Kids who get lots of antibiotics from their doctors are more likely to harbor the MRSA superbug, although it's still rare, a new study of British youngsters has found. While that doesn't prove the drugs are to blame for the antibiotic-resistant bacterium, it would make biological sense, researchers say. "This just provides more evidence to support redoubling our efforts to decrease antibiotic use," Daniel J. Diekema, MD, who was not involved in the new work, told Reuters Health. MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, first arrived in the U.S. in the 1960s. But it wasn't until 1980, when it infected a burn victim in a Seattle hospital and caused a devastating outbreak, that doctors realized how serious the situation really was. It is estimated that in 2005, the bug caused severe infections in nearly 95,000 Americans and killed more than 18,500 of them.
An overcrowded ER does not seem to delay patients in getting an emergency procedure to stop a heart attack in progress -- at least at one U.S. hospital, a new study finds. Over the past couple of decades, the number of emergency rooms in the U.S. has dropped by about one-quarter, even as the number of patients visiting them has climbed. That often equals ER overcrowding and research suggests it's taking a toll. A recent study of California ERs, for instance, found that elderly heart attack patients had a higher death rate when their nearest hospital was on a high level of "diversion" -- meaning the ER was so crowded it was turning ambulances away. And some research, though not all, has suggested that when heart attack patients arrive at a crowded ER, their care may be slowed down -- whether they require an invasive procedure or blood-clot-dissolving drugs.
This is cancer therapy at its most aggressive, a treatment patients liken to being filleted, disemboweled and then bathed in hot poison. The therapy, which couples extensive abdominal surgery with blasts of heated chemotherapy to the abdominal cavity and its organs, was once a niche procedure used mainly against rare cancers of the appendix. Most academic medical centers shunned it. More recently, as competition for patients and treatments intensifies, an increasing number of the nation's leading medical centers has been offering the costly -- and controversial -- therapy to patients with the more common colorectal or ovarian cancers. And some hospitals are even publicizing the treatment as a hot "chemo bath." To critics, the therapy is merely the latest example of one that catches on with little evidence that it really works. "We're practicing this technique that has almost no basis in science," said David P. Ryan, MD, clinical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.
Doctors have treated only three leukemia patients, but the sensational results from a single shot could be one of the most significant advances in cancer research in decades. And it almost never happened. In the research published Wednesday, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania say the treatment made the most common type of leukemia completely disappear in two of the patients and reduced it by 70% in the third. In each of the patients as much as five pounds of cancerous tissue completely melted away in a few weeks, and a year later it is still gone. The results of the preliminary test "exceeded our wildest expectations," says immunologist Carl June, MD, a member of the Abramson Cancer Center's research team. Edgar Engleman, MD, a cancer immunologist at Stanford University School of Medicine who was not involved in the research calls the results "remarkable ... great stuff.
A common form of irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation can cause blood clots, putting people at increased risk of stroke. The anticoagulant drug warfarin is used to reduce that risk, but since people respond to it very differently, it requires careful monitoring to avoid the risk of heavy bleeding. Now, researchers say a new drug called rivaroxaban looks to be as good as warfarin in preventing strokes. About 2.3 million people in the United States have atrial fibrillation, so drug manufacturers have been eager to come up with oral anti-clotting drugs to replace warfarin -- drugs that don't require blood tests and frequent fiddling with doses. Rivaroxaban, one of those new drugs, is just as good as warfarin at reducing the risk of stroke, according to a new study published online in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study followed 14,264 patients who took either rivaroxaban (brand name Xarelto) or warfarin (sold as Coumadin and other brand names). None of the study participants knew which drug they were given.
California's medical board failed to discipline 710 troubled doctors even as they were disciplined by hospitals, surgical centers and other healthcare organizations in the state, according to a report released Tuesday. The report by Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Public Citizen was based on an analysis of doctors' records in the National Practitioner Data Bank from 1990 to 2009. The Department of Health & Human Services uses the data bank to track doctors' discipline, medical malpractice payments and other actions. The data released to Public Citizen did not name the doctors or their workplaces. Of the doctors who escaped state discipline in California, 35% had racked up more than one disciplinary action from another entity, according to the report. "If the hospital or HMO has taken action, why hasn't the board?" asked Sidney Wolfe, MD, director of Public Citizen's health research group. "That's something that as a physician or a patient I would be worried about. Hospitals rarely discipline doctors. When they do, it's usually for very serious infractions."