As more people are diagnosed with H1N1 influenza infection, some will be admitted to hospital. The most severely affected may be treated in the intensive care unit (ICU) and placed on a mechanical ventilator to help them breathe while they recover from the infection. While mechanical ventilation clearly saves the lives of many people felled by serious illness, in some cases, this supportive measur...

A new study is taking a closer look at the benefits versus risks for lung cancer patients to undergo preventative brain radiation therapy as a means to stop cancer from spreading to the brain. Study results show that while preventative brain radiation for patients with non-small cell lung cancer — the most common form of lung cancer — does reduce the chance of developing brain metastas...

Physician bias might be the reason why African Americans are not receiving kidney/pancreas transplants at the same rate as similar patients in other racial groups. Dr. Keith Melancon, director of kidney and pancreas transplantation at Georgetown University Hospital and associate professor of surgery at Georgetown University Medical Center, and colleagues explore this phenomenon in the November iss...

Compared to the general population, patients starting dialysis have an increased risk of death that is not attributable to a higher rate of death from cardiovascular causes, as previously thought, according to a study in the October 28 issue of JAMA. Several studies have shown that cardiovascular disease accounts for 40 percent to 50 percent of deaths in patients with end-stage kidney disease, acc...

More than half of patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) don`t get any counselling on their ability to drive after angioplasty — and this could be putting lives in danger, Dr. Ravi Bajaj told the 2009 Canadian Cardiovascular Congress, co-hosted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society. "If a patient is discharged from hospital following a cardiac e...

Several cell-based therapy approaches could provide new treatments for patients with Alport syndrome, reports an upcoming paper in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). "Our study opens up many considerations of how new therapies related to the use of stem cells can be devised for our kidney patients with chronic disease," comments Raghu Kalluri, MD, PhD (Harvard Medi...

Patients who die in the hospital in the United States are almost five times as likely to have spent part of their last hospital stay in the ICU than patients in England. What`s more, over the age of 85, ICU usage among terminal patients is eight times higher in the U.S. than in England, according to new research from Columbia University that compared the two countries` use of intensive care servic...

Difficult-to-treat asthma often may have more to do with patients who do not take their medication as instructed than ineffective medication, according to researchers in Northern Ireland. "[A] significant proportion of patients with difficult asthma are poorly adherent to inhaled and oral corticosteroid therapy," wrote principal investigator, Dr. Liam Heaney, of Belfast City Hospital. Th...

Doctors have less respect for their obese patients than they do for patients of normal weight, a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests. The findings raise questions about whether negative physician attitudes about obesity could be affecting the long-term health of their heavier patients. As patients had higher body mass index (BMI), physicians reported lower respect for them, according t...

Computed tomography (CT) scans are better than standard radiography (X-rays) in showing the extent of disease in patients with the H1N1 virus, according to a study to be published online Oct. 21, 2009, in the American Journal of Roentgenology. The study will be published in the December issue of the AJR. The study group consisted of seven patients with the H1N1 virus. All seven patients received c...