March

Reporting by Mahmoud Mourad; editing by John Stonestreet http://news.yahoo.com A team from a Spanish university has discovered what Egyptian authorities are calling the world’s oldest evidence of breast cancer in the 4,200-year-old skeleton of an adult woman. Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said the bones of the woman, who lived at …

By GILLIAN MOHNEY http://abcnews.go.com A 22-month-old toddler was revived after falling into a frigid creek near his home and undergoing 101 minutes of CPR — a recovery that one doctor said may have been made possible by a type of “suspended animation.” Gardell Martin was pulled from a nearly frozen creek …

Written by Honor Whiteman www.medicalnewstoday.com A new study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine claims that health care costs and the number of postoperative complications across the US could be significantly reduced if hospitals were to increase their use of minimally invasive surgery for some common procedures. Lead researcher Dr. …

Markus MacGill www.medicalnewstoday.com After receiving an experimental emergency vaccine, a doctor from the US who had received a needle stick injury, and so put at high risk of infection while working in an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone, has been found clear of the virus. The physician, given the …

Anne Austin www.theweek.com We might think of state supported health care as an innovation of the 20th century, but it’s a much older tradition than that. In fact, texts from a village dating back to Egypt’s New Kingdom period, about 3,100-3,600 years ago, suggest that in ancient Egypt there was a …

www.sciencedaily.com Both physicians and patients overestimate the risk of heart attack or death for possible acute coronary syndrome (ACS) as well as the potential benefit of hospital admission for possible ACS. A survey of patient and physician communication and risk assessment, along with an editorial, were published online last week …

www.physiciansweekly.com On Gary Schwitzer’s website healthnewsreview.org, a debate about the role of physicians who work as journalists took place. It was sparked by an NBC News report on the changing of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to its new name—Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID). The report featured commentary by Dr. Natalie Azar, …

LAURA STARECHESKI www.npr.org The University of Florida’s Dr. Nancy Hardt has an unusual double specialty: She’s both a pathologist and an OB-GYN. For the first half of her career, she brought babies into the world. Then she switched — to doing autopsies on people after they die. It makes perfect …

www.fda.gov The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the ResQCPR System, a system of two devices for first responders to use while performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on people whose hearts stop beating (cardiac arrest). The devices may improve the patient’s chances of surviving cardiac arrest. The Centers for Disease Control …

Bruce Davis, MD www.physiciansweekly.com I was not having a good morning. I had just come off Trauma call—a difficult 24hr shift that was finally behind me. I had finished a long week of rounding on the Trauma Service and had turned the patients over to Sid, who would be the …

TARA PARKER-POPE http://well.blogs.nytimes.com Hair loss is one of the most obvious side effects of cancer treatment. Now, a growing number of breast cancer patients are freezing their scalps as a way to preserve their hair during chemotherapy. The hair-saving treatment, widely used in Europe, requires a specialized frozen cap worn …

David McNamee www.medicalnewstoday.com An analysis of data provided by 135,000 randomly selected participants – including 19,000 people who had used drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms – finds that use of psychedelics does not increase risk of developing mental health problems. The results are published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. …

Diana Phillips www.medscape.com Nearly all of the infants with confirmed cases of neonatal abstinence syndrome identified in three Florida hospitals during a 2-year period had documented in utero opioid exposure. Yet only 10% of their mothers received or were referred for drug addiction rehabilitation or counseling at the time of …

www.ama-assn.org The medical education overhaul continues—and not just with undergraduate med ed. Changes being launched now in medical schools are touching graduate medical education and pre-medical education, seeking to better prepare doctors for a health care system that is constantly changing. Academic physicians covered these innovations in an online video panel Tuesday …

NSIKAN AKPAN www.npr.org How do you turn a contagious disease like tuberculosis from a set of statistics — 9 million cases, 1.5 million deaths a year — into a human story? One way is by making a 4 1/2 minute video. “Thembi Jakiwe: Strength of a Woman” is the story of a …

STEVE LOHR www.nytimes.com Jeffrey Hammerbacher is a number cruncher — a Harvard math major who went from a job as a Wall Street quant to a key role at Facebook to a founder of a successful data start-up. But five years ago, he was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, …

GILLIAN MOHNEY http://abcnews.go.com A family that had to go to court to get a brain-dead woman taken off life support is now fighting to change Texas law so other families won’t have to go through the same ordeal. The family of Marlise Munoz is working with Texas lawmakers to craft a new …

Honor Whiteman www.medicalnewstoday.com Although around 25-40% of children and adolescents in the US experience some form of sleep disorder, such conditions are often overlooked, with a lack of realization of just how important a good night’s sleep is for a child’s present and later-life health. In line with National Sleep …

www.physiciansweekly.com A study presented at the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) meeting in October of last year found that patients who chew gum in the immediate preoperative period may safely undergo surgery. The authors, based at the University of Pennsylvania, found that gum chewing increases saliva production and the volume of …

Honor Whiteman www.medicalnewstoday.com When receiving information about treatment options and prognosis, advanced cancer patients favor doctors who provide more optimistic information and perceive them to be more compassionate when delivering it. This is according to a new study published in JAMA Oncology. The study was conducted by researchers from the University …

Catharine Paddock PhD www.medicalnewstoday.com Brains of older people with Alzheimer’s disease show characteristic abnormal clusters of faulty protein called amyloid. Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered amyloid can begin to accumulate in the brains of people as young as 20. The finding is surprising because it was thought …

KATHERINE HOBSON www.npr.org A group of lung cancer survivors was chatting online last May about what they thought was a big problem: Influential treatment guidelines published by a consortium of prominent cancer centers didn’t reflect an option that several people thought had saved their lives. They wanted to change that. …

LAURA STARECHESKI www.npr.org In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight. Felitti, …

Jonathan Harris whatstrending.com Jimmy Kimmel made a good point. If you don’t believe what a doctor tells you about vaccines, why would you believe him about anything else? If he’s likely to intentionally poison your children so that he can line the pockets of GlaxoSmithKline, why would you go there …

Honor Whiteman www.medicalnewstoday.com A new case report published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases reveals that a woman who was treated for a recurrent Clostridium difficile infection with the gut bacteria of an overweight donor quickly and unexpectedly gained weight herself following the procedure. The authors say the case suggests doctors should avoid …

CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS www.nytimes.com A wide majority of pediatricians and family physicians acquiesce to parents who wish to delay vaccinating their children, even though the doctors feel these decisions put children at risk for measles, whooping cough and other ailments, a new survey has found. Physicians who reluctantly agreed said they did so …