Medical Health

Three of four studies published last Friday in Diabetologia showed a potential link between Lantus — an insulin analogue made by French drug company Sanofi-aventis — and increased risks for various tumor types.
But, “the duration of patient follow-up in all four studies was shorter than what is [...]

Receiving UVB treatment at a hospital can be difficult for patients with the chronic inflammatory skin condition because a course of treatment typically involves going to the hospital three times a week for eight to 10 weeks. In addition, many dermatologists believe home UVB treatment is inferior to, and carries more [...]

In a small study, Australian researchers found that almost half of people in an intensive care unit were deficient in vitamin D.
“Vitamin D deficiency is likely to be common in seriously ill patients,” said study author Dr. Paul Lee, an endocrinologist and research fellow at the Garvan Institute of [...]

About one in three thought that their doctor would be able to cure their diabetes or that they wouldn’t always have diabetes, while most didn’t know about the hemoglobin A1C test, a key gauge of long-term blood glucose control.
“The newly observed misconceptions and related predictors may represent important opportunities for targeting barriers [...]

People taking anticoagulants must be closely watched to prevent serious side effects such as blood clots and hemorrhage, which can be fatal. But, this type of monitoring is labor intensive, according to background information in the study.
The research involved 226 people who spoke English, did not have [...]

Some experts said the results suggested that doctors might one day be able to custom-produce blood vessels for patients with circulatory problems in their hearts or legs. Todd McAllister of Cytograft Tissue Engineering in California and colleagues implanted lab-grown blood vessels into 10 patients with advanced kidney disease in Argentina and Poland from 2004 to [...]

The tissue-engineered grafts were grown over a period of six months and tested in patients undergoing kidney dialysis.
“We had extremely good long-term performance,” said Dr. Todd McAllister, chief executive of Cytograft Tissue Engineering of California, whose study appears in the Lancet.
Many dialysis patients have their blood filtered through a plastic [...]

“The quality of life in patients with radiation-induced xerostomia is profoundly impaired,” study senior author Mark S. Chambers, a professor in the dental oncology department at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said in a news release from the center. “Symptoms can include altered taste acuity, dental decay, infections [...]

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will make a single payment to dialysis units to cover both dialysis and injectable medications. These services were previously reimbursed separately.
Because black kidney patients more often experience anemia (low hemoglobin) than white patients, they’re more likely to require more treatment with [...]

The drugs, olanzapine and quetiapine, were both associated with significant weight gain. In addition, patients who took olanzapine experienced increases in waist circumference and declines in HDL cholesterol.
The longer patients took the drugs, the more likely they were to experience significant weight gain. However, the weight gain occurred [...]