Fuoco di Sant ’ Antonio, shingles, herpes zoster …
Stefano had been complaining recently (last week) about a strange sort of pain/ache in his back that began more or less last Wednesday. We thought he’d pulled a muscle or some such thing. But the pain wasn’t going away. When he’d come home from work, and in the morning when he got out of bed, it was ouch-ouch-ouch. I suggested he at least call our GP, but he didn’t want to bother him. He really thought it was a pulled muscle. Then, on Saturday morning, he asked me to take a look. I found a little rash on the left side of his torso, but he said it wasn’t where the pain was.
And so I didn’...
Source: Margaret's Corner - March 7, 2018 Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Margaret Tags: Blogroll shingles turmeric paste Source Type: blogs
That Darned Foreskin
I was a practicing pediatrician before I did a residency in emergency medicine. One of the most common and sometimes most stressful decisions parents had to make in the neonatal nursery was whether to circumcise their newborn son. I have to admit that the hullabaloo about the foreskin has always intrigued me. The American Academy of Pediatrics has gone back and forth over the years on the topic of circumcision and its benefits, but the current evidence clearly establishes a benefit from this procedure (Pediatrics 2012;130[3]:e756) that is performed approximately 1.4 million times each year in the United States. (May...
Source: M2E Too! Mellick's Multimedia EduBlog - February 28, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs
Infection without Disease (from Precision Medicine and the Reinvention of Human Disease)
A prior post listed 7 assertions regarding the role of infectious organisms on the human genome. In the next few blogs we ' ll look at each assertion, in excerpts fromPrecision Medicine and the Reinvention of Human Disease. Here ' s the fifth:Normal defenses can block every infectious disease. Hence, every infectious disease results from a failure of our normal defenses, immunologic and otherwise. For any given infectious agent, no matter how virulent they may seem, there are always individuals who can resist infection. Moreover, as a generalization, the majority of individuals who are infected with a pathogenic microorgan...
Source: Specified Life - February 12, 2018 Category: Information Technology Tags: commensals host organisms latent infection precision medicine symbiotes symbiotic Source Type: blogs
Precision Medicine and Public Health (from Precision Medicine and the Reinvention of Human Disease)
Excerpted fromPrecision Medicine and the Reinvention of Human DiseaseDespite having the most advanced healthcare technology on the planet, life expectancy in the United States is not particularly high. Citizens from most of the European countries and the highly industrialized Asian countries enjoy longer life expectancies than the United States. According to the World Health Organization, the United States ranks 31st among nations, trailing behind Greece, Chile, and Costa Rica, and barely edging out Cuba [42]. Similar rankings are reported by the US Central Intelligence Agency [43]. These findings lead us to infer that acc...
Source: Specified Life - February 6, 2018 Category: Information Technology Tags: cancer cancer vaccines precision medicine prevention public health Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 11th 2017
In this study, we used the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) to estimate clinically measured SBP and DBP trajectories for 20 years prior to death, for individuals dying at 60 years and older. Second, we compared the linear SBP trends for years 10 to 3 years before death in patients who died and age- and sex-matched controls who survived at least 9 years. These approaches aimed to separate age from end-of-life associations, and avoid healthy survivor biases.
Twenty years before death, estimated mean SBPs increased with increasing age at death (60-69 years, 139.5 mm Hg; ≥90 years, 150.0 mm Hg). All age-at-d...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 10, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
How Long Does Shingles Last In The Elderly?
Shingles is a viral infection that follows a varicella-zoster infection, although it can take decades for symptoms of the secondary disease to emerge. The condition presents as a painful and blistering rash, but it is not life-threatening.
According to the Center for Disease Control, there are nearly one million cases in the United States each year, and almost half of those cases are in older adults over age 60. Some people only see one instance of the illness, while others have recurring symptoms, but 30 percent of Americans will develop shingles at some point in their lifetime.
Duration of Shingles: Timeline of the Viru...
Source: Shield My Senior - December 8, 2017 Category: Geriatrics Authors: Vin Tags: Senior Safety Source Type: blogs
How Long Does Shingles Last In The Elderly?
View Original Article Here: How Long Does Shingles Last In The Elderly?
Shingles is a viral infection that follows a varicella-zoster infection, although it can take decades for symptoms of the secondary disease to emerge. The condition presents as a painful and blistering rash, but it is not life-threatening.
According to the Center for Disease Control, there are nearly one million cases in the United States each year, and almost half of those cases are in older adults over age 60. Some people only see one instance of the illness, while others have recurring symptoms, but 30 percent of Americans will develop shingles at s...
Source: Shield My Senior - December 8, 2017 Category: Geriatrics Authors: Vin Tags: Senior Safety Source Type: blogs
Low Cost Biotechnologies can be Inconvenienced but not Halted by Regulators
The coming era of gene therapies will be considerably more distributed and bottom-up than the advent of stem cell therapies. This will be a dynamic industry in which many small groups compete to set up distribution of mail order kits and clinics to provide widespread access to therapies. Regulators will attempt to suppress all of this, and will largely fail, as money talks and many regions will choose to host the businesses that offer gene therapies. This will come to pass because gene therapy technologies are many times cheaper, more easily managed, and capable of centralization and mass production than stem cell technolo...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 4, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, November 20th 2017
This study cohort is a healthy subset of the EpiPath cohort, excluding all participants with acute or chronic diseases. With a mediation analysis we examined whether CMV titers may account for immunosenescence observed in ELA.
In this study, we have shown that ELA is associated with higher levels of T cell senescence in healthy participants. Not only did we find a higher number of senescent cells (CD57+), these cells also expressed higher levels of CD57, a cell surface marker for senescence, and were more cytotoxic in ELA compared to controls. Control participants with high CMV titers showed a higher number of senes...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 19, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
A Study of Early Life Adversity versus Later Immune Aging Points to Cytomegalovirus as the Problem
This study cohort is a healthy subset of the EpiPath cohort, excluding all participants with acute or chronic diseases. With a mediation analysis we examined whether CMV titers may account for immunosenescence observed in ELA.
In this study, we have shown that ELA is associated with higher levels of T cell senescence in healthy participants. Not only did we find a higher number of senescent cells (CD57+), these cells also expressed higher levels of CD57, a cell surface marker for senescence, and were more cytotoxic in ELA compared to controls. Control participants with high CMV titers showed a higher number of senes...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 13, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Dengue hemorrhagic encephalitis: MRI
Discussion by Dr MGK Murthy, Dr GA PrasadDengue virus is a single-stranded RNA virus of the Flavivirus genus classified into four serotypes. Neurological manifestations, commonly seen with serotypes 2 and 3.Neurological manifestation in dengue hemorrhagic fever usually results from multisystem dysfunction secondary to liver failure, cerebral hypoperfusion, electrolyte imbalance, shock, cerebral edema, and hemorrhage related to vascular leak. Presentation as viral encephalitis is rare as the virus is non-neurotrophic.Patients can present with - stroke, mononeuropathies, polyneuropathies, Guillain-Ba...
Source: Sumer's Radiology Site - November 13, 2017 Category: Radiology Authors: Sumer Sethi Source Type: blogs
TWiV 464: Boston baked viruses
At Tufts University Dental School in Boston, Vincent speaks with Katya Heldwein and Sean Whelan about their careers and their work on herpesvirus structure and replication of vesicular stomatitis virus.
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Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - October 22, 2017 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology glycoprotein herpes simplex virus infectious DNA clone negative strand virus RNA dependent RNA polymerase tegument vesicular stomatitis virus viral virus egress virus entry viruses X-ray structure Source Type: blogs
Good news about the HPV vaccine
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Did you know certain viruses can cause cancer? Two common examples include hepatitis C (which is linked with liver cancer) and human papilloma virus (HPV, which causes cervical cancer). The discovery of these virus-cancer connections is particularly important, because if a vaccine can prevent these viral infections it may also prevent cancer. And there is preliminary evidence that the HPV vaccine is making this happen. More on that in a moment.
What is HPV?
HPV is a group of viruses that may cause warts (papillomas) and a variety of cancers, including those involving the throat, rectum, ...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - October 11, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Robert H. Shmerling, MD Tags: Health Infectious diseases Prevention Sexual Conditions Vaccines Source Type: blogs
Naturopaths: Able to turn even Epsom salt potentially deadly
Naturopathy and naturopaths are a fairly frequent topic on this blog —and for very good reason. If there is an example of a pseudomedical " discipline " that has been gaining undeserved " respectability, " it ' s naturopathy. It ' s licensed in all too many states, and physicians who have fallen under the spell of so-called " integrative medicine, " a specialty that rebrands science-based lifestyle medical interventions as somehow " alternative " or " integrative " and uses them as a vessel to " integrate " quackery into medicine, seem to have a special affinity for naturopaths. Indeed, so common has the presence of natu...
Source: Respectful Insolence - October 6, 2017 Category: Surgery Authors: oracknows Source Type: blogs
