Nearly 3,000 people died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. But the twin towers' collapse and their smoldering ruins also exposed thousands of rescuers, firefighters and cleanup crews to toxic ash and smoke. Ten years later, medical researchers say many of these people are suffering higher-than-normal rates of serious disease and psychological problems.
There is no cure for Alzheimer's, but researchers, many of whom launch clinical trials in South Florida, are optimistic as the genetics, the pathology and the intricacies of Alzheimer's become better known. An estimated 450,000 Floridians have Alzheimer's disease, a number that is expected to grow by another 135,000 or so by 2025, according to the Alzheimer's Association, a national group that focuses on Alzheimer's research. Florida ranks second only to California in Alzheimer's patients.
"We want to map the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's so we can understand the landscape," said Dr. Margaret Pericak-Vance, director of the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and recipient of this year's lifetime achievement award by the Alzheimer's Association.
Care transitions — those times when someone enters a hospital, transfers from one department to another, gets discharged to a rehabilitation center or goes home — are risky times. Health care professionals have long known that these handoffs provide prime opportunities for mistakes, most often because of communication lapses.
One unnervingly common error for hospitalized patients was documented by a very large Canadian study of older adults recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association: essential medications inadvertently get stopped.
A medical privacy breach led to the public posting on a commercial Web site of data for 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., including names and diagnosis codes, the hospital has confirmed. The information stayed online for nearly a year.
Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made its way from one of its vendors, a billing contractor identified as Multi-Specialty Collection Services, to a Web site called Student of Fortune, which allows students to solicit paid assistance with their schoolwork.
Scandals, recalls, stingy customers, anxious regulators--any one of these would traumatise a chief executive. America's industry for medical devices is suffering from all of them. Omar Ishrak, the new boss of Medtronic, the world's biggest medical-technology company, recently described the problem succinctly to analysts: "There is a lot of work ahead of us." This is a relatively new ailment for the industry. From 1998 to 2005 the use of equipment such as defibrillators and drug-eluting stents expanded rapidly. "It was the age of implantation in this country," explains David Lewis of Morgan Stanley, with companies "sticking things into everybody." Much has changed.
Anel Potti, Joseph Nevins and their colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, garnered widespread attention in 2006. They reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that they could predict the course of a patient's lung cancer using devices called expression arrays, which log the activity patterns of thousands of genes in a sample of tissue as a colourful picture. A few months later, they wrote in Nature Medicine that they had developed a similar technique which used gene expression in laboratory cultures of cancer cells, known as cell lines, to predict which chemotherapy would be most effective for an individual patient suffering from lung, breast or ovarian cancer. At the time, this work looked like a tremendous advance for personalised medicine--the idea that understanding the molecular specifics of an individual's illness will lead to a tailored treatment.