DR. C REVIEWS MAJOR HEALTH AND TELEMEDICAL NEWS FOR THE WEEK ENDING AUGUST 30, 2020.
Category Archives: Medicine
INFOGRAPHICS: “PROSTATE CANCER – HOW TO FACE IT”
INFOGRAPHICS: “DYSPHAGIA – DIFFICULTY IN SWALLOWING”
DR. C’S PODCAST: WEEKLY MEDICAL NEWS (AUG 23)
DR. C REVIEWS MAJOR HEALTH AND TELEMEDICAL NEWS FOR THE WEEK ENDING AUGUST 23, 2020.
STANFORD: RESEARCHERS FIND WAY TO “REGROW” NEW CARTILAGE IN JOINTS
The Stanford researchers figured out how to regrow articular cartilage by first causing slight injury to the joint tissue, then using chemical signals to steer the growth of skeletal stem cells as the injuries heal. The work was published Aug. 17 in the journal Nature Medicine.
“Cartilage has practically zero regenerative potential in adulthood, so once it’s injured or gone, what we can do for patients has been very limited,” said assistant professor of surgery Charles K.F. Chan, PhD. “It’s extremely gratifying to find a way to help the body regrow this important tissue.”
STANFORD MEDICINE (Aug 17, 2020): Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered a way to regenerate, in mice and human tissue, the cushion of cartilage found in joints.
Loss of this slippery and shock-absorbing tissue layer, called articular cartilage, is responsible for many cases of joint pain and arthritis, which afflicts more than 55 million Americans. Nearly 1 in 4 adult Americans suffer from arthritis, and far more are burdened by joint pain and inflammation generally.
COMMENTARY
Stanford has come up with a Promising new approach to the surgical treatment of osteoarthritis. Unfortunately for the suffering public, this approach is still in the rodent experimental stage.
The pain of osteoarthritis is caused by the LOSS of the CARTILAGE which insulates the bone of the joints. The wonderful cartilage coating prevents the pain which would result from the rubbing of bone on bone. The best solution in osteoarthritis would be to replace the cartilage, and I have no doubt that this will be possible some day.
STEM CELLS is the theoretical method most commonly imagined when it comes to replacing lost tissue.. Brain cells, cardiac muscle cells, and pancreatic islet cells are some of the research areas. The development of stem cells from the cells of the Patient herself (iSCs) obviates the need for immunosuppression, which plagues allographs ( stem cells or organs from other humans).
Recently, in situ transformation of neighboring cells has been described, which sidesteps the need to introduce any cells. For instance the transformation of astrocytes (a type of brain cell) into neuronal stem cells of the dopamine lineage would be a great boon to Parkinson’s disease.
The Stanford method somewhat resembles this last-mentioned technique. An injury is created where the cartilage is desired. Like any injury, bleeding, clotting, and cell infiltration follows, destined to form a scar. However, the researchers added BMP-2, which in this milieu causes the pro-fibroblasts to head toward the bone (osteoblast) lineage. Since cartilage forms first in a tissue destined to be bone, they then added a VEGF antagonist, which interrupts the transformation in the desired cartilage stage. Both BMP-2 and anti-VEGF have already been approved for use, facilitating the development of this attractive therapy.
The researchers have even identified an excellent potential Patient Population: Osteoarthritis patients scheduled for surgical removal of the first metacarpal articulation with the wrist. They could do their procedure on this area, and if there is no benefit, They could just go ahead with the original plan of removal. The thumb happens to be one of my most painful arthritic areas.
I will most interestedly follow their research.
–Dr. C.
Dr. C’s Medicine Cabinet: Benefits Of “Nootkatone”
INSECTS are mainly pests. Except for the very commercially valuable Pollinators, Honeybees, the other useful insects, like ladybugs, dragonflies and spiders are beneficial because they eat other insects. It is very exciting, then, to hear about a pleasantly-smelling insect repellent that is quite harmless to Humans.
NOOTKATONE, after you get used to its ugly spelling, has an aromatic, Grapefruit-like smell. It was discovered while researching the CEDAR family. We all know of the association between Cedar and storage. One of my prized possessions was a Cedar chest for storing our families ski clothes.
Whenever I hear of a non-toxic chemical that repels and sometimes kills mosquitos, ticks, bedbugs and fleas, and yet is so harmless as to be used in perfumes, I like to hear of a proposed MECHANISM OF ACTION.
Nootkatone is thought to work by stimulating octopamine receptors, which insects use to make their muscles work. The muscles just keep on contracting and the insects die. The only problem is that Nootkatone is mainly a repellant, and a weaker insecticide.
Another good quality of Nootkatone is that the effect lasts several hours, in contrast to citronella and the other plant oils. Interestingly, the substance was isolated from grapefruit some 25 years ago, while looking for a repellant for the tick of Lyme disease.
Anaplasmosis and Rocky mountain spotted fever are 2 other tick-transmitted diseases present in America. Nootkatone is particularly effective against ticks, and is now EPA-approved.
–Dr. C.
Technology: SCIENTISTS DEVELOP SMARTPHONE APP TO DETECT “DIABETES” (UCSF)
Overall, the algorithm correctly identified the presence of diabetes in up to 81 percent of patients in two separate datasets. When the algorithm was tested in an additional dataset of patients enrolled from in-person clinics, it correctly identified 82 percent of patients with diabetes.
In the Nature Medicine study, UCSF researchers obtained nearly 3 million PPG recordings from 53,870 patients in the Health eHeart Study who used the Azumio Instant Heart Rate app on the iPhone and reported having been diagnosed with diabetes by a health care provider. This data was used to both develop and validate a deep-learning algorithm to detect the presence of diabetes using smartphone-measured PPG signals.
Among the patients that the algorithm predicted did not have diabetes, 92 to 97 percent indeed did not have the disease across the validation datasets. When this PPG-derived prediction was combined with other easily obtainable patient information, such as age, gender, body mass index and race/ethnicity, predictive performance improved further.
MEDICINE: LUNG CANCER DEATHS DROP AS TARGETED THERAPIES IMPROVE (NEJM)
NEJM (Aug 13, 2020) – Population-level mortality from NSCLC in the United States fell sharply from 2013 to 2016, and survival after diagnosis improved substantially. Our analysis suggests that a reduction in incidence along with treatment advances — particularly approvals for and use of targeted therapies — is likely to explain the reduction in mortality observed during this period.
“The survival benefit for patients with non-small cell lung cancer treated with targeted therapies has been demonstrated in clinical trials, but this study highlights the impact of these treatments at the population level,” said Nadia Howlader, Ph.D., of NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, who led the study. “We can now see the impact of advances in lung cancer treatment on survival.”
NEW MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY: UC DAVIS SCIENTISTS INVENT WORLD’S FIRST TOTAL-BODY PET SCANNER (VIDEO)
UC Davis Health scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi spent 15 years developing the world’s first total-body PET scanner, called EXPLORER. This imaging machine scans a patient’s entire body at one time, delivering breathtaking image quality that improves patient diagnoses and disease research.
UC Davis Cultivating Health blog: https://health.ucdavis.edu/cultivatin…
INFOGRAPHIC: PROLONGED COVID-19 SYMPTOMS – “A MULTI-SYSTEM DISEASE” (BMJ)
COMMENTARY
COVID 19 is a nasty disease, in case you hadn’t noticed. It is SNEAKY: you can catch it from a person who has no symptoms.
It is UNPREDICTABLE: you may develop no symptoms or Die from it. It can affect any part of your body, including HEART and BRAIN.
And now we hear that it can DRAG ON. The outstanding infographic, “a multi-systems disease, which is intended for PRIMARY CARE PROVIDERS, has a lot to offer patients, who can do a lot to Care for themselves:
- –They can get a THERMOMETER and a PULSE OXIMETER to watch their own temperatures and oxygen saturations
- –They can monitor their own COMORBIDITIES, like Diabetes and HYPERTENSION, which are common with severe Covid. In patients who get very ill .
- –They can watch their GENERAL HEALTH, including SLEEP and DIET (the exercise part is relegated to DOCTORS recommendations).
You should also RESTRICT Alcohol, Caffeine and it goes without saying CIGARETTE SMOKING. Of course PREVENTION, with DISTANCING, MASKING and being Outside, coupled with SLEEP, DIET and EXERCISE is always best.
Doctors Without Waiting Rooms 