News by Subject Medicine & Health

Surgeons wielding their life-saving scalpels, laparoscopic tools, or other implements to repair or remove what ails their patients understand all too well that pain is an unavoidable part of the healing process. Yet the current opioid crisis has made the standard prescribing practices for these highly effective analgesics fraught with risk. New research from Michigan Medicine could help clinicians mitigate that risk by identifying which patients are more likely to continue to use opioids after their immediate recovery period.

Research led by Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz, who recently joined The Ohio State University College of Medicine, shows that gene replacement therapy for Niemann-Pick type A disease is safe for use in nonhuman primates and has therapeutic effects in mice. These findings will publish online in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Prior to joining Ohio State as a professor of neurosurgery, Bankiewicz conducted this translational gene therapy research at the University of California at San Francisco.

Case studies of individuals threatening mass violence suggest that extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), colloquially known as 'red flag' orders, may play a role in preventing mass shootings. An aggregate summary and individual histories for a preliminary series of 21 cases are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study found that 'silent' covert strokes are actually more common than overt strokes in people aged 65 or older who have surgery.

A team of researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine designed a study to see whether older adults who are physically active before having surgery had less delirium after surgery. The research team had previously found that people who enjoy activities such as reading, doing puzzles, or playing games experienced lower rates of delirium. The team published new findings on physical activity in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

A new study shows how one state's surgeons reduced the number of opioids they prescribed to thousands of patients -- without causing patients to feel more pain or less satisfied with their surgical experience.

Ultrasound is a non-invasive and relatively inexpensive means of diagnosing a number of medical conditions. This review presents an analysis of the diagnostic value of ultrasound to draw comparison between different types of arthritic conditions.

As indicated by a recently completed Finnish study, antibiotics administration and bowel cleansing before colon surgery do not improve patients' treatment outcomes. According to the researchers, bowel preparation, a procedure strenuous for patients, is not needed.

An arm in a sling cures a shoulder fracture just as well as an operation with plates and screws. This is shown by a comprehensive study from Aarhus University in Denmark which forms part of a Nordic research collaboration.