News by Subject Medicine & Health

The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America has issued a new expert guidance on how hospitals and healthcare providers may reduce infections associated with anesthesiology procedures and equipment in the operating room. The guidance, published in SHEA's journal, Infection Control & Healthcare Epidemiology, recommends steps to improve infection prevention through increased hand hygiene, environmental disinfection, and continuous improvement plans.

Rotator Cuff tears affect 15 percent of 60 year olds and carry a significant social and financial burden. Current operative techniques and repair adjuncts are associated with unacceptably high failure rates, stimulating investigation into novel tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) approaches in the field of rotator cuff surgery. In this review researchers explore the most recent advances in the field of electrospinning, focussing on proposed tissue-engineered solutions in tendon, specifically the rotator cuff.

In a new study, researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the White River Junction VA Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont, used the most current publicly available data to compare health outcomes for VA and non-VA hospitals within 121 local healthcare markets that included both a VA medical center and a non-VA hospital.

Researchers at the Wyss Institute have created a novel 3D printing workflow that allows cardiologists to evaluate how different valve sizes will interact with each patient's unique anatomy, before the medical procedure is actually performed. This protocol uses CT scan data to produce physical models of individual patients' aortic valves, in addition to a 'sizer' device to determine the perfect replacement valve size.

'We know weight-loss surgery has the potential to put diabetes in remission,' says Dr. Rachel Golan, a lecturer in the BGU School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences. 'The previous DiaRem model was limited to projecting outcomes for only one year after only one type of procedure. Our 'Advanced-DiaRem' was able to predict the longer-term probability of achieving remission from diabetes out to five years following three different surgical procedures.'

Younger breast cancer patients who underwent mastectomy reported lower breast satisfaction and poorer psychosocial and sexual well-being compared with those who underwent breast-conserving surgery, according to results of a trial presented at the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Patients with lymph node ratio greater than 10 percent had about 2.5 times greater risk of cancer recurrence and 2.7 times greater risk of death than patients with LNR below 10 percent.

Patients with early-stage breast cancer who had cancer detected in a sentinel lymph node biopsy had comparable 10-year recurrence and survival rates following either axillary radiotherapy or axillary lymph node dissection, according to data from the randomized, phase III AMAROS clinical trial presented at the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.