A Mayo Clinic surgical team has found that using a 3-Tesla MRI in surgical decision making provides a new level of capability to predict surgical outcomes that improves patient care by minimizing the potential for unsuccessful tumor-removal surgeries. The Mayo Clinic report appears in the December issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery.
Cardiac surgeons in New York State who are less experienced with the recently introduced off-pump techniques in coronary bypass surgery are more likely to perform such operations on black patients, according to new research.
In “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Geordi La Forge is a blind character who can see through the assistance of special implants in his eyes. While the Star Trek character “lives” in the 24th century, people living in the 21st century may not have to wait that long for the illuminating technology.
Pancreatic cancer patients 65 or older who live five years after surgery have nearly as good a chance as anyone to live another five years. Researchers reviewed records of 890 pancreatic cancer patients who over a 30 year-period underwent surgery. They found 23 percent lived five years after surgery, half of whom were 65 or older. Some 65 percent lived another five years compared to 87 percent in the general population at age 70.
Preliminary research indicates that several specific genetic alterations are associated with the development of smoking-related head and neck skin cancers, according to a report in the Jan. 10 issue of JAMA.
Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) recently made significant strides toward settling a decades-old debate centering on the role played by stem cells in cancer development. According to the study’s findings, which appear in an upcoming issue of Nature Genetics and now available online, genes that are reversibly repressed in embryonic stem cells are over-represented among genes that are permanently silenced in cancers; this link lends support to the increasingly discussed theory that cancer is rooted in small populations of stem cells.
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found how two molecules fight in the blood to control the spread of cancer cells.
An inexpensive tracing agent used in combination with ultrasound can pinpoint how effectively drugs targeting pancreatic cancer work, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have demonstrated for the first time.
Utilization of cancer treatments with limited evidence of benefit may depend on the therapy’s availability according to a new study. The study reveals that patients with pancreatic cancer were almost twice as likely to receive radiotherapy, for which there is more controversy regarding efficacy, when the treating hospital had radiotherapy available compared to patients who were treated at centers where radiotherapy was not available.
Ashley had a normal birth, but her mental and motor faculties did not develop. Over the years, neurologists, geneticists, and other specialists conducted every known traditional and experimental test, but still could not determine a diagnosis or a cause. Doctor?s call her condition ?static encephalopathy of unknown etiology?, which means an insult to the brain of unknown origin or cause, and one that will not improve.