Twins Die in Incubator At Kinamba Health Centre

A couple in Kinamba, Laikipia West is mourning the death of one-week-old twins due to what they termed as negligence by medical practitioners.

The twin boys, who were in an incubator, died on Sunday morning at Kinamba health centre following a power blackout. The father of the twins Alfred Muchangi said they had been in the health facility for a week since they were born.

He said the boys died after medics who were on duty during the 2am incident did not remove the babies from the incubator after a power blackout.

“The boys had been with their mother at the health centre for the last week. On Sunday night, the power went off for hours and the health centre does not have a standby generator. They died,” Muchangi said.

John Githinji, the officer in charge of the facility. said upon examining them he noted that they may have died from a condition known us perspiration pneumonia.

“It is true that the facility does not have a standby generator and power loss could have contributed to the deaths,” he said. He however said the hospital is overstretched due to shortage of clinical officers and nurses.

Githinji said only one staffer was on duty on the fateful night. He said she was attending to outpatient and inpatient at the same time, thus being overwhelmed.

Source: all Africa

Common heart valve problem may be fixed without open-heart surgery

heart2

Researchers are closing in on techniques to fix the most common valve problem in the heart without having to resort to open-heart surgery.

Mitral valve regurgitation, which causes blood to flow backward into the lungs, affects about four million adults in the U.S. For many patients, the condition never causes serious harm. But for others, mitral regurgitation causes extreme fatigue and shortness of breath. In serious cases, patients’ hearts have to pump twice as hard to move the same amount of the blood to the body, leading to heart failure.

To avoid open-heart surgery, doctors are looking to less-invasive ways to implant medical devices that could replace or repair the valve. Some devices are on the market and others are being developed.

When the mitral valve is in need of repair or replacement, open-heart surgery is generally performed. About 50,000 such operations take place in the U.S. a year. But many patients are reluctant or too frail to undergo the surgery. Doctors are also hesitant about recommending the procedure in some older patients with heart disease because surgery hasn’t been shown to prolong life, though doctors believe it improves patients’ quality of life. Permanent heart damage and more heart problems can result if the valve isn’t repaired.

Source: fox news

Sit less, move more to improve health and quality of life

A team of researchers have claimed that people decreasing their sitting time and increasing their physical activity have a lower risk of chronic disease.

The researchers – Sara Rosenkranz and Richard Rosenkranz, both assistant professors of human nutrition from Kansas State University – studied a sample of 194,545 men and women ages 45 to 106.

The data was from the 45 and Up Study, which is a large Australian study of health and aging.

Richard said that not only do people need to be more physically active by walking or doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, but they should also be looking at ways to reduce their sitting time.

The twofold approach — sitting less and moving more — is key to improving health, the researchers said.

People often spend the majority of the day being sedentary and might devote 30 to 60 minutes a day to exercise or physical activity, Sara said. Taking breaks to stand up or move around can make a difference during long periods of sitting.

Sitting for prolonged periods of time — with little muscular contraction occurring — shuts off a molecule called lipoprotein lipase, or LPL, Sara said. Lipoprotein lipase helps to take in fat or triglycerides and use it for energy.

For the study, the researchers wanted to take a positive approach and see if increasing physical activity helped to increase health and quality of life. The researchers want to motivate people — especially younger people — to sit less and move more so they can age easier with less chronic disease

The research has been published in the journal BMC Public Health.

Source: dna india

 

Kids get uneven tonsil care, study finds

Getting your tonsils out: It’s a rite of passage for hundreds of thousands of U.S. kids every year.

Yet a study released Monday shows hospitals vary greatly in just how they handle this common procedure. And kids fare differently depending on which hospital they go to. At the best hospitals, just three percent of kids came back for complications like bleeding. But at others, close to 13 percent did.

It is the latest in a series of studies showing that Americans get vastly different care depending on where they live.

It’s not clear why, but the researchers who did the study say it will be worth looking into so that all hospitals can make sure children recover well from the operations. New guidelines issued in 2011 may help get all hospitals and pediatric surgeons on the same page, other experts said.

It’s something in the public eye with the case of 13-year-old Jahi McMath, who died after complications from a complex tonsil operation in December at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Calif. McMath had her tonsils out, along with her adenoids and parts of her upper throat to try and improve serious sleep apnea.

She started bleeding profusely and went into cardiac arrest shortly after. Doctors said Jahi was brain dead, but the family sued first to keep their daughter on life support, then to remove the body to a facility where her body will be kept on life support.

McMath’s operation was a complicated one. Researchers who did the study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics looked at simpler cases.

Dr. Sanjay Mahant of the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and colleagues across the United States, looked at the records of nearly 140,000 children who got simple, uncomplicated tonsillectomies at 36 children’s hospitals between 2004 and 2010. All got same-day operations and were sent home on the day of their procedure.

Over that time, about 8 percent had to go back to the hospital within a month, usually for bleeding.

The researchers also looked at the use of two common drug types — dexamethasone, which can reduce complications such as nausea, and antibiotics.

New guidelines issued in 2011 advise giving dexamethasone to children before the operation, and they recommend against giving any antibiotics.

In the study before the guidelines came out, 76 percent of the children got dexamethasone, and at some hospitals almost none did. And 16 percent of children got antibiotics, although at some hospitals 90 percent of patients did.

“More than 500,000 tonsillectomies are performed each year in children in the United States, most commonly for sleep-disordered breathing and recurrent throat infections,” the researchers wrote. There shouldn’t be such variation from one hospital to another, they said.

It’s one of the reasons the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) issued practice guidelines based on what the studies show – that giving kids dexamethasone before the operation helps, and that giving them antibiotics doesn’t.

“These recommendations are based on evidence gathered from trials over the past two decades, which showed that dexamethasone, administered on the day of surgery, reduces postoperative nausea, vomiting, and pain, whereas perioperative antibiotics do not reduce postoperative bleeding,” Mahant’s team wrote.

Tonsillectomies are mostly done now to help sleep disorders. “There is an increased focus on sleep health in children,” said said Dr. Emily Boss, an assistant professor with the Johns Hopkins University Department of Otolaryngology and a member of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

Children can start bleeding as the scab formed after the operation naturally sloughs off, Boss added. “It’s one of the well-known complications,” she said. “It’s hard to predict who will have bleeding and who will not.”

It’s almost certainly nothing the child or parents are doing, Boss added. She said there’s no evidence to support common beliefs about what causes it, such as that eating scratchy food breaks off the clot.

Children do prefer soft, cool foods because their throats are sore, she added. And yes, popsicles or ice cream are not just allowed, but recommended.

“I think this study will force the issue of practicing according to evidence-based guidelines,” Boss said.

There were not any established guidelines before, Boss told NBC News. “People practiced based on their own experiences for a long period of time,” she said.

Other medical organizations are also starting to stress clear practice guidelines. And the Obama administration is also encouraging them, to help make care more consistent and to help lower costs.

A study published by the Dartmouth Atlas project last October found variation in all sorts of treatments. For example, in San Angelo, Texas, 91 percent of heart attack patients filled a prescription for a beta-blocker drug to lower blood pressure in 2008 or 2009, the study found. But in Salem, Ore., just 62.5 percent did. For a statin drug to lower cholesterol, the rates ranged from 91 percent of patients in Ogden, Utah to 44 percent in Abilene, Tex.

Prices vary, also, often with little apparent rhyme or reason. Last week another study found that the hospital charges in California for giving birth can vary from $3,000 to $37,000 – and that’s for a simple, uncomplicated delivery.

In May, the federal government said it would start publishing data on hospital charges. Their first numbers confirmed what health reform advocates complained about for years: The charges vary enormously, and for seemingly unclear reasons.

Source: nbc news

Heavy drinking in middle age may speed men’s mental decline

Middle-aged men who drink heavily show declines in memory, attention and reasoning skills up to six years sooner than those drinking less alcohol, new research suggests.

European scientists found that men drinking 2.5 or more alcoholic beverages daily at midlife were more likely to experience more rapid mental losses over the next decade than light or moderate drinkers.

Heavy drinking’s effects on women could not be accurately assessed because far fewer middle-aged females participated in the research, the study authors said.

“Heavy alcohol consumption is known to be detrimental for health, so the results were not surprising . . . they just add that [it’s] also detrimental for the brain and the effects can be observed as [early] as 55 years old,” said study author Severine Sabia. “There is no need to be an alcoholic to see a detrimental effect of heavy alcohol consumption on cognition [thinking skills].”

Sabia is a research associate in the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London. The study was published online Jan. 15 in the journal Neurology.

Scant research has examined the impact of alcohol consumption on brain aging before old age, according to study documents. The new study, however, included data from more than 5,000 men and 2,000 women at midlife.

Participants’ alcohol consumption was assessed three times in the 10 years before the first of three tests of memory and executive function, which deals with attention and reasoning skills needed in achieving goals. The first test was taken when participants were an average age of 56.

No differences were found in memory and executive function decline between men who didn’t drink alcohol and those who were light or moderate drinkers, consuming up to two servings of beer, wine or liquor each day. Heavy drinkers exhibited mental declines between 1.5 and 6 years faster than those drinking less.

Although the study found an association between heavy drinking in men and earlier decline in mental function, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

“We have lots of clinical experience to suggest that heavy drinking can have adverse effects on cognition. But what was new about this study, at least in men, was that it didn’t seem that light or moderate drinking” was more harmful than not drinking alcohol at all, said Dr. Marc Gordon, chief of neurology at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., who was not involved in the research.

“A relative strength of this study was that it looked at drinking at much younger ages than waiting until participants were elderly,” added Gordon, also an Alzheimer’s disease researcher at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y. “And nothing in this study [contradicts the idea] that having one drink a day is OK.”

Sabia agreed, saying the results echo previous studies and suggest that moderate alcohol consumption is not likely to harm people’s memory and executive function.

Source: web md

 

FDA approves Mental Disability Blood Test for Infants

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday cleared a first-of-a-kind blood test that can help diagnose mental disabilities in babies by analyzing their genetic code.

The laboratory test from Affymetrix detects variations in patients’ chromosomes that are linked to Down syndrome, DiGeorge syndrome and other developmental disorders. About 2 to 3 percent of U.S. children have some sort of intellectual disability, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The test, known as the CytoScan Dx Assay, is designed to help doctors diagnose children’s disabilities earlier and get them appropriate care and support. It is not intended for prenatal screening or for predicting other genetically acquired diseases and conditions, such as cancer.

While there are already genetic tests used to detect conditions like Down’s syndrome, doctors usually have to order them individually and they can take several days to develop. Pediatricians said Friday that Affymetrix’s test should offer a faster, more comprehensive screening approach. Dr. Annemarie Stroustrup stressed that such tests are generally only used after children exhibit certain physical or behavioral signs that suggest a disorder.

“When there’s something about the child that strikes us as unusual or pointing to a potential genetic disease, that’s when we would use this testing,” said Stroustrup, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “This is not a screening test to be done on all newborns to predict how they are going to do in school when they are 5.”

The technology behind Affymetrix’s test has already been used for several years to screen fetuses for potentially debilitating diseases. Known as microarray analysis, the technique involves a high-powered computer scanning a gene chip of the patient’s DNA for slight chromosome imbalances. Older techniques involve scientists looking at chromosomes under a microscope for major irregularities.

The FDA said it approved the new test based on studies showing it accurately analyzes a patient’s entire genome and can accurately spot variations associated with intellectual disabilities.

Currently hospitals in all 50 states are required to screen newborns for at least 29 disorders that can be detected though laboratory testing, including sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis. Generally those tests pickup irregularities in metabolism, not genetic variations. The mandatory screening program, begun a half-century ago, is considered one of the nation’s most successful public health programs.

Affymetrix Inc. is based in Santa Clara, Calif. Shares of the company declined 22 cents to close at $9.26 in trading.

Source: ABC news

9 foods that boost metabolism naturally

Your metabolism is partly ruled by genetics, but you can rev it up naturally by eating right. Fill up on the following nine foods to increase your body’s fat-burning power.

Egg whites

Egg whites are rich in branched-chain amino acids, which keep your metabolism stoked, says Chicago nutritionist David Grotto. Eggs are also loaded with protein and vitamin D.

Lean meat

Lean meat is full of iron; deficiencies in the mineral can slow metabolism. Eat three to four daily servings of iron-rich foods, such as chicken or fortified cereal.

Water

If you’re even mildly dehydrated, your metabolism may slow down, says Dr. Scott Isaacs, clinical instructor of medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine. Tip: Drink water cold, which forces your body to use more calories to warm it up.

Chili peppers

Chili peppers contain capsaicin, a chemical compound that can kick metabolism into higher gear, Isaacs says. He suggests adding a tablespoon of chopped chili peppers to a meal once a day. Chili peppers are also an unexpected source of vitamin C.

Coffee

A study published in Physiology & Behavior found that the average metabolic rate of people who drank caffeinated coffee was 16% higher than that of those who drank decaf.
Green tea

The brew contains a plant compound called EGCG, which promotes fat-burning, research suggests.

Milk

Studies conducted by Michael Zemel, former director of The Nutrition Institute at the University of Tennessee, suggest that consuming calcium may help your body metabolize fat more efficiently.

Whole grains

Whole grains help your body burn more fat because they take extra effort to break down than processed grains, like white bread and pasta. Whole foods that are rich in fiber, like brown rice and oatmeal are your best bets.

Lentils

About 20% of women are iron deficient, which is bad news for your waistline — your body can’t work as efficiently to burn calories when it’s missing what it needs to work properly. One cup of lentils provides 35% of your daily iron needs.

 

Prawns Show Promise in parasite Control

MNN01222CHN

Reintroducing prawns to lakes and rivers in which they have been partially or fully lost may be a sustainable way of controlling the parasitic disease schistosomiasis, which kills more than 200,000 people every year in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, says a study.

Researchers have found some native prawns to be voracious predators of the freshwater snails that transmit schistosomiasis parasites and so could be used as a biological control, they report in a study in press in Acta Tropica.

Field tests are under way in Senegal, and researchers suggest that farming the edible prawns could help local populations cut disease while also providing an additional source of income.

“Prawns may offer a simple and affordable transmission control solution in rural poor communities where few alternatives exist and drug treatment is failing to achieve long-term disease reductions,” the study says.

People get infected from contact with water containing schistosomiasis parasites, which are released by infected snails.

Although people who carry schistosomiasis can be treated with the drug praziquantel, reinfection from fresh exposure to infested waters hampers disease control and eradication.

In laboratory experiments, researchers based in the United States set out to measure the rate at which prawns eat uninfected snails. They found that they consume an average of 12 per cent of their body weight in snails each day.

The researchers also found that young prawns that are still growing are more efficient at controlling snail numbers than large, fully-grown prawns. The larger prawns ate more snails but the smaller ones were more efficient as they ate more snails per gram of body weight and fed on snail eggs and hatchlings, too, the study shows.

These results support the idea of the aquaculture of native prawns, and their reintroduction to freshwater bodies where their numbers have fallen, the authors say.

When prawns are too small to be sold at market they are “high-efficiency snail killers”, says Susanne H. Sokolow, lead author of the study and a researcher at Stanford University in California. “When they grow and their efficiency declines, we can harvest them.”

Source: All Africa

 

NHL injuries cost an estimated $218M US a year

About half of NHL players suffer an injury such as a concussion that benches them, costing the league an estimated $218 million in lost time, say Canadian doctors who want arenas to be safer workplaces.

About 63 per cent of National Hockey League players missed at least one game because of an injury over three seasons between 2009 and 2012, researchers said in Monday’s issue of the British Medical Journal’s Injury Prevention.

The injuries added up to a total salary cost of about $218 million US a year.

“While league owners and management are wary of making changes to the game to decrease aggression that could in turn affect profits, they must also consider the costs of injuries,” Dr. Michael Cusimano, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and his co-authors concluded.

“It is hoped that consideration of these costs will provide sufficient motivation for professional sports leagues like the NHL to consider taking further action to prevent player injuries.”

Cusimano is particularly concerned about concussions, which he said is related to violent acts in 88 per cent of cases.
The researchers pegged salary loss to concussions at $42.8 million a year. After head/neck injuries, leg and foot injuries were the most common injury in the sample, accounting for 30 per cent of the total cost and about $68.2 million.

They estimated games lost to concussions cost insurance companies $7.2 million a year and teams $15 million a year. Insurance companies pick up part of the salary tab for players with long-term injuries.

Head shot rule changes enough?

In 2010, the NHL enacted Rule 48, banning blindside hits to the head. The following season, the rule was expanded to include targeted head shots from any direction.

Both of these seasons were included in the study. Cusimano said the findings show the need for stiffer penalties, such as red cards in soccer that mean losing a player for the game.

The full costs of injuries are greater than estimated if the costs of treatment, personal suffering, potential later lost income and future medical care are considered.

At a practice, some Toronto Maple Leafs players said there’s not much more that the league can do.

“I think it’s always going to be a dangerous game,” said forward Joffrey Lupul. “The league is doing a great job taking some of the high hits away and the checking from behind and those are two cases where there’s been a lot of injuries.”

Fellow forward James van Riemsdyk said he’s seen improvements over the last couple of years.

“Instead of hitting him in the head, you’re making more of an effort to hit in a place where you’re not going to basically kill him,” he said.

A concussion lawsuit against the NHL originally launched by 10 former players argues the league did not do enough to protect them from concussions. The NHL has said it intends to defend it case.

In August 2013, the National Football League agreed to pay nearly $800 million US to settle lawsuits from thousands of former players over concussion-related brain injuries.

The NHL did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study’s findings from CBC News.

Source: CBC news

 

Hesperia woman gives birth to 15-pound baby

15 pound

A woman from Hesperia delivered what could be one of the largest babies born in the United States in 2014

Vanessa Cervantez, 28, gave birth to Andrew Jacob, who weighed in at a whopping 15 pounds, 2 ounces, by an emergency cesarean section. He was 24 inches long.

“I couldn’t even believe it,” Cervantez said by phone Saturday. “They had to double check because I didn’t believe them; I thought the machine was broken.”

Cervantez said that doctors told her it was the largest baby they had ever delivered at Desert Valley.

“None of the doctors have ever delivered or heard of a baby being born that big here,” Cervantez said. “My sister’s been doing research and she doesn’t think a baby weighing 15 pounds has ever been born in California.”

According to media reports, the largest baby born in the United States in 2013 reportedly weighed 14 pounds and was delivered in Utah. Guinness World Records show that Ann Bates of Canada gave birth to the biggest newborn, in 1879, when her baby weighed in at 23 pounds, 12 ounces.

Cervantez said she is 5’1” and heavyset, and was 38 weeks along at the baby’s birth. She went in for a routine pregnancy stress test on Thursday when doctors discovered decreased fetal movement. That is when the decision was made to conduct a C-section the same day, Cervantez said. The mother of three said she was expecting a large baby, but wasn’t prepared for one weighing 15 pounds.

“My other ones have also been big,” Cervantez said. “My son was 10 pounds, 10 ounces and my daughter was 9 pounds, 14 ounces.”

Due to patient confidentiality laws, a nurse at Desert Valley in the labor and delivery department said she couldn’t go on record about the details of the birth. However, she said the mother has documentation confirming the baby’s weight.

Baby Andrew was immediately sent by air flight to Loma Linda Children’s Hospital following his birth, Cervantez said. She said she hadn’t been able to hold him yet and was waiting to be discharged from the hospital as of Saturday afternoon.

“He’s having trouble breathing on his own,” Cervantez said, “that’s what they’re monitoring him for right now.”

Daniel Cervantez, 29, is the baby’s father and was spending time with him at the hospital in Loma Linda on Saturday, Vanessa Cervantez said. Briana Pastorino, a spokeswoman for Loma Linda, confirmed that a baby by the name of Andrew Cervantez was in the neonatal intensive care unit, but she said she couldn’t release more information about the patient.

Source: VVDaily Press