ProCPR Blog

Today I learned about another great advance in medical technology.  This one could be another very important step toward the eradication of cancer, and it was developed by a high school student.  Nanotechnology has helped 17-year-old Angela Zhang to develop what one fellow researcher’s calling the “Swiss Army knife of cancer treatment,” as her gold and iron-oxide nanoparticle does double duty delivering the drug salinomycin to the site of a tumor, in addition to aiding MRI and photoacoustic imaging.

Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifunctional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells – Biochemistry

MENTOR: Dr. Zhen Cheng, Stanford University

“I was surprised by the survival rate of patients who had undergone current cancer therapy.”

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The UCLA School of Dentistry has developed a new mouthwash that may completely eliminate cavities and tooth decay during our lifetime.  The new mouthwash targets Streptococcus mutans bacteria, primarily responsible for causing tooth decay and cavities.

The mouthwash, which is the result of nearly ten years of research, could be a big step toward the eradication of all forms of tooth decay.

In a recent clinical study, 12 subjects who rinsed just one time with the experimental mouthwash experienced a nearly complete elimination of the S. mutans bacteria over the entire four-day testing period. The findings from the small-scale study are published in the current edition of the international dental journal Caries Research.

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Recently there has been a lot of talk about how doing CPR to the 100 beat-per-minute song Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees was the way to go.  It has the proper number of beats per minute, and can potentially keep you on pace correctly.  Another song that fits the mold, albeit a morbid one, would be Another One Bites the Dust by Queen.

There has been other research, meanwhile, indicated that a childrens’ song called “Nellie the Elephant” was better.  I have never heard of that song, so I’m not sure how many would think of it and be able to apply that if they were in a position where they needed to do CPR.

New research has been conducted at the Malcolm Woollard of Coventry University in Britain, where they conducted an experiment with 74 delegates attending an Australian College of Ambulance Professionals conference in New Zealand.  The delegates had volunteered to perform CPR on a training dummy.

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This is a subject that is very close to my heart, and likely close to many of yours as well.  While it doesn’t have much to do with CPR, use of this font could help people learn CPR indirectly.  According to the National Institutes of Health, in the U.S., one out of every five persons is dyslexic.  There are many different levels of dyslexia, so one font can’t help everyone with the disorder, but the font has helped many in tests so far.  I’ve got a mild form of dyslexia, which greatly slows my reading speed and comprehension, and reading the article about the font, written with the font, I found it really helped.

Whereas the majority of typography designers want their fonts to be aesthetically pleasing (think of the flowing serifs of Lucida Calligraphy or the chiseled lines of Arial), Boer was more concerned with reading comprehension. He estimates that the time he spent designing his font added up to 15 hours per letter. He even recruited dyslexic college pals for feedback.

One of the first things he did was increase the boldness of letters at their bases, to make them appear weighted, causing readers’ brains to know not to flip them upside down, as can occur with “p” and “d.” Boer also enlarged the openings of various letters, such as “a” and “c,” to make them more distinguishable from one another, and increased the length of “the tail” of other letters, like the “g” and y.” He also put certain letters at a slant so that they would appear to be in italics, like the “j,” a tactic to increase the brain’s ability to distinguish it from the letter “i.” Finally, he boldfaced capital letters and punctuation, and provided ample space between letters and words, to allow the brain more time to compute the letters and begin forming them into words and sentences.

Read more at Scientific American (read the article in the Dyslexie font (pdf))

Order the Font from his website (Available in English and Dutch)

Tricking the immune system can help to make the allergen safer and to prevent the body’s life-threatening reaction.  Researchers found that they could trick the immune system into thinking that nut proteins aren’t a threat to the body.  The preclinical study achieved peanut tolerance by attaching peanut proteins onto blood cells and reintroducing them into the body.  Using this approach may also allow more than one food allergy to be targeted at a time.

“We think we’ve found a way to safely and rapidly turn off the allergic response to food allergies,” said Paul Bryce, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of allergy-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Bryce and Stephen Miller, professor of microbiology-immunology at Feinberg, are co-senior authors of a paper published in the Journal of Immunology.
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Americans are relying more and more on social media, mobile technology and online news outlets to learn about ongoing disasters, seek help and share information about their well-being after emergencies, according to two new surveys conducted by the American Red Cross.

The surveys, one by telephone of the general population and a second online survey, continue to show that the vast majority of Americans believe response organizations should be both monitoring social media during disasters and acting quickly to help.

“Social media is becoming an integral part of disaster response,” said Wendy Harman, director of social strategy for the American Red Cross. “During the record-breaking 2011 spring storm season, people across America alerted the Red Cross to their needs via Facebook.  We also used Twitter to connect to thousands of people seeking comfort, and safety information to help get them through the darkest hours of storms.”

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Alzheimer’s disease is a very scary thing to go through.  Oftentimes the person going through it recognizes that they are, as they become less and less able to recall some of the simplest things.  There is currently a study on the effectiveness of improv on the well-being of Alzheimer’s patients.

“Improv is all about being in the moment, which for someone with memory loss, that is a very safe place,” says Mary O’Hara, a social worker at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Maybe thinking about the past and trying to remember makes the person a little anxious or even a bit sad because their memory is failing. And maybe thinking about the future too much is also anxiety-provoking. So being in the moment is such a safe and a good place to be.”

-via NPR

More information: Chicago News

The United States’ Food and Drug Administration has just approved a new drug to fight HIV in combination with other antiretrovirals that are already on the market.  The drug is called Edurant, and it was made by New Jersey based Tibotec Therapeutics.  It works by blocking the HIV from replicating and is part of a class of drugs known as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor.

“Patients may respond differently to various HIV drugs or experience varied side effects,” said Edward Cox, director of the office of antimicrobial products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

“FDA’s approval of Edurant provides an additional treatment option for patients who are starting HIV therapy.”

-via

The FDA also approved a long awaited drug for the treatment of Hepatitis C, which was developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals.  The drug is called Incivek, and it is so effective that the chances of a person being cured of the disease double with its’ use.  This drug works in combination with others such as ribavirin and pegylated interferon.  It was unanimously approved by the FDA, and Vertex founder and former CEO Joshua Boger remarked that this is “a great day for patients that we at Vertex envisioned almost 18 years ago.”

-via

Back in December, Time released their annual list of the top ten medical breakthroughs.  I completely forgot about this list until today, and figured that it was better late than never.

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Have you ever wondered just how much help wearing a medical mask is?  It doesn’t seem like it would be a whole lot, considering how thin they are, but a new study has shown that they provide greater help than was previously thought.

Crosstex International, a subsidiary of Cantel Medical Corp., announced today the publication of sponsored research that suggests a far greater infection prevention value of medical face masks, commonly referred to as surgical masks, than previously understood. The key outcome challenges conventional wisdom that a medical mask or respirator is most effective when worn by a person attempting to protect oneself from exposure to infectious matter.  Instead, if FDA-cleared medical face masks are worn at the potential source of the infection, the level of overall protection is magnified up to 300-fold.  Published in the September issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the research study, entitled “Quantifying Exposure Risk and Mask Protection”, was conducted by Keith Diaz, MD, and Gerald Smaldone, MD, PhD, at Stony Brook University Medical Center in Stony Brook, NY.

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