Body

Trauma patients who sustain multiple fractures are often in serious condition when they arrive at the emergency department. An article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS) explains that trauma patients who have several orthopaedic injuries and are considered to be in unstable condition should only have a few hours of surgery when first arriving at the hospital. This principle is known as 'damage control'.

The benefits of initially limiting time in the operating room for patients with life-threatening injuries include:

Patients who had a cardiac resynchronization device combined with a defibrillator (CRT-D) implanted had a 34 percent reduction in their risk of death or heart failure when compared to patients receiving only an implanted cardiac defibrillator (ICD), according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress (ESC) in Barcelona, Spain. The overall benefit observed from resynchronization therapy was driven by a 41 percent reduction in heart failure.

Researchers may have found a key ingredient in the recipe that leads from obesity to chronic low-grade inflammation, according to a report in the September issue of Cell Metabolism.

Chronic inflammation within fat tissue is now recognized as a contributor to the many ill health consequences that come with obesity, from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, explains Yuichi Oike of Kumamoto University in Japan. The new discovery may therefore point to a targeted therapy designed to limit the health impact of the obesity epidemic, the researchers say.

Directly inhibiting the activity of a key protein mediator of inflammation successfully reduced radiation toxicity in zebrafish embryos, and may ultimately be helpful to patients receiving radiation therapy, according to researchers from the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson.

Reporting in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, the researchers found that inhibitors of NF-kappa B not only protected against radiation toxicity when given before exposure to treatment, but also lessened the radiation toxicity when given one to two hours post-exposure.

A process that limits the number of times a cell divides works much differently than had been thought, opening the door to potential new anticancer therapies, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center report in the journal Cell.

Most cells in the human body divide only a certain number of times, via a countdown mechanism that stops them. When the controlling process goes wrong, the cells divide indefinitely, contributing to cancer growth.

Researchers say findings about how fat causes hypertension could one day help identify which obese people – and maybe some thin ones too – are at risk for hypertension and which drugs would work best for them.

Medical College of Georgia researchers have found that deleting or mutating the gene PTP1B puts mice at risk for hypertension by interfering with an endogenous mechanism that should help prevent it. The findings are published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation

Researchers have found new evidence showing that parents play a key role in whether or not their adolescent children who experiment with tobacco progress to become daily smokers before they graduate from high school.

A study published in the journal Pediatrics shows that parents can be a positive or negative influence on their child's future smoking habits.