Delhi hospital launches helpline for strokes |  |
- Delhi hospital launches helpline for strokes
- Harris Lewin elected to National Academy of Sciences
- Inexpensive, abundant starch fibers could lead to ouchless bandages
- UC Santa Cruz builds national data center for cancer genome research
- Smart gas sensors for better chemical detection
- New research expands understanding of psychoactive medication use among children in foster care
| Delhi hospital launches helpline for strokes Posted: 01 May 2012 08:46 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) With the number of strokes on the rise, Delhi's Fortis hospital Tuesday launched a toll-free helpline for victims. A statement from the hospital chain said its helpline number 1800-200-3060 can be accessed from both mobiles and landlines in Delhi and the NCR. The goal is to get the stroke victim to a hospital as quickly as possible to confirm the diagnosis because every minute is important. FEHI has a dedicated expert team 24*7 - a neurologist, a neuro-surgeon, emergency room, critical care, a cardiologist and radiologist - to provide comprehensive stroke treatment, a statement from the hospital said. A stroke is a brain disease caused by either blockage of blood supply or rupture of a blood vessel to a particular part of the brain. This results in reduction of blood and oxygen supply to the affected part of brain resulting in loss of function. After 3-6 hours, the brain cells are irreversibly damaged and any form of treatment cannot completely reverse the damage. A stroke is a major cause for loss of life, limbs and speech in India, with the Indian Council of Medical Research estimating that in 2004, there were 9.3 lakh cases of stroke and 6.4 lakh deaths due to stroke in India, most of the people being less than 45 years old. WHO estimates suggest that by 2050, 80 percent of stroke cases in the world would occur in low and middle income countries, mainly India and China. http://www.rxpgnews.com    |
| Harris Lewin elected to National Academy of Sciences Posted: 01 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Harris Lewin has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), it was announced today. Lewin, an emeritus faculty member in the Department of Animal Sciences and founding director of the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), was recognized for research he conducted during his 27 years at the University of Illinois. He is now vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Davis, where he earned his doctorate in 1984. Lewin joins an august body of approximately 2,200 members and 420 foreign associates. Members are elected to the NAS in recognition of their distinguished research achievements. Election to the National Academy is one of the highest professional honors a scientist can receive. As a faculty colleague since his arrival on the Illinois campus 27 years ago I am absolutely delighted that Harris has been selected for this recognition, said Robert Easter, president-designate of the University of Illinois. It is a wonderful honor for him and for the University of Illinois. Lewin is widely known for his research in comparative mammalian genomics and immunogenetics. Harris has made fundamental contributions to biology, says Gene Robinson, professor of entomology, director of the IGB and also an NAS member, and he always will be remembered on this campus for his visionary leadership in helping to establish and then direct the IGB. Harris's involvement in sequencing both the bovine and swine genomes has placed the University of Illinois in a unique position to be an international leader in functional genomics of these major food-producing animals, says Neal Merchen, head of the Department of Animal Sciences. Lewin's research has advanced the understanding of mammalian chromosome evolution. He led research that showed that different parts of the genome have different evolutionary histories and that areas of the chromosome more prone to breakage are a rich source of genetic variation. The IGB, which... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Inexpensive, abundant starch fibers could lead to ouchless bandages Posted: 01 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A process that spins starch into fine strands could take the sting out of removing bandages, as well as produce less expensive and more environmentally-friendly toilet paper, napkins and other products, according to Penn State food scientists. There are many applications for starch fibers, said Lingyan Kong, graduate student, food science, Starch is the most abundant and also the least expensive of natural polymers. Kong, who worked with Greg Ziegler, professor of food science, used a solvent to dissolve the starch into a fluid that can then be spun into long strands, or fibers. These fibers can be combined and formed into paper-like mats similar to napkins, tissues and other types of paper products. Once the process is scaled to industrial size, companies could make bandages and other medical dressings using starch fibers. Unlike bandages that are currently on the market that must be -- often painfully -- removed, starch bandages would degrade into glucose, a substance the body safely absorbs. Starch is easily biodegradable, so bandages made from it would, over time, be absorbed by the body, said Kong. So, you wouldn't have to remove them. Starch is a polymer made of amylose and amylopectin. Polymers are large molecules that are composed of chains of smaller, repeating molecules. Starches, typically found in corn, potatoes, arrowroot and other plants, are most familiar to consumers as cornstarch, potato starch and tapioca starch. Starch does not completely dissolve in water but instead becomes a gel -- or, starch paste -- that is too thick to make fibers. To solve the problem, the researchers added a solvent to help the solution dissolve the starch, but not destroy its molecular structure, Kong said. The researchers used an electrospinning device that, in addition to the solvent, helped stretch the starch solution into fibers. The device uses a high voltage electrical charge to create a charge repulsion to overcome surface... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| UC Santa Cruz builds national data center for cancer genome research Posted: 01 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) SANTA CRUZ, CA--The emerging field of personalized or precision medicine holds great promise in the fight against cancer. If scientists can identify the genetic changes that drive each patient's cancer cells, they can use that information to develop targeted treatments. But achieving this goal will require massive amounts of genomic and clinical data and a sophisticated infrastructure to manage and analyze the data. The University of California, Santa Cruz, has now completed a first step in building this infrastructure, said UC Santa Cruz bioinformatics expert David Haussler. Haussler's team has established the Cancer Genomics Hub (CGHub), a large-scale data repository and user portal for the National Cancer Institute's cancer genome research programs. CGHub's initial beta release is providing cancer researchers with efficient access to a large and rapidly growing store of valuable biomedical data. The project is funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) through a $10.3 million subcontract with SAIC-Frederick Inc., the prime contractor for the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. By providing researchers with comprehensive catalogs of the key genomic changes in many major types and subtypes of cancer, these efforts will support the development of more effective ways to diagnose and treat cancer, said Haussler, a distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UCSC and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. In personalized care, doctors design treatments to target specific genetic changes found in a patient's cancer cells. Researchers are trying to catalog all the genetic abnormalities found in different types of cancers and find connections between specific genetic changes and how patients respond to different treatments. The scale and complexity of the information being gathered creates a critical challenge in the area of data management. Although recent... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Smart gas sensors for better chemical detection Posted: 01 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ANN ARBOR, Mich.--- Portable gas sensors can allow you to search for explosives, diagnose medical conditions through a patient's breath, and decide whether it's safe to stay in a mine. These devices do all this by identifying and measuring airborne chemicals, and a new, more sensitive, smart model is under development at the University of Michigan. The smart sensor could detect chemical weapon vapors or indicators of disease better than the current design. It also consumes less power, crucial for stretching battery life down a mineshaft or in isolated clinics. In the gold standard method of gas detection, chemicals are separated before they are measured, said Xudong Sherman Fan, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. In a vapor mixture, it's very difficult to tell chemicals apart, he said. The main advance of the sensor under development by Fan and his colleagues at U-M and the University of Missouri, Columbia, is a better approach to divvying up the chemicals. The researchers have demonstrated their concept on a table-top set-up, and they hope to produce a hand-held device in the future. You can think of the different chemical vapors as tiny clouds, all overlapping in the original gas. In most gas sensors today, researchers separate the chemicals into smaller clouds by sending the gas through two tubes in sequence. A polymer coating on the inside of the first tube slows down heavier molecules, roughly separating the chemicals according to weight. The time it takes to get through the tube is the first clue to a chemical's identity, Fan explained. A pump and compressor collect gas from the first tube and then send it into the second tube at regular intervals. The second tube is typically coated with polar polymers, which are positively charged at one end and negatively charged at the other. This coating slows down polar gas molecules, allowing the non-polar molecules to pass through more quickly. With this... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| New research expands understanding of psychoactive medication use among children in foster care Posted: 30 Apr 2012 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Philadelphia -- A few months after the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report on the use of psychoactive drugs by children in foster care in five states, a national study from PolicyLab at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia describes prescription patterns over time in 48 states. The updated findings show the percentage of children in foster care taking antipsychotics--a class of psychoactive drugs associated with serious side effects for children-- continued to climb in the last decade. At the same time, a slight decline was seen in the use of other psychoactive medications, including the percentage of children receiving 3 or more classes of these medications at once (polypharmacy). As public scrutiny has increased about the use of psychoactive medication by children over the past decade, children in foster care continue to be prescribed these drugs at exceptionally high rates compared with the general population of U.S. children. According to the PolicyLab study, 1 in 10 school-aged children (aged 6-11) and 1 in 6 adolescents (aged 12-18) in foster care were taking antipsychotics by 2007. The research team looked at the 686,000 foster-care children enrolled in Medicaid annually in 48 states from 2002-2007, and saw that both overall psychoactive use and polypharmacy-- the practice of prescribing multiple classes of psychoactive drugs at once-- increased from 2002 to 2004, and then began to decline from 2005 to 2007. Prescriptions for antipsychotics, on the other hand, increased each year from 2002 to 2007. While it is encouraging to see fewer kids being prescribed multiple classes of drugs, and--to some degree--a slowing rate of growth in the use of antipsychotics by 2007, these medications are still being prescribed much too frequently to children in the foster care system, said David Rubin,MD, MSCE, one of the study's authors and Director of PolicyLab. Previous studies have established that... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
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