News by Subject Medicine & Health

Noting that the prescription of proton pump inhibitors is on the rise among middle-aged and older adults, a team of researchers designed a new study to examine PPIs and the risk of dementia, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease. They published their study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Specialist antenatal clinics for severely obese mums-to-be can help cut rates of pregnancy complications, research has found. Women who received the specialist care were eight times less likely to have a stillbirth and health experts say the clinic helps them to spot signs of complications sooner.

Their study suggests that while emergency room visits for shingles has decreased for those vaccinated against either the chicken pox (18 to 19 years old) or the shingles (60 years and older), the patient population in-between (ages 20-59 years old) has experienced increased visits for the disease.

New developments and marketing have made an increasing range of surgical and non-surgical cosmetic procedures -- including botox, dermal fillers, implants, and skin lightening, as well as newer techniques such as 'fat freezing' and 'vampire' treatments -- big business and widely accessible. Today the Nuffield Council on Bioethics publishes a wide-ranging new report, 'Cosmetic procedures: ethical issues,' which makes a series of recommendations that highlight areas of concern for the practice and promotion of invasive cosmetic procedures.

Newly diagnosed asymptomatic atrial fibrillation patients have a higher rate of previous stroke than those with symptoms, according to results from the GLORIA-AF Registry presented today at EHRA EUROPACE - CARDIOSTIM 2017. The findings highlight the need for screening to identify atrial fibrillation patients with no symptoms so that stroke prevention treatment can be given.

Breast implants may impede an electrocardiogram (ECG) and could result in a false heart attack diagnosis, according to research presented today at EHRA EUROPACE -- CARDIOSTIM 2017.

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.

Though it is one of the most frequently used health indicators as more and more of us age, frailty -- the medical term for increased vulnerability to declines in health or a loss of independence -- remains under-studied and under-utilized, so say researchers reporting on a prestigious conference hosted by the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA), with support from the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM) and The John A. Hartford Foundation.

Perfusion in the human placenta is an important physiological phenomenon which shows the placental conditions. The magnitude of placental perfusion can be evaluated by 3-D power Doppler and contrast-enhanced MR images, but the direction has been hardly indicated. The computational model of the villous tree developed in this study will help to indicate the direction and the mechanical properties of the villous tree.

Pacemakers and other cardiac devices can help solve forensic cases, according to a study presented today at EHRA EUROPACE - CARDIOSTIM 2017. Devices revealed the time and cause of death in some cases where autopsy failed to do so.