda), Sandler was…
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