Hospital care quality differs markedly by state: annual HealthGrades study
...y rates, which resulted in hundreds of lives being saved in those states during the same period. State-Level Hospital Quality for Percutaneous Coronary Interventions (PCI), Including Angioplasty, Stent and Atherectomy * Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands were analyzed, but results were not included ...Nordic collaboration gives new insights into adjuvant chemotherapy
...ferences in survival can translate into many lives saved in common cancers," he concluded....In childhood leukemia study, aggressive chemotherapy cuts deaths by 37%
...om a particularly deadly form of leukemia would be saved if doctors used three existing drugs more aggressively administering them at much higher doses and over a longer period of time. That is one of several important conclusions drawn from a long-term study, published in the October issue of the Journa...It's the neighborhood that matters in ALS, according to medical researchers
... neurons, involved in ALS can be either damaged or saved from degeneration by neighboring non-neuronal cells. The team reports that when non-neuronal cells harbor a genetic mutation associated with ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, they can cause damage in normal "motor neurons," the long and complex ...Stages of memory described in new study
...the file on the 'hard drive,' but instead of being saved in a matter of seconds like your computer file, a memory needs several hours to be saved." From there, the researchers went on to discover that the second stage of memory processing occurs during sleep and that it is "absolutely dependent on sleep i...Molecular test proves to be effective in measuring remission and relapse after cancer treatment
...lapse with treatment decisions that has ultimately saved lives. In a study published in the Oct. 9 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Tim Hughes at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide, Australia, Jerry Radich at Fred Hutchinson and Jaspal Kaeda at Hammersmith in Lond...... (DRGS) for the Social Security Administration had saved the Medicare program $50 billion since the 1980's. In contrast, the cost of developing DRGs was just $2 million. Prof. Carter recently began developing a sophisticated model of a complete hospital. The model is being applied in four large health ca...Study overcomes stroke care's biggest travesty
...y a tiny percentage of stroke victims who could be saved from death or lifelong disability by the quick delivery of emergency therapy actually get the right treatment in time. But a new study shows there might be a way to fight what stroke experts call one of the biggest travesties in the treatment of the ...Doris Duke Charitable Foundation selects Emory HIV/AIDS research team for innovation award
...cal monitoring labs. Indeed, many lives are being saved as a result of therapeutic advances. However, both the antiretroviral drugs and the clinical monitoring tools are very expensive and complex to use. Further, the technology needed for contemporary clinical monitoring tools involves complex, expensi...Study finds VA maintained quality despite shift to outpatient care
...nhibitors for congestive heart failure--might have saved patients from hospital visits and enhanced their survival. "These findings reflect well on the efforts undertaken by VA in the mid-1990s to make care more efficient and effective for veterans," said senior author Dr. Nelda P. Wray, formerly a physic...Cardiac MRI detects thinned heart muscle previously deemed unsalvageable
...Not only have we found thinned areas that could be saved by revascularization, we have learned some new concepts that will allow us to predict which of the thinned areas could be saved," said cardiologist Raymond Kim, M.D., co-director of the Duke Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Center and member of the ...Elderly women over-screened for cancers with little measurable benefit
...rall, this reduces the number of years that can be saved through screening." Ostbye is a professor in the department of community and family medicine at Duke. Although the use of mammography and Pap smears is lower among older women than middle-aged women, the Duke researchers cite data from two large popu...Patient outcomes are better indicator than patient volume for selecting hospitals for VLBW babies
...patient volume and more lives could potentially be saved if patient referrals were based on the former rather than the latter. The difference in mortality between the best and worst hospitals was more than 5 times larger when ranking hospitals on past-mortality rates compared with ranking hospitals on pas...Funding and distribution of inappropriate drugs add to rising global childhood malaria deaths
... principally among children, all of which could be saved by effective treatment. The ability to do this is undermined by drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum (the deadly species of the disease) to conventional treatments such as chloroquine, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, or the combination of these drugs....Computer-aided detection system for mammography does not change recall, detection rates
...rove, we hope that women's lives can ultimately be saved by this new technology," they write....Stroke news tips for Thursday, Feb. 5, 2004
...rtery screenings may have prevented 30 strokes and saved $1,944,210 in stroke care costs. The investigators attempted to prevent strokes by either removing the carotid blockages by an operation called carotid endarterectomy before a stroke occurred or by treating them medically depending on the severity ...Nevirapine plus zidovudine to prevent perinatal HIV in Thailand
...nsmission of HIV, many more infants' lives will be saved with the addition of a single dose of NVP to the mother and to the baby. The cost of these additional doses is only $US4. In the same study, resistance mutations, detectable very early after delivery, were found in about 20% of women who had recei...Sepsis drug also protects brain cells
...showed both in the laboratory and in mice that APC saved about 70 percent of the neurons that would have otherwise died. The benefit disappears if either PAR-1 or PAR-3 aren't working correctly. In addition to Zlokovic, Guo and Liu, the team from Rochester included Tong Cheng, research assistant profes...Implanted defibrillators not covered for half of patients who could benefit, study finds
... the patients were under Medicare, that would have saved Medicare, and therefore society, $989,000 annually...roximately two of the 140 patients a year would be saved from sudden cardiac death if all the patients received an ICD. Even if some of the 140 patients died...Doctor attacks South African government for failing women while spending billions on arms deals
...r Boulos. "This suggests that more lives could be saved if a study with sufficient power proves feasible. We may need about 30-50,000 women in total to provide a statistically significant answer." Dr Boulos concluded: "A substantial segment of women in the community are resistant to attempts to involve t...