An artificial heart valve device that does not require major open surgery has received FDA approval. The heart valve is deployed with a catheter, which is inserted in an artery in the groin and guided up to the heart.
Johns Hopkins surgeons report they have devised a better, safer method to replace bone removed from the skull after lifesaving brain surgery. The new technique, they say, appears to result in fewer complications than standard restoration, which has changed little since its development in the 1890s.
Wake Forest sophomore Timothy Lee built a robotic painting arm that could one day lend doctors a hand in practicing complex, robot-assisted surgeries without having to step foot in an operating room.
A new evidence review from The Cochrane Library found that administering a drug called clonidine before surgery may be a good alternative for controlling post-surgical pain and help reduce a child’s anxiety after surgery.
Patients who have had bariatric surgery may need to take dietary supplements and pay closer attention to their nutritional intake, a UT Southwestern Medical Center study suggests.
Heart transplantation continues to be the “gold standard” treatment for end-stage heart failure, and a large number of patients now live 20 years or more after surgery
First-of-its-kind research by the Innovation Institute at Henry Ford Hospital shows promise for developing a method of clearly identifying cancerous tissue during surgery on one of the most common and deadliest types of brain tumor.
Patients who have undergone plastic surgery to change the appearance of their nose may also notice changes in the sound of their voice, reports a study in the February issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
Orlando Health Heart Institute offers innovative technology to remove potentially deadly, large clots.
Infants and children who undergo heart transplantation are experiencing good outcomes after surgery and may expect to live beyond 15 years post-surgery with reasonable cardiac function and quality of life
The introduction of minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) for treatment of aortic stenos not only has increased the number of patients eligible for aortic valve replacement (AVR), but also has led to a decrease in patient mortality, suggesting that patients fare better when multiple treatment options are available.
A new device tested first at the University of Michigan may provide a minimally invasive option for the elderly who are facing life-threatening thoracic aneurysms.
A staged approach to epilepsy surgery—with invasive brain monitoring followed by surgery in a single hospital stay—is a safe and beneficial approach to treatment for complex cases of epilepsy in children, reports the February issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
New imaging technology from University of Washington engineers allows scientists to analyze what happens within the smallest blood vessels during a cosmetic facelift. This finding could be used to prevent accidents during procedures and help clinicians reverse the ill effects if an injection doesn't go as planned.
For patients who have experienced a large stroke that cuts off blood supply to a large part of the brain, the use of standardized medical management protocol and surgery to decompress swelling can improve life expectancy, Mayo Clinic researchers found in a recent study.
Implementing a system to ensure the surgical team uses the most effective practices resulted in significant improvements in operating room (O.R.) performance, suggests research being presented at the American Society of Anesthesiologists PRACTICE MANAGEMENT 2014.
Patients feel safer – and likely are safer – when they receive a surgical safety checklist and request that their health care providers use it, suggests a pilot study being presented at the American Society of Anesthesiologists PRACTICE MANAGEMENT 2014.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) yesterday became the first institution in the United States to use a new minimally invasive medical device since it received FDA approval last week. The device treats patients with severely damaged aortic heart valves who are too ill or frail to have their aortic valves replaced through traditional open-heart surgery.
• There is substantial geographic variation in deceased donor kidney waiting times for children across the United States, with median waiting time ranging from as little as two weeks to as long as three years. • Local supply and demand of high quality organs had a significant impact on waiting times for children in need of kidneys.
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report a three-fold increase in the use of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) across the nation for patients with pancreatic disease. Although adaptation of MIS for this difficult-to-reach gland is recent, the growing trend points to improved patient outcomes, such as reduced bleeding and infections.
Patients with chronic kidney disease who received robot-assisted partial nephrectomy to treat kidney cancer have minimal loss of kidney function -- a smaller amount even than patients with normal kidney function, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital’s Vattikuti Urology Institute.
Shoulder arthritis is a common problem for rheumatoid arthritis patients: pain and difficulty moving their arms can grow so severe that daily tasks and sleep become difficult. If medication and physical therapy aren’t enough, shoulder replacement surgery is a common next step. Despite surgical challenges with some rheumatoid arthritis patients, the procedure improves range of motion and reduces pain in nearly all cases, especially for those with intact rotator cuffs, a Mayo Clinic study shows. The findings are published in the Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery.
Current protocols for matching donor hearts to recipients foster sex mismatching and heart size disparities, according to a first-of-its kind analysis by physicians at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Matching by donor heart size may provide better outcomes for recipients.
As perceived by both patients and doctors, the cosmetic results after "lumpectomy" for breast cancer differ for African-American versus Caucasian women, suggests a pilot study in the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery—Global Open®, the official open-access medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
While weight loss surgery offers one of the best opportunities to improve health and reduce obesity related illnesses, the nearly 100,000 Americans who undergo bariatric surgery each year represent only a small fraction of people who are medically eligible for the procedure. Among those who have surgery, Caucasian Americans are twice as likely as African Americans to have weight loss surgery. On the surface, the data appear to signal racial disparity, but when researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center dug deeper to ask why this variation exists, the answer was more complicated.
Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) appears to be an effective alternative to surgical aortic valve replacement (AVR) for the treatment of aortic stenosis in very elderly patients, including those age 85 years and older
Over the past two years, an expert in revision hip and knee replacement surgery has seen an increase in the number of people needing a second surgery. When a knee or hip implant wears out or another problem develops, people often need a second surgery in which the existing implant or components are taken out and replaced.
For the estimated 10 percent of patients whose bodies reject a corneal transplant, the odds of a second transplant succeeding are poor. All that could change, however, based on a UT Southwestern Medical Center study that has found a way to boost the corneal transplant acceptance rate.
For patients with herniated discs in the lower (lumbar) spine, surgery leads to greater long-term improvement in pain, functioning, and disability compared to nonsurgical treatment, concludes an eight year follow-up study in Spine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
Incorporating a blood conservation strategy (BCS) during aortic valve replacement (AVR) can reduce the likelihood of transfusion-related complications, as well as reduce blood-product utilization
The elimination of extensive routine preoperative tests and consultations represents an area of potentially large health care savings across many disciplines, particularly for low-risk patients being evaluated for cataract surgery. Lee A. Fleisher, MD, chair of the department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, authored a commentary alongside a study from a team from the University of Washington, Seattle, showing that, despite this evidence showing no benefit for patients, the incidence of preoperative tests is actually increasing for Medicare patients undergoing cataract surgery. The piece is published online today in the new issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.
Preoperative consultations before cataract surgery became more common for Medicare patients despite no clear guidelines about when to require such a service, hinting at unnecessary use of health care resources, according to a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.
A new study shows that coronary artery calcium (CAC) screening, an assessment tool that is not currently recommended for people considered at low risk, should play a more prominent role in helping determine a person’s risk for heart attack and heart disease-related death, as well as the need for angioplasty or bypass surgery. CAC screening provides a direct measure of calcium deposits in heart arteries and is easily obtained on a computed tomography (CT) scan.
The interventional cardiology team led by Ehtisham Mahmud, MD, FACC, at UC San Diego Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center (SCVC) has successfully completed the first two robotically-assisted coronary angioplasty/stent procedures in California.
In a study of national data on colon surgery, Johns Hopkins researchers found that while patients who undergo either minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery or the high-tech robotic approach have similar outcomes, robotic surgery is significantly more expensive.
Patients receiving the widely used anesthesia drug etomidate for surgery may be at increased risk or mortality and cardiovascular events, according to a study in the December issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS).
Children had long been prescribed codeine for pain relief after having surgery to remove their tonsils -- until the FDA banned use of the drug in February. Now a new study finds that acupuncture can be a safe and effective alternative.
Johns Hopkins surgeons say skipping one commonly taken step during a routine procedure to insert a wire mesh stent into a partially blocked carotid artery appears to prevent patients from developing dangerously low blood pressure, an extremely slow heart rate or even a stroke or heart attack.
Strangers often stop to ask Bob Seeman why he wears a padded glove on his left hand. So he hands out a card with a link to a YouTube video, which tells the extraordinary story of how Seeman’s left arm was reattached after it was nearly completely severed in a tow truck accident.
Washington, DC, December 8 - Resective surgery is seldom used in epilepsy patients aged 60 and older despite its potential to offer seizure freedom. Older age may deter referrals to specialized epilepsy centers given concern of increased surgical risk due to age and presence of other health problems common in the elderly.
Resective surgery is an effective treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy. To investigate the effect of epilepsy surgery on patients lives, researchers from the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit conducted a long-term retrospective follow up of surgical patients and correlated post-surgical psychosocial outcomes with seizure outcome and brain area surgically treated.
Patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) who were as old as 74 fared as well with stem cell transplantation as did patients in the 60-to-65 age range, according to a study from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.
Patients with epilepsy often undergo evaluation by concurrent video and EEG monitoring (vEEG) for therapeutic planning, including possible epilepsy surgery. Seizures during monitoring increase the diagnostic yield and requires the withdrawal of anticonvulsant drugs (AEDs) to allow seizures to occur. A frequently asked question in clinical practice concerns the safety and long-term effect of AED withdrawal or discontinuation in this diagnostic procedure.
Surgery for drug–resistant epilepsy is performed with the dual aim of obtaining seizure freedom and potential for reducing or discontinuing anticonvulsant drugs (AEDs). Most epilepsy patients become seizure free with surgery. But there are no criteria for the timing of AED withdrawal following the procedure, and the long-term effect of post-operative AED withdrawal is unclear.
Epilepsy surgery is a very effective intervention for patients with treatment resistant epilepsy. The most successful and most common epilepsy surgery is temporal lobectomy, which produces seizure freedom in approximately two-thirds of patients. The strongest candidates for this type of surgery are those who have had treatment resistant epilepsy which includes 30-40 percent of all epilepsy cases. Even with this clear benefit, epilepsy specialists today reported at the Presidential Symposia during the American Epilepsy Society Annual Meeting, that the overall number of surgeries in adults, as well as the number of temporal lobectomies, has decreased from their peaks.
For patients with stable coronary artery disease (CAD) who are not experiencing a heart attack and an abnormal stress test, treatment of their narrowed arteries by the common procedure of angioplasty may not provide additional benefits compared to drug therapy alone. This finding results from a survey of more than 4,000 patients with myocardial ischemia, or inadequate circulation, led by cardiologists at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. The survey results are published in the online first edition of JAMA Internal Medicine.
Once viewed as an "outlandish morally objectionable" concept with science-fiction overtones, face transplantation is now accepted as a "feasible and necessary treatment" for severely disfigured patients. The evolving ethical debate over face transplantation is analyzed in a special topic paper in the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
Current laser therapy approaches are effective for treating excessive scars resulting from abnormal wound healing, concludes a special topic paper in the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
Nearly half of orthopaedic surgeons sustain at least one injury during their career and, in many cases, the resources available to them are inadequate, according to a Vanderbilt study in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The study is the first to demonstrate that many surgeons are injured on the job during their careers, according to lead author Manish Sethi, M.D., assistant professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation.
A neuroradiologist inserts a micro-catheter into an aneurysm and injects a fluorescent dye, a complex, rare and new procedure which provides a neurosurgeon a clear view of the blood vessel that feeds the aneurysm. The surgeon then knows where to sew in a transplanted blood vessel to bypass the aneurysm.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right