Newsline — Tuesday, June 17, 2014 13:00
New Tumor-targeting Agent Images, Treats Wide Variety of Cancers
Study: MRI Analysis Predicts Stroke Patient Outcome
Monday, June 2, 2014 9:23
Researchers say they have developed a technique that can predict — with 95 percent accuracy — which stroke victims will benefit from intravenous, clot-busting drugs and which will suffer dangerous and potentially lethal bleeding in the brain. Recently reported online in the journal Stroke, the Johns Hopkins research team said that these predictions were made possible by applying a new method they developed that uses standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to measures damage to the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from drug exposure. The method is a computer program that lets physicians see how much gadolinium, the contrast material injected into a patient’s vein during an MRI scan, has leaked into the brain tissue from surrounding blood vessels. By quantifying this damage in 75 stroke patients, researchers identified a threshold for determining how much leakage was dangerous. Then, the team applied this threshold to those 75 records to determine how well it would predict who had suffered a brain hemorrhage and who had not. The new test correctly predicted the outcome with 95…
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Study Examines Risk of Early Death for People with MCI
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 13:00
One of the first studies to look at a relationship between death and the two types of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) suggests that people who have thinking problems but their memory is still intact might have a higher death rate compared to those who have no thinking or memory problems. For the study, 862 people with thinking problems and 1,292 with no thinking problems between the ages of 70 and 89 were followed for nearly six years. People with MCI with no memory loss had more than twice the death rate during the study than those without MCI, while people with MCI with memory loss had a 68 percent higher death rate during the study than those without MCI. “Exploring how memory may or may not be linked with the length of life a person has is of tremendous significance as the population ages,” said study author Maria Vassilaki, MD, with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. To learn more about the study, click here.