Two days of post-surgical pain relief now possible with just one shot
... Every year, millions of Americans undergo painful procedures such as Cesarean sections, hip and knee replacemen...ry. The many methods of relieving pain after such procedures include some that require catheters or IV (intravenous) lines. DepoDur (morphine sulfate extended-r...November/December 2004 Annals of Family Medicine tip sheet
...ppointments, including fear and anxiety about both procedures and bad news. Fifteen participants (44 percent) commented on issues of respect by the health care system, commenting that the health care staff did not respect patients, discounting their time, opinions and feelings. Forty-one percent of patients ind...Outpatient lung cancer procedure promising for inoperable disease
...y and colleagues studied 155 image-guided RFA lung procedures over six years on 126 medically inoperable patient...ents we treated were poor surgical candidates, the procedures went very well," Dr. Dupuy said. "Our complication rate was low, and morbidity and mortality rates w...New stroke prevention therapy as effective as invasive surgery
...s used minimally invasive angioplasty and stenting procedures typically used for heart disease to treat carotid ...enosis after treatment (4%). "Today, these procedures are largely used for the heart, but I think that in the future they will be used for every artery an...Simple intervention nearly eliminates catheter-related bloodstream infections
...catheter insertions, and empowering nurses to stop procedures if the guidelines were not followed. They also calculated the number of infections that were prevented as well as the potential savings in health care costs associated with catheter infections. During the study, the catheter-related bloodstream i...Early results shed light on lung cancer screening advance
...r practitioners are generally following reasonable procedures in their work-up of positive CT screens."...Pain relief could be easy with a simple injection
... type of procedure. "Reserving these invasive procedures for patients who will receive the greatest benefit could have significant value by reducing unnecessary risk for adverse events, as well as significant economic benefit by limiting the costs associated with unnecessary procedures," states lead resear...NIH launches new study to compare prostate surgery and drugs
...ow and symptoms. Early studies suggest that these procedures reduce the occurrence of erection or bladder control side effects, which occur more often with the traditional surgery for BPH, known as transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP). TUNA and TUMT are said to be minimally invasive in part because ...Gastric bypass works for GERD and obesity in patients with prior surgery, says Pitt study
...in obese patients who have had previous antireflux procedures and continued to have problems with GERD. This small study involved seven patients who underwent laparoscopic gastric bypass after having antireflux surgery to control GERD. Patients' co-morbid medical conditions included sleep apnea, diabetes mellit...Custom-built facial implants helpful for patients with HIV and facial wasting syndrome
...V live longer, they are beginning to seek surgical procedures to help improve their appearance caused by the dis...s own fat, but frequent adjustments and additional procedures were often required. Custom designed implants tend to remain stable in their position after implant...Prenatal alcohol exposure has effects far beyond fetal alcohol syndrome
...she said. "We plan to use innovative neuroimaging procedures to help target when and where the damage occurs. By also identifying critical moderators of the relation between alcohol exposure and outcome, we hope to improve the ability to identify affected individuals and thus better understand the specific da...Morphine for chest pain increases death risk
...als on outcomes and on the use of proven drugs and procedures used to restore blood flow to the heart. From this registry, the researchers identified 57,039 high-risk patients with non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (non-STEMI), a categorization of heart attack based on electrocardiogram (ECG) readi...Drug-eluting stents adopted quickly, with early disparities
...months of 2003, the results of 162,969 angioplasty procedures were entered into the registry, with 83 percent of them involving the placement of a stent. "During that period, 35 percent of all angioplasties involved the placement of drug-eluting stent," Rao said. "The growth from quarter to quarter was dramatic...Angioplasty, robotically assisted keyhole bypass combo appears effective
..." If confirmed in larger trials, combining the two procedures should especially benefit patients with diabetes a... patients." Patients in the study underwent their procedures between July 2002 and December 2003. All had fatty deposits narrowing the heart's three main arteri...St. Jude scientist to lead NCI Pediatric Preclinical Testing Program
...gator. The program will develop procedures for generating sufficient preclinical information to allow pediatric oncology researchers to reliably prioritize new agents for study in children with specific cancers. The increasing number of anti-cancer agents potentially available for clinical te...Heart surgery patients receive less aggressive discharge care
...als on outcomes and on the use of proven drugs and procedures used to restore blood flow to the heart. ...hat had the capability to perform both angioplasty procedures and bypass surgery. Of the more than 64,000 patients entered into the registry from those hospitals ...Percutaneous edge-to-edge mitral valve repair shows favorable preliminary results
...ed in the cardiac catheterization lab, the initial procedures have taken approximately two to four hours. Under full anesthesia, a catheter (a thin, flexible plastic tube) is introduced through the skin in the thigh area and guided through the femoral veinto the affected area of the heart. A smaller delivery c...Heart arrhythmias easily treated, yet few know risks
...hysicians at Loyola perform more electrophysiology procedures than any other medical center in Illinois, and Wilber receives referrals for difficult-to-treat arrhythmias from physicians across the nation. "The heartbeat is controlled by electrical pathways that coordinate muscle contractions," explained...Coronary stents do not improve long-term survival
...and sustained reduction in the need for subsequent procedures to re-open the treated artery," Kandzari said. "Ho...of restenosis, we would expect the need for repeat procedures to decline even more as these stents become more widely used," Kandzari continued. "While earlier tr......iologists are following guidelines for angioplasty procedures to reopen blocked heart arteries that were issued in 2001 by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, and the result is uniformly better outcomes. That's the finding of a large new survey of 407,152 percutaneous coronar...