Health A-Z

Hitachi unveils medical content management blueprint

storage-210x1462

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, on Wednesday announced the first medical content management blueprint for Electronic Medical Records Adoption Model (EMRAM). The model, devised by Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Asia Pacific helps health organizations optimize their IT investments on the journey to full electronic medical records (EMR) adoption.

“Medical content is the lifeblood of health organizations. To ensure it runs smoothly, health organizations need a robust system to manage and control its storage, operation and security,” said Steven Yeo, vice president and executive director of HIMSS Asia Pacific. “It is encouraging that HDS has developed solutions with each stage of the EMR Adoption Model in mind.”

Health organizations around the world are fast adopting EMR applications to enhance care quality and efficiency. To support and guide these organizations, HIMSS offers an eight-stage Asia Pacific EMRAM which helps healthcare professionals understand their EMR needs.

Many physicians and managers find it challenging to identify the appropriate solutions to store and manage medical content when they adopt EMR. Drawing on its expertise in information innovation, HDS developed the new medical content management blueprint for HIMSS EMRAM.

“Healthcare is a big data industry that is experiencing a rapid, exponential increase in both the volume and variety of data when adopting EMR applications. As patient data continues to grow, health organizations need highly scalable, available IT infrastructures to support patient care as well as lower the total cost of ownership,” said Johnny Ma, general manager, APAC Industry Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems. “Through HIMSS consulting services, we ensure that we help healthcare organizations optimize their IT assets and manage costs while delivering excellent services.”

HDS content management solutions for EMRAM include seven elements, namely business continuity, file and content, unified storage, storage economics, cloud enablement, virtualization, and enterprise-class storage platforms. Health organizations can implement each element separately according to their adoption stage or deploy an integrated infrastructure with multiple solutions to support their specific environment and growth plan.

By referring to the medical content management requirements for EMRAM, health organizations can formulate a solution algorithm to architect the best solution to meet the specific requirements of each stage. This solution algorithm comprises all the essential components to not only meet the needs of that individual EMRAM stage, but to integrate with the solutions implemented at later stages, according to a statement by HDS.

Source: India medical Times

 

Do multiple pills increase hospitalisation risk?

Researchers have termed as ‘misleading’ the commonly-held assumption that taking several medicines for multiple health conditions is hazardous.

According to them, polypharmacy – where patients, generally older adults (those aged over 65 years), use multiple medications – needs more sophisticated approaches to assess the suitability of each patient’s set of medicines.

“Today, we have more elderly people and also a rising number of people are being diagnosed with multiple health conditions,” said lead author Rupert Payne who works at the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research.

Working with colleagues in Nottingham and Glasgow, Payne analysed data for 180,815 adults with long-term clinical conditions.

They found that for patients with only a single medical condition, taking 10 or more medications was associated with a more than three-fold increase in an unplanned hospitalisation compared to patients who took only one to three medicines.

However, patients with six or more medical conditions who used 10 or more medications only increased their chance of admission by 1.5 times – compared to the group taking one to three medicines, said the study published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

“This work is highly relevant to the development and assessment of prescribing skills in general practice where the majority of long-term clinical care is undertaken and where doctors often prescribe drugs for long periods of time,” said Payne.

“The research demonstrates the need for more sophisticated and nuanced approaches when measuring the impact of polypharmacy in future clinical research,” he added.

Source: DNA India

UK govt health adviser warns against drinking orange juice

Contrary to the popular beliefs about the health benefits of fruit juices, the UK government’s leading adviser on obesity has said people should stop taking orange juice due to high sugar content in it.

Professor Susan Jebb, head of diet and obesity research at the Medical Research Council’s Human Nutrition Research unit in Cambridge, UK, says orange juice has as much sugar as Coca-Cola and warned that fruit juice should not be counted as part of a healthy five-a-day diet.

“Fruit juice isn’t the same as intact fruit and it has got as much sugar as many classical sugar drinks. It is also absorbed very fast so by the time it gets to your stomach your body doesn’t know whether it’s Coca-Cola or orange juice, frankly,” she told The Sunday Times.

The development comes after the health experts urged the food industry to cut 30 per cent from processed in the UK while warning that sugar has become as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco.

They also claim that reduction in sugar could shave 100 calories from each person’s daily intake and reverse the UK’s growing obesity epidemic.

While many branded fruit juice contain as little as 10 percent fruit juice with lots of added sugar, several research has linked intake of sugary sodas, fruit juices with an elevated risk of obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.

Professor Susan Jebb, who said she had herself stopped drinking orange juice also asked people to dilute it with water and drink if they cannot quit juice.

“I have to say it is a relatively easy thing to give up. Swap it and have a piece of real fruit. If you are going to drink it, you should dilute it”, she added.

Source: Zee news

 

Stem cell breakthrough explains how breast cancer spreads

Breast cancer stem cells exist in two different states and each state plays a role in how cancer spreads, a new study has revealed.

Study’s senior author Max S. Wicha from University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center said the lethal part of cancer is its metastasis so understanding how metastasis occurs is critical.

“We have evidence that cancer stem cells are responsible for metastasis – they are the seeds that mediate cancer’s spread. Now we’ve discovered how the stem cells do this,” Wicha said.

First, on the outside of the tumor, a type of stem cell exists in a state called the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) state. These stem cells appear dormant but are very invasive and able to get into the bloodstream, where they travel to distant parts of the body.

Once there, the stem cells transition to a second state that displays the opposite characteristics, called the mesenchymal-epithelial transition state (MET). These cells are capable of growing and making copies of themselves, producing new tumors.

The study looked specifically at breast cancer stem cells but the researchers believe the findings likely have implications for other cancer types as well.

The study was published in the journal of Stem Cell Reports.

Source: ANI

 

Sleeping on one side may worsen glaucoma: study

In a new study from South Korea, people with worsening glaucoma on just one side were also more likely to sleep with the affected eye facing downward.

The researchers say that position raises the eye’s internal pressure and probably hastens deterioration of the eye.

In glaucoma, the optic nerve is often damaged by increased intraocular pressure. The damage causes tunnel vision and eventual blindness.

According to the World Health Organization, glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness around the world, after cataracts.

“There is prior data from the early nineties, suggesting that in patients with glaucoma who sleep on their sides, the eye in the dependent position tends to have greater damage of the optic nerve,” Dr. Jeffrey Schultz told Reuters Health in an email.

Schultz directs Glaucoma Service at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York and is an associate professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

He was not involved in the study, but said it is “important in letting us know that there is potential for behavior changes in lessening the risk of blindness from glaucoma.”

The study was led by Dr. Kyoung Nam Kim, a researcher in the Department of Ophthalmology at the Chungnam National University hospital in Daejeon.

Treatments to decrease pressure in a patient’s eyeballs can slow progression of glaucoma in some cases. But other patients continue to progress even when intraocular pressure appears to be under control, Kim’s team writes in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.

Since lying down raises the pressure in the eyeball, and sleeping on one side consistently more than the other could be problematic for the eye on that side, the researchers decided to investigate whether a side- sleeping position might be part of the problem.

Kim and colleagues examined the sleeping habits of 430 glaucoma patients who had a visual field loss that was worse in one eye.

They found 132 of the patients preferred to sleep on one side. Of these patients, 67 percent usually slept with the worse eye downward.

They also compared the sleeping habits of patients who had glaucoma with elevated intraocular pressure (high-tension glaucoma) with those with normal pressure (normal-tension glaucoma).

Approximately 66 percent of the patients with normal-tension glaucoma preferred to sleep with the worse eye downward and 71 percent of the patients with high-tension glaucoma slept that way.

The results don’t prove that sleeping position accounts for worsening glaucoma on one side.

But they at least verify a link “between the preferred sleeping position and asymmetric visual field loss between eyes,” the authors write.

“Unfortunately, it is very difficult to control your body position during sleep,” Schultz said.

“Certainly, if one has severe damage in one eye it would seem to make sense to attempt to avoid sleeping on your side with that eye down,” he said.

It may help to sleep on the side with less eye damage – or on your back. But Schultz warns that sleeping on your back may not be the answer for people who are predisposed to sleep apnea, which is another risk factor for worsening glaucoma.

At this point there is no way to improve visual field loss in patients with glaucoma once it occurs, he said.

“The best thing that patients can do to lessen the risk of worsening, is to be compliant with the medical regime and to follow up as directed by the patient’s physician,” Schultz said.

Source: Reuters

Gene therapy reverses blinding eye disease

An experimental therapy for a blinding eye disease showed early – and surprising – promise when it improved the vision of patients in an early trial that was only supposed to test its safety, doctors reported Wednesday.

The experimental gene therapy not only stopped the steady degeneration of the patients’ vision, but appears to have reversed some of the damage. And the effects have lasted two years in one case, British researchers report in the Lancet medical journal.

Wayne Thompson of Staffordshire in Britain saw the stars for the first time in years after being treated in April.

“One night in the summer, my wife called me outside as it was a particularly starry evening. As I looked up, I was amazed that I was able to see a few stars,” Thompson, 43, said in a statement.

“I hadn’t seen stars for a long, long time,” he added.

“It is still too early to know if the gene therapy treatment will last indefinitely, but we can say that the vision improvements have been maintained for as long as we have been following up the patients, which is two years in one case,” says Dr. Robert MacLaren of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford, who leads the research team.

“In truth, we did not expect to see such dramatic improvements in visual acuity and so we contacted both patients’ home opticians to get current and historical data on their vision in former years, long before the gene therapy trial started. These readings confirmed exactly what we had seen,” he added in a statement.

The men taking part in the trial all have choroideremia, a genetic disease that causes vision to start breaking down when patients are still children. The defective gene, called CHM, is on the x chromosome, so it almost exclusively affects males – females have an extra x chromosome that usually makes up for any lost function. It causes about 4 percent of all cases of blindness, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The condition breaks down various parts of the retina, the reflective tissue at the back of the eye that collects light and images. The gene therapy approach uses a virus to carry a corrective gene directly into the retina.

Gene therapy itself has a mixed record – it’s harder than scientists thought to safely deliver new genes into the body. And there is no guarantee that the patient’s cells will accept the new gene and use it.

But the eye is a good place to try, in part because doctors can see the effects in real time, and also because one eye can be treated and the other eye used to compare results.

“I think that this is a very important study,” said Dr. Richard Weleber, professor of ophthalmology who is leading a team at Oregon Health and Science University trying gene therapy to treat Usher Syndrome.

MacLaren’s trial was meant to be a stage 1 safety trial, designed simply to show that the treatment did no harm. But the six patients in the trial said they noticed improvements quickly.

“This has huge implications for anyone with a genetic retinal disease such as age-related macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa, because it has for the first time shown that gene therapy can be applied safely before the onset of vision loss,” MacLaren said.

He says nine patients have now had one eye treated with the gene therapy in operations at the Oxford Eye Hospital. The patients had varying degrees of vision loss, but MacLaren thinks the best course will be to treat people when they are young, before much damage has been done.

“If we were able to treat people early, get them in their teens or late childhood, we’d be getting the virus in before their vision is lost,” he said. “If the treatment works, we would be able to prevent them from going blind.”

Weleber, who says his own gene therapy trial is moving along but who could not release details, says MaCLaren’s surgical technique may have helped the therapy work more successfully. MacLaren’s team lifted an area called the macula to deliver the engineered viruses directly into the tissue that needed correcting.

Last year, researchers reported success against a different genetic disease causing blindness , one called Leber congenital amaurosis. But even though the patients’ vision improved, the eye continued to deteriorate.

“Each type (of genetic disease) needs to be tested separately,” Weleber said.

Gene therapy also works to some degree against blood cancers and immune diseases.

Last year, doctors reported they had successfully treated the first children in the U.S. for severe combined immune deficiency or SCID, sometimes known as “bubble boy” disease. Like choroideremia, SCID is caused by a mutated recessive gene, meaning children must inherit a defective copy from each parent to show symptoms.

Gene therapy has helped 26 of 59 two patients with a form of cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia go into remission after a type of gene therapy treatment that programmed immune system cells to hunt down and kill the leukemia cells. And last year doctors reported 24 people with acute lymphocytic leukemia got at least temporary remission after gene therapy.

Source: nbc news

Feeling too skinny may lead to depression, drugs

You may not be as skinny as you think you are. Teenagers who think they are too skinny when they actually have a healthy weight are at greater risk of being depressed, says a study.

“Teenage boys who feel they are underweight and report being the victim of bullying are also more likely to use steroids and feel depressed than other boys their age,” according to the findings reported by the American Psychological Association.

Also, boys who inaccurately see themselves as overweight are also more likely to be depressed than boys who think they are of average weight, added the study published in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity.

“Teenage girls tend to strive for zero size whereas teenage boys tend to emphasise a more muscular body type. We found that some of these boys who feel they are unable to achieve that often unattainable image may be taking drastic measures,” said Aaron Blashill, staff psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty member at Harvard Medical School.

The research was based on two large, nationally representative samples of teenage boys in the US.

The first sample included 2,139 boys who were about 16-years old in 1996 at the beginning of the study and were followed for 13 years.

The second data came from a 2009 nationally representative survey of 8,065 ninth- through 12th-grade boys in the US.

“Doctors working with depressed teenage boys, particularly those who think they are underweight and/or bullied based on their appearance, should be mindful of the possibility of steroid use,” Blashill suggested.

“Cognitive-behavioural therapy has proven to be effective for body image concerns and could be helpful for boys considering using or already using steroids,” the study said.

Source: Business standard

Chilly winter can affect the eyes too

Chilly winter can affect the eyes too

A dry-eye condition caused by cold winds evaporates the tears, which could partially affect vision and cause constant eye pain.

Blurred vision, scratching and burning sensation and irritation in the eye – these are not minor irritants in your daily routine but might be the pointers to a condition called the dry-eye syndrome which plagues many people during an extreme winter.

According to doctors, even though a person’s entire body might be covered up as a protection against the chilly winter winds, there is one part that is always exposed: the eyes.

The surface of the eye is covered with a thin layer of liquid known as the tear film, which is essential for its health. A dry-eye condition caused by cold winds evaporates the tears, which could partially affect vision and cause constant eye pain.

“Occurrence of dry-eye syndrome is very common during the winter season because of the cold, dry outdoor air and dry indoor heat,” Sanjay Dhawan, director of ophthalmology at Fortis Hospital, told IANS.

Dhawan said when there is insufficient lubrication in the eye, the conjunctiva (the white part of the eye) becomes much less moist than normal.

He said this causes severe pain, discomfort and inflammation of the conjunctiva and cornea of the eye, due to inadequate tear secretion.

It is a common problem faced by both men and women above 50.

“Sometimes it becomes severe as this abnormality may result in disruption of the ocular (eye) surface, causing difficulty in vision,” Dhawan said.

The other symptoms of the eye problem include a persistent watery discharge and irritation if one is using contact lenses.

“If menopause occurs at an early age, then the chances of developing dry-eye syndrome during the winter gets increased even among middle-aged women,” Dhawan said, adding that at an initial stage, it may seem like a minor irritation but can become potentially serious.

According to Kinshuk Biswas, opthalmologist at Gurgaon’s Columbia Asia Hospital, the condition could also be a result of constant use of a computer.

“Dry-eye syndrome is caused by the low humidity factor during winter which leads to evaporation of the lubricant in the eyes. Another contributing factor for this condition is the use of a computer and continuously looking at the screen for long,” Biswas told IANS.

To prevent this condition, one should use eye drops (as prescribed by a doctor) three-four times a day.

One could also close the eyes for half-a-minute while sitting in front of the computer screen to bring moisture back to the eyes, Biswas said.

Listing out the preventive steps, Dhawan said patients should wear sunglasses to protect the eyes from the cold wind, while artificial tears – also known as tear substitutes – should be applied at least four times a day.

If the condition aggravates, use lubricating ointment at bedtime and run a humidifier to put moisture back into the air.

Also, lay a warm, damp washcloth across your eyelids for a couple of minutes, drink extra fluids and use a hot- or cold-air humidifier, Dhawan said.

According to the American Association of Ophthalmology, approximately 3.2 million women and 1.7 million men over the age of 50 suffer from chronic dry eyes.

Source: Khaleej times

Brain Injuries May Raise Risk of Early Death

People who have suffered a traumatic brain injury appear to have a much higher risk of dying prematurely, a new study suggests.

These risks include having another brain injury, being assaulted and suicide. The risks are even higher for those with a psychiatric or drug abuse problem, the researchers added.

“After a traumatic brain injury, patients have a threefold increased risk of dying prematurely,” said lead researcher Dr. Seena Fazel, a Wellcome Trust senior research fellow in clinical science at the University of Oxford in England.

“Fifty percent of the early deaths are due to either accident or suicide or being assaulted,” he said. “That seems to be related to psychiatric illness and substance abuse.”

The study found that 61 percent of these patients had psychiatric or substance abuse problems, Fazel said. In some cases, these problems were present before the injury, while some developed after the injury, he added.

The dangers of developing psychiatric or drug abuse problems after an injury may be caused by a variety of factors, including biological and social changes.

These risks might be a particular problem for soldiers and athletes who have had a traumatic brain injury, Fazel suggested.

“A large number of vets have suffered traumatic brain injuries, and we know a lot of vets are dying from suicide. Traumatic brain injury may be one of the factors that increases their risk,” he said.

Fazel believes that after a traumatic brain injury, patients need to be monitored for risk factors that may put them at risk for dying prematurely.

“Some of these problems, like psychiatric illness and substance abuse, can be treated,” he said.

While the study found an association between traumatic brain injury and early death, it did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

The report was published online Jan. 15 in JAMA Psychiatry.

One expert said he thinks certain personality traits play a part in the phenomenon.

“The people that are dying earlier have personality characteristics that make them vulnerable to have brain injury,” said Dr. Robert Robinson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa and author of an accompanying editorial.

“These people are being injured because they’re impulsive and thrill-seeking. These vulnerable personality characteristics are getting them not only into their first head injury, but into a subsequent head injury and that’s causing this premature death,” he said.

Another expert agreed.

“It makes sense that people who suffer a brain injury are more likely to repeat behavior over time, and have more injuries and be at risk for premature death,” said Dr. Jamie Ullman, director of neurotrauma at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y.

“A lot has to do with behaviors that would get them involved in injuries in the first place. We need to focus on the underlying behaviors that have resulted in these injuries, and see if these behaviors can be modified after the injury,” she said.

Source: web md

Alcohol consumption – 80,000 yearly deaths in the Americas

download

Alcohol consumption is the direct cause of nearly 80,000 deaths in the Americas each year, according to a new study.

Published in the journal Addiction, the study analyzed yearly mortality rates from 16 countries in North and Latin America. The researchers focused on deaths that were specifically attributed to alcohol, meaning death would not have occurred without some form of alcohol consumption.

“Our purpose was to obtain more detailed information about alcohol mortality from countries in the region,” study co-author Dr. Maristela Monteiro, senior advisor on alcohol and substance abuse for the Pan American Health Organization, told FoxNews.com. “There are statistics from all these countries, but very few regions have specific alcohol mortality data, meaning [the information] we used usually is not reported or not collected.”

After combing through each country’s death statistics, Monteiro and her co-author Dr. Vilma Gawryszewski found that, between 2007 and 2009, alcohol was a ‘necessary’ cause of death for an average of 79,456 cases each year in North and South America. The researchers found that the biggest causes of these deaths included liver disease and alcohol poisoning.

“One important thing we knew from the medical literature but we also found in our data is that alcohol consumption is a cause of premature mortality,” Gawryszewski said. “The highest rates are among people in early age [dying before] the life expectancy in their countries.”

The countries with the highest rates of alcohol-related deaths were mostly in Central America, including El Salvador (27.4 out of 100,000 deaths each year), Guatemala (22.3 out of 100,000) and Nicaragua (21.3 out of 100,000).

Overall, men accounted for 84 percent of alcohol-necessary deaths, though the male-to-female ratio varied from country to country. In El Salvador, the risk of a man dying from an alcohol-necessary cause was 27.8 times higher than that of a woman, while in the United States and Canada, the risk was 3.2 times higher.

There were also differences in age groups for alcohol mortality between countries. In Argentina, Canada, Costa Rica and the U.S., the highest mortality rates occurred in individuals between 50 and 69 years of age. In Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela, the highest mortality rates were seen in individuals between 40 and 49 years of age.

While these statistics may seem concerning on their own, Monteiro and Gawryszewski maintain their findings reveal that the overconsumption of alcohol is an even bigger issue than previously thought.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Monteiro said. “Of course there are many more alcohol-related deaths from injuries, traffic accidents, violence, and also chronic conditions – where alcohol has a role but is not the only cause. But the data does not cover that. We’re only getting the most severe cases.”

With this in mind, the researchers argue that more needs to be done to control the amount of alcohol individuals consume in North and South America.

“We know how to reduce mortality – with population-based policies, controlling availability and increasing price,” Monteiro said. “We need to prevent people from getting to that stage where you have alcohol dependence or you die.”

Source: Fox news