What kind of AV block is this? And why does she develop Ventricular Tachycardia?
Discussion: The initial ECG in today ' s case is pathological for any patient, especially for a 50-year old previously heathy female. Extensive conduction system abnormalities can have various causes (ischemia, genetic, infectious, amyloid, etc). Usually the medical history will provide clues to the cause. Even though the primary suspicion was not ischemic heart disease, a CT angiogram was performed, and it revealed normal coronary arteries. This ruled out coronary disease as the cause of conduction system disease. When assessing patients with early onset high grade conduction disorders and ventricular tachydysrhythmi...
Source: Dr. Smith's ECG Blog - January 23, 2024 Category: Cardiology Authors: Magnus Nossen Source Type: blogs

Drug Delivery System for Ectopic Pregnancy
Researchers at Oregon State University have developed a drug delivery system that is intended to treat ectopic pregnancy. Often occurring in the fallopian tubes, ectopic pregnancies are non-viable and are the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester. A drug called methotrexate can be administered to end the pregnancy, but can cause serious side-effects at the concentrations required. These researchers designed a nanoparticle delivery vehicle for methotrexate that can release its drug payload near where it is needed by responding to glutathione, a tripeptide that is present in high concentrations in placental ...
Source: Medgadget - August 22, 2023 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Medicine Ob/Gyn Source Type: blogs

TWiV 914: COVID-19 clinical update #121 with Dr. Daniel Griffin
In COVID-19 clinical update #121, Dr. Griffin discusses age as a risk factor for severe disease, updated vaccine boosters for the fall, pediatric infection and antibody seroprevalence in Arkansas over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, all-cause maternal mortality in the United States before and during the pandemic, and the effect of 2-week interruption in methotrexate treatment and how it impacts vaccine immunity. (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - July 2, 2022 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology antiviral coronavirus COVID-19 delta inflammation Long Covid monoclonal antibody Omicron pandemic SARS-CoV-2 vaccine vaccine booster variant of concern viruses Source Type: blogs

How is treatment for myasthenia gravis evolving?
Myasthenia gravis (MG) — a medical term that translates as “serious muscle weakness” — is a rare neuromuscular disease. An estimated 30,000 to 60,000 people in the United States have this disorder, which affects people of all ages, sexes, and ethnicities. Recently updated consensus guidelines have added to our knowledge of different forms of myasthenia gravis and improved approaches to treatment. What are the symptoms of myasthenia gravis? Myasthenia gravis impairs the transmission of signals from nerves to muscles at a site called the neuromuscular junction (NMJ), where nerves make contact with muscle. This causes...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - April 12, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Pushpa Narayanaswami, MD, FAAN Tags: Autoimmune diseases Neurological conditions Source Type: blogs

Harvard Health Ad Watch: Can an arthritis drug help you become a morning person?
Perhaps this is obvious, but drug ads are not intended to inform you about the best way to treat a condition you may have. Their primary purpose is to sell a product, as explained in an earlier blog on direct-to-consumer drug ads. And the newest drugs tend to be the most expensive, even though some aren’t much better than older drugs. So the ads you see for medications are usually not promoting the latest and greatest as much as they are promoting the newest and most expensive. And these ads vary widely in how much accurate, useful information is included and what information is left out. A recent ad for Xeljanz (tofacit...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - February 2, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Robert H. Shmerling, MD Tags: Arthritis Health Healthy Aging Source Type: blogs

Dr Jane Cooke Wright
I recommend Christie Watson ' s book about her experience of nursing, The language of kindness (1).  There is a chapter about cancer nursing, which mixes Watson ' s experience of nursing cancer patients with her experience of her father living with cancer, and being nursed by a Marie Curie Nurse.In that chapter, Watson mentions Dr Jane Cooke Wright (1919-2013), clinical oncologist, who discovered the anticancer properties of methotrexate, and investigated anticancer agents in vitro.  She was one of the founders of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which was started because the America Association fo...
Source: Browsing - November 1, 2020 Category: Databases & Libraries Tags: Black History Month medical history Source Type: blogs

Tubal (ectopic) pregnancy - so near and yet so far !
Being infertile is bad enough, but one of the biggest tragedies is when you get pregnant, but the pregnancy is not in the uterus , and is lodged in the fallopian tubes. This is called an ectopic or tubal pregnancy. Implantation just a fewcentimetres from the right place can make such a big difference !The risk of an ectopic pregnancy is higher in infertile women , because often their tubes are partially damaged ( even though they are open, they may not be functioning properly). Sadly, we can't prevent this.You can have an ectopic pregnancy even after doing IVF , because even though we're transferring the embryo direct...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - October 26, 2020 Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs

Growing research shows how two of the major cancer treatments, radiation and chemotherapy, can lead to long-term cognitive impairment
Mind jumble: Understanding chemo brain (Stanford Medicine): Sarah Liu was treated for leukemia as a teenager. She attended her high school graduation on a four-hour pass from Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and was bald under her white graduation cap, her arm bandaged where she’d been receiving chemotherapy drugs. Liu survived cancer and the ordeal of her treatment, and for many years she thrived. But today, at 53, she struggles to remember the names of all the Stanford oncologists who helped her, though she reveres them for saving her life. Many years later, her childhood cancer treatments — chemotherapy...
Source: SharpBrains - June 5, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: SharpBrains Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience Health & Wellness Technology astrocyte chemo-brain chemobrain chemotherapy chemotherapy-related cognitive impairment cognitive difficulties Cognitive-impairment microglia myelin oligodendrocyte OPC Source Type: blogs

Cesarean scar ectopic pregnancy- MRI
Discussion –— Cesarean scar ectopic pregnancy (CSEP) or Cesarean scar pregnancy (CSP) is a rare form of ectopic pregnancy resulting from implantation of a blastocyst within myometrial scar tissue (old uterine scars) in the anterior lower uterine segment (LUS) at the site of prior Cesarean section.— It is considered amongst the rarest type of ectopic pregnancy, although some do not include it in the category of ectopic pregnancy as implantation occurs within the uterus itself.— Incidence is on rise due to increasing numbers of elective Cesarean sections as well as improved detection with transv...
Source: Sumer's Radiology Site - March 19, 2020 Category: Radiology Authors: Sumer Sethi Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 27th 2020
Fight Aging! publishes news and commentary relevant to the goal of ending all age-related disease, to be achieved by bringing the mechanisms of aging under the control of modern medicine. This weekly newsletter is sent to thousands of interested subscribers. To subscribe or unsubscribe from the newsletter, please visit: https://www.fightaging.org/newsletter/ Longevity Industry Consulting Services Reason, the founder of Fight Aging! and Repair Biotechnologies, offers strategic consulting services to investors, entrepreneurs, and others interested in the longevity industry and its complexities. To find out m...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 26, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Aging Skin as a Significant Source of Systemic Chronic Inflammation
Researchers here propose that the skin is a significant source of the systemic chronic inflammation that is observed in older individuals. Setting aside the range of other mechanisms that contribute to inflammation to only consider the accumulation of senescent cells with age, and the fact that these errant cells are a potent source of inflammatory signaling, this proposition doesn't seem unreasonable. The skin is a sizable organ, after all, and even if it produces senescent cells at much the same pace as the rest of the body, it will still represent a large and quite distributed pool of such cells, positioned to delivery ...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 23, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Chronic Lyme arthritis: A mystery solved?
In 1975, researchers from Yale investigated an epidemic of 51 patients with arthritis who lived near the woodsy town of Lyme, Connecticut. The most common symptom was recurrent attacks of knee swelling. A few had pain in other joints, such as the wrist or ankle. Many had fever, fatigue, and headache. Some remembered a round skin rash before the onset of knee swelling. We now know that Lyme disease is an infection acquired from tick bites, caused by a spiral bacterium named Borrelia burgdorferi. After a tick bite, Borrelia bacteria wriggle through the skin away from the bite site. This leads to a circular red rash, known as...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - October 3, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Ross, MD, FIDSA Tags: Arthritis Bones and joints Infectious diseases Source Type: blogs

Using FibroScan in The Clinic: Interview with Dr. Stephen A. Harrison
EchoSens creates non-invasive liver diagnosis medical devices. The company’s line of products, called FibroScan, work by measuring the speed of ultrasound waves as they move through liver tissue. This measurement can tell us about the state of the liver. For example, ultrasound waves move faster through fibrotic/scarred livers. EchoSens recently appointed Dominique Legros as their new global CEO, and we recently spoke about his plans for growth in a Medgadget exclusive.  To learn more about how a clinician would use the FibroScan, we spoke with Dr. Stephen A. Harrison, Medical Director of Pinnacle Clinical Re...
Source: Medgadget - September 30, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Ben Ouyang Tags: Diagnostics Exclusive GI Medicine Source Type: blogs

Recap of the first day of the AANP annual meeting
Dr. Maria Martinez-Lage was  kind enough to write the following summary of events at today ’s American Association of Neuropathologists meeting in Atlanta:The opening day of the 95th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Neuropathologists in Atlanta featured a special course dedicated to a topic both old and new: what happens when treatments go awry? Under the title “Unintended Consequences: The Iatrogenic Neuropathology of Systemic Therapies” the faculty discussed neurologic adverse effects of novel immunotherapies,other cancer and non-cancer related treatments, a...
Source: neuropathology blog - June 7, 2019 Category: Radiology Tags: meetings Source Type: blogs