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| Surgeons Complete Single-incision Gallbladder Removal, Patient Golfing Within A Week |
UT Southwestern Medical Center surgeons have removed a gallbladder through a unique operation requiring only a single incision in the bellybutton rather than the traditional four incisions in the abdomen. It is the first such operation in North Texas.
"It went better than we expected," said Dr. Homero Rivas, assistant professor of surgery, who completed the 80-minute procedure with Dr. J. Esteban Varela, assistant professor of surgery. "Through a single hole, we were able to introduce more than one instrument into the patient's abdomen at once, and we were able to remove her gallbladder very safely, just like we do routinely through four incisions."
Melanie Willhite, a 28-year-old professional golfer, said she had suffered for more than a decade with gallbladder attacks that caused recurring abdominal pain, sometimes so intense she could not stand.
"I wasn't eating. I had lost about 12 pounds in the past two months. It came on when I was under stress, so I got attacks after almost every tournament round," said Ms. Willhite, a Farmers Branch resident who has been on the professional circuit for five years.
She said she opted for the single-incision cholecystectomy in January to reduce scarring afterwards and have less down time.
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Weill Cornell Team Identifies Potential New Drug Targets Against Hormone-Dependent Breast Cancer
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The identification of two cellular receptors that likely contribute to the genesis of hormone-dependent breast cancer points the way to new, highly targeted therapies against the disease, says a team led by scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.
The finding also helps explain how daily use of medicines such as aspirin might help keep these breast tumors at bay.
"These two receptors, called EP2 and EP4, form key links in a biochemical pathway that boosts estrogen production in fat and breast cancer cells - this, in turn, may increase a woman's risk for developing hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. Finding ways to interrupt this pathway in a manner that causes few side effects is the ultimate goal of this research," explains the study's senior author Dr. Andrew Dannenberg, director of the newly established Cancer Center at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, and the Henry R. Erle, M.D.-Roberts Family Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.
The new findings were published recently in the online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
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New Drug Targets for Preventing Cell Death
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A new compound that blocks an early step in cell death could lead to a novel class of drugs for treating heart attacks and stroke.
When cells are deprived of oxygen -- during a heart attack, for example -- they start to die through a tidy process called apoptosis or programmed cell death. Early in apoptosis, the mitochondria -- complex structures that supply energy to the cell -- divide into pieces, holes appear in their membranes and proteins such as cytochrome c leak out. These events trigger other processes, ending in cell death.
"Mitochondria divide like crazy during apoptosis," said Jodi Nunnari, professor of molecular and cellular biology at UC Davis and senior author on the paper. Nunnari's lab has been studying the fundamental processes of mitochondrial division for several years.
The researchers screened 23,000 compounds to find those that blocked mitochondrial division in yeast cells. From three "hits" they picked the most effective, named mdivi-1.
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Scientists Studying Sepsis in Mice Find Potential Drug Targets for Deadly Disease
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Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have uncovered a connection between blood coagulation and the immune system that may have important implications for people with sepsis, a severe and difficult to treat disease that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year.
"We have identified a key connection of signaling pathways in the cascade of events leading to sepsis. This defines a crucial point where the immune system spirals out of control to cause severe sepsis and where there is an opportunity for therapeutic intervention," says Scripps Research Professor Wolfram Ruf, who led the research with his postdoctoral fellow Frank Niessen. Their results are published in the February 27 advance, online issue of Nature.
Ruf and his colleagues identified a new cross talk involving the vascular coagulation system and certain cells in the immune system. By disrupting this cross talk, they were able to rescue mice from death due to sepsis. Though there is no guarantee this preclinical success will translate into human therapies, these proof-of-principle experiments may improve the diagnosis of heterogeneous sepsis syndromes and yield potent drugs for treating people who suffer from sepsis.
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| UT Research May Lead to Better Flu Vaccine |
New research from a scientist at the University of Tennessee has uncovered information that may someday lead to a better flu vaccine.
While the research is an early step toward a better vaccine, the findings from Mark Sangster, a professor of microbiology, track a little-understood immune system cell's response to an influenza infection and reveal new information about where it is most concentrated in the body.
By analyzing the formation of the cells, known as memory B cells, Sangster and his colleagues may better understand how to stimulate their production by vaccination.
"When we see how these cells are formed in response to a full-on infection of the flu, we get a picture of the gold standard of the immune response and protection," said Sangster, who co-authored the paper with graduate student Hye Mee Joo and postdoctoral researcher Yuxia He.
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| Aromatherapy May Make You Feel Good, But It Won't Make You Well |
One of the most comprehensive investigations done to date on aromatherapy failed to show any improvement in either immune status, wound healing or pain control among people exposed to two often-touted scents.
While one of two popular aromas touted by alternative medicine practitioners - lemon - did appear to enhance moods positively among study subjects, the other - lavender - had no effect on reported mood, based on three psychological tests.
Neither lemon nor lavender showed any enhancement of the subjects' immune status, nor did the compounds mitigate either pain or stress, based on a host of biochemical markers.
In some cases, even distilled water showed a more positive effect than lavender.
The study, published online in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, looked for evidence that such aromas go beyond increasing pleasure and actually have a positive medical impact on a person's health. While a massive commercial industry has embraced this notion in recent decades, little, if any, scientific proof has been offered supporting the products' health claims.
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| Stress Can Help Trigger Stroke |
The notion that stress can help bring on a stroke may have merit, British researchers say.
"If you divide the population into five different groups according to how severe their stress is, someone in the highest stress group, reporting the greatest stress, has a 40 percent increased risk of stroke than someone in the lowest group," said Paul G. Surtees, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge. "That is quite a difference."
On the other hand, his team found no association between depression and stroke risk.
Reporting in the March 4 issue of Neurology, Surtees' group followed more than 20,000 British men and women, aged 41 to 80, for an average of 8.5 years. The participants answered questions on their levels of stress and depression, using standard measures of mental health.
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Believe it or not
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Pregnant woman uses train toilet and baby slips out
A newborn baby girl survived an ignoble birth after slipping down the toilet bowl of a moving Indian train onto the tracks when a pregnant woman unexpectedly gave birth while relieving herself on Tuesday.
"My delivery was so sudden," said the Bhuri Kalbi, the mother of the infant, born two months prematurely. "I did not even realise that my child had slipped from the hole in the toilet."
Kalbi, a 33-year-old woman from a village in Rajasthan, fainted on the toilet seat after the birth for a few minutes before waking up and alerting her family.
"They stopped the train and ran on the tracks to find the baby," she said, speaking from her hospital bed in the western city of Ahmedabad.
Railway staff at a nearby station were alerted and soon found the newborn girl lying uninjured on pebbles by the track. She is now in intensive care because of her premature birth, doctors said.
Most toilets on Indian trains are filthy chutes emptying directly onto the tracks. |
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News From MedWatch |
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