News by Subject Medicine & Health

Women who receive human papillomavirus (HPV) testing, in addition to a pap smear, receive a faster, more complete diagnosis of possible cervical precancer, according to a study of over 450,000 women by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the University of New Mexico (UNM) Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Your doctor is an expert with many years of experience. So when she tells you, upon reviewing all the fancy tomographic imaging you had done, that the tenderness in your breast is just some minor irritation, you want to believe her and leave it at that.

A simple test that measures how long it takes to kill bacteria could help doctors treat strains that are on their way to becoming resistant to antibiotics. If implemented in hospitals' microbiology labs, the test could help guide treatment decisions, and could ultimately reduce the ever-growing risk of bacterial resistance.

When it comes to testing for cancer, environmental pollution and food contaminants, traditional sensors can help. The challenges are that they often are bulky, expensive, non-intuitive and complicated. Now, one team reports in ACS Sensors that portable pressure-based detectors coupled with smartphone software could provide a simpler, more affordable alternative while still maintaining sensitivity.

Up to 90 percent of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) report that they have no family history of the disease. Now, new research has found approximately 17 percent of such ALS cases may be caused by a gene mutation, according to a study published in the June 21, 2017, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Monitoring and maintaining glucose levels of critically ill patients after admission from ICU, to general care through their discharge from the hospital may have positive impact on outcomes.

Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a new system that can efficiently search through hundreds of hours of video for events and visual features that correspond to a few training examples. In work they presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation this month, the researchers trained their system to recognize different stages of an operation, such as biopsy, tissue removal, stapling, and wound cleansing.

After years of living with Parkinson's Disease approximately 25% of patients experience deficits in cognition that impair function. A new research tool may help predict a patient's risk for developing dementia and could enable clinical trials aimed at finding treatments to prevent the cognitive effects of the disease.