Your Guide To Home Health Care

Visiting the Emergency Room Without Waiting in Line?

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:47:57 +0000

A company, InQuickER, founded by Tyler Kiley out of Dalton, Georgia is creating a business allowing patients to go online and check into a emergency room. “With InQuickER, patients skip the ER waiting room by registering online and waiting at home.” Clients can find the emergency room near them that will see in the least amount of time and schedule a time to be seen at the emergency room so that they don’t have to wait in the emergency room lobby for hours until they are seen.

Their claim: InQuickER will “drastically cut ER waiting room times from several hours or more down to 15 minutes or less”. In fact, InQuickER has a guarantee, “When you register online using the InQuickER service, our promise is that you will be seen by a Physician or a Physician Assistant within 15 minutes of your selected time”. In fact, if you wait more than 15 minutes, there will be no charge for your ER treatment.

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Findings Published on New Drug For Stroke Prevention

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:14:09 +0000

For years, the primary method of stroke prevention has been the use of a drug more frequently used as a method of killing vermin. Warfarin, commonly known as “rat poison” has been used on patients considered to be at risk of strokes. It has, to the present day, been deemed very effective in doing so due to its blood-thinning capabilities. However, those same capabilities have had some negative results along with the positive ones. Cuts and stomach ulcers have led to excessive bleeding, and certain acidic foods have been known to react badly with it. The search has continued for a stroke prevention drug without the negative effects of Warfarin.

It seems now as though the search may have raised a preferable alternative. The drug does not suffer from the same side-effects as Warfarin, and additionally has been proven in clinical testing to be 34% more effective in reducing the risk of strokes in patients considered to be at risk. The drug, known as Pradaxa, has seen death rates reduced by 15%. These results come after three years of testing on more than 18,000 patients, over more than forty countries – the largest trial of its kind ever to be carried out.

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Newer Tests for Detecting Heart Attacks More Quickly

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:26:07 +0000

An article in the August 27th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports on two studies investigating quicker ways to identify heart attacks for patients coming to an emergency room with heart attack symptoms. The study councluded that newer blood tests were more accurate at identifying heart attacks than the current methods. These newer blood tests more quickly detect elevated levels of troponin, which is a heart muscle protein.

One study was lead by a team of researchers at Johnannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. They studied 1818 people who came to a emergency room with chest pain. The other study was done by cardiologists at the University Hospital in Basel, switzerland. Researchers in this study looked at 718 patients coming to the emergency room with heart attack symptoms.

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Gene Therapy has Helped Three Legally Blind Patients

admin — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:06:09 +0000

The NIH National Eye Institute (NEI) at the National Institutes of Health has conducted clinical trials by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the University of Florida, Gainesville. After a year, three patients, ages 22 to 25, who recieved the gene therapy have continued to show gains and visual improvements.

The gene therapy is used for a form of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), which has been an untreatable hereditary condition that causes severe vision loss and blindness in infants and children. LCA causes mutations in the RPE65 gene. A protein made by this gene is a crucial component needed for eyes to function.

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Want to have access to your kid’s immunization records via the phone?

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 22:48:03 +0000

Have you ever gone to a doctor and wished you had remembered to have your insurance information or that you had a record of when your child had his or her last vaccination? Well, now you can enter all that information online and have it available on your mobile phone.

As of May 2009, AllOne Mobile secured by Diversinet went live with a secure mobile consumer direct PHR (personal health record) solution that is offered by Microsoft’s HealthVault. The product is now available for purchase for $25 per year. The link to the solution is http://healthvault.com/websites/AllOneHealth-AllOneMobile.html?type=application.

The application has been designed to give users secure and immediate access to a host of personal information. Diversinet is the company that provides authentication and security technologies for the wireless devices so that you feel safe to store such information on a phone.

What does this mean?

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Just How Many Bacteria are On the Human Body?

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:37:34 +0000

A recently completed study by Dr. Julia Segre, a senior investigator for the National Human Genome Research Institute, and her colleagues has collected bacterial samples from a racially diverse gropu of 10 volunteers. 112,283 organisms were collected in all. What they found was groundbreaking, if not for the only reason that such a study has never been done.

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New Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Vaccine Tested in Mice

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:46:10 +0000

Medicago, a biotech out of Quebec City Canada that is expecting to enter clinical trials with an avian flu vaccine this year, has just announced, only 14 days after receiving the DNA sequence for the influenza A (H1N1) virus, positive results on an immunogenicity study in mice. Results demonstrated that the Company’s H1 VLP vaccine induced a positive immune response in mice against the H1N1 influenza virus, also know as swine flu.

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New Method for Fighting the AIDS Virus

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:24:18 +0000

A team lead by Dr. Philip R. Johnson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and his colleagues published results on a new method to fight the AIDS virus in the journal Nature Medicine. The research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Dieseases.

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Stem-Cell Therapy Successful in Altering Defective Gene

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:14:33 +0000

A team of researchers has announced combined stem cell-gene therapy that has corrected a defective gene in cells taken from patients with a disorder called Fanconi Anemia. The study was published on May 31, 2009 in the magazine Nature.

The team of researchers have collaborated from several institutions, including the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and the Centre for Regenerative Medicine of Barcelona, CIEMAT in Madrid, and The Salk Institute for Bilogical Studies in La Jolla, Ca. Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine of Barcelona comments, “We haven’t cured a human being, but we have cured a cell. In theory we could transplant it into a human and cure the disease.”

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Two Proteins linked to Inflamation Found to Indicate Poor Outcomes in Breast Cancer Patients

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:38:26 +0000

The results of a new study published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on May 26, 2009, suggest that those breast cancer patients with elevated levels of two proteins were two to three times more likely to die and/or have their cancer return compared to those patients that didn’t have the elavated levels. Data from the the Health, Eating, Activity and Lifestyle (HEAL) study was used. The findings did not vary significantly based on other major factors like a “patient’s age, tumor stage, race, body mass index, or history of previous cardiovascular issues.”

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