Culture

SAN DIEGO – On September 12, 2011, a Springfield, Virginia man arrived at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital (MGUH) in the early stages of liver failure. The man had mistakenly eaten poisonous mushrooms, handpicked from his yard. He would be the first of four patients in the course of two weeks to seek treatment at MGUH for mushroom (amanitin) poisoning.

Margaret Rosenfeld, M.D., M.P.H., of Seattle Children's Hospital, and colleagues conducted a study to examine if hypertonic saline would reduce the rate of pulmonary exacerbations in children younger than 6 years of age with cystic fibrosis (CF). Inhaled hypertonic saline is recommended as therapy for patients 6 years or older with CF, but its efficacy has not been evaluated in patients younger than 6 years.

New recommendations on devices, drugs and diagnosis in heart failure were launched at the Heart Failure Congress 2012, 19-22 May, in Belgrade, Serbia, and published in the European Heart Journal.

The ESC Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Acute and Chronic Heart Failure 2012 were developed by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in collaboration with the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the ESC. The Congress is the HFA's main annual meeting.

Athens, Ga. – Decades of research show people born into poverty are likely to continue to live that way as adults. But one University of Georgia researcher has found a way out—education.

Children reared in disadvantaged communities and poor families earn less money and experience more health problems as adults than do children raised without adversity, according to Kandauda Wickrama, a professor of human development and life science in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

Bestselling authors of teen literature portray their more foul-mouthed characters as rich, attractive and popular, a new study finds.Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne analyzed the use of profanity in 40 books on an adolescent bestsellers list. On average, teen novels contain 38 instances of profanity between the covers. That translates to almost seven instances of profanity per hour spent reading.

Coyne was intrigued not just by how much swearing happens in teen lit, but who was swearing: Those with higher social status, better looks and more money.

CLEVELAND — University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center and CardioKinetix Inc., a medical device company pioneering a catheter-based treatment for heart failure, today announced promising results for the first-of-its-kind catheter-based Parachute™ Ventricular Partitioning Device, a Percutaneous Ventricular Restoration Therapy (PVRT) technology for patients with ischemic heart failure.

PULLMAN, Wash.—There are jerks, and then there are jerks.

Joel Anaya has given them a fair amount of study, focusing on that very special jerk who can take a routine service experience—dining out, paying at a cash register, air travel—and make it a nightmare.

Anaya has even coined a term for it—"customer service sabotage"—and discerned seven different categories of rude customers who can be a serious liability for the service industry.

Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012 – Stories of athletes bravely "playing through the pain" are relatively common and support the widespread belief that they experience pain differently than non-athletes. Yet, the scientific data on pain perception in athletes has been inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory. Investigators from the University of Heidelberg have conducted a meta-analysis of available research and find that in fact, athletes can indeed tolerate a higher level of pain than normally active people.

Palliative care for cancer patients in the UK is well established – but the situation is starkly different for those suffering from heart failure. A recent service evaluation led by the University of Hull and Hull York Medical School (HYMS) shows this doesn't have to be the case – particularly if clinicians have the courage to talk about death with their patients.

Suicides by psychiatric in-patients have fallen to a new low, research published today (Thursday) has found.

The study by the University of Manchester's National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness, one of very few to look at trends over time, shows the rate of suicide among psychiatric in-patients fell by between 29% and 31% between 1997 and 2008 with nearly 100 fewer deaths per year.

• Standard treatment for chronic leukemia is too harsh for many older patients.
• Early clinical trials testing indicates that these patients respond well to the experimental drug ibrutinib.
• This agent merits further testing as a first-line therapy for older chronic-leukemia patients.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The experimental drug ibrutinib (PCI-32765) shows great promise for the treatment of elderly patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to interim findings from a clinical trial.

LGL leukemia is a relatively rare, malignant blood disease of the mature T-cells and, in many cases, it is related to autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. The pathogenetic mechanism of the disease has been unknown and it has previously been unclear if the disease is an overreaction of the normal defense system or a malignant hematological disease.

One of the key symptoms of LGL disease is a low count of white blood cells (neutrophils), which may predispose the patients to life-threatening infections.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) generally approves drug therapies faster and earlier than its counterparts in Canada and Europe, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers. The study counters perceptions that the drug approval process in the United States is especially slow.

Led by second-year medical student Nicholas Downing and senior author Joseph S. Ross, M.D., assistant professor of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine, the study will be published May 16 online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- iPhones and other smartphones can be a huge help to the visually impaired, but few vision doctors are recommending them to patients, according to a study co-authored by a Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine ophthalmologist.

Researchers surveyed 46 low-vision adults from the Chicago Lighthouse and the Spectrios Institute for Low Vision in Wheaton, Ill. Participants' best-corrected vision ranged from 20/70 to complete blindness.