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AAA Warman Home Care’s E-Update is intended to bring to you timely and useful articles and information at the click of the mouse. It is sent monthly in an effort to keep you apprised of what is happening across the healthcare continuum of care effecting hospital, hospice and rehabilitation social workers and case managers, as well as Assisted Living, Independent Living and Skilled Nursing facility executives. Warman understands that time is limited and has undertaken to share with you important industry information without your having to search for it.
Exercise is an important part of recovering from an injury, illness or surgery, but many older adults lack the knowledge and guidance needed to properly perform exercises. University of Missouri researchers have developed technology to track exercise motions and provide feedback to patients to reduce the chances of future injuries and re-hospitalization.
The studies focused on older adults, a population that is often susceptible to falls and injuries due to loss of balance. Elders who exercise see benefits such as reduced likelihood of falls, better emotional and cognitive health, and improved cardiovascular function.
"If you go to a gym now, there is either no feedback or it is static," said Gregory Alexander, assistant professor of nursing at the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing and the College of Engineering. "This technology is interactive because it tracks motion that patients can actually see."
The images provided by the motion tracking technology provide detailed data that will help patients, physicians and therapists better visualize movements as patients exercise. This visualization will allow physicians and therapists to monitor recovery and adapt treatment plans, as well as give the patient a better picture of movements that may be potentially dangerous.
"Previous studies have conducted similar research in laboratory settings," said Tim Havens, who recently received a doctorate from the MU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Our system is unique because it extracts data out of images collected from participants in a real environment without changing the scene."
In the future, this technology will help healthcare providers stay connected with patients after they are discharged from the hospital. The technology can easily be set up in patients' homes to provide feedback and encouragement to improve their workouts or rehabilitation routines. It also can send messages about patients' progress to physicians in order to make better treatment decisions for patients who are far away and have less frequent office visits.
"Integrating engineering data with health data gives you a much more powerful ability to make a clinical decision," Alexander said.
Havens will continue his research at Michigan State University as a National Science Foundation Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow.
SOURCE: University of Missouri – Columbia, August 12, 2010
A high proportion of nursing facility residents were found to have low serum (blood) zinc concentrations during an observational study funded by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the National Institute on Aging. The scientists found that those with normal blood zinc concentrations were about 50 percent less likely to develop pneumonia than those with low concentrations.
The study was led by Simin Nikbin Meydani, director of the Nutritional Immunology Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University in Boston, Mass. ARS is the chief intramural scientific research agency of USDA.
HNRCA researchers have been studying immune response and respiratory infections in about 600 elderly residents in 33 nursing facilities in the Boston area. Meydani and colleagues previously reported that among the facility residents, those who consumed 200 international units (IU) of vitamin E daily for one year were 20 percent less likely to get upper respiratory infections, such as colds, than those who took a placebo.
The secondary analysis of data from the same clinical trial showed a high proportion of the residents had low serum (blood) zinc concentrations at baseline and after one year of follow-up. All participants had been supplemented with half of the recommended dietary allowance of essential vitamins and minerals, including zinc, during the trial.
Those with normal zinc status were not only less likely to develop pneumonia, they also had fewer new prescriptions for antibiotics, a shorter duration of pneumonia, and fewer days of antibiotic use compared with residents who had low zinc levels. In addition, mortality was lower in those with adequate blood zinc levels.
The study suggests that supplementation of zinc-deficient elderly may result in reduced risk of pneumonia. Still, the authors note that controlled clinical trials are needed to test efficacy of zinc supplementation as a low-cost intervention to reduce mortality due to pneumonia among vulnerable populations who already have low zinc levels.
These study results were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
SOURCE: USDA, Office of Research, Education and Economics, August 11, 2010
Scientists are reporting development of a substance to enhance the visibility of skin cancer cells during scans with an advanced medical imaging system that combines ultrasound and light. The hybrid scanner could enable doctors to detect melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, in its earliest and most curable stages, the report in the monthly journal ACS Nano indicates.
Lihong Wang, Younan Xia, and colleagues point out that early diagnosis is key to improving survival in patients with melanoma. The five-year survival rate for melanoma is about 98 percent if detected early but can be as low as 15 percent when detected at an advanced stage. Existing imaging techniques for early detection of melanoma produce low-quality images, can "see" only a fraction of an inch below the skin, and use potentially harmful radioactive materials. A promising new technique called photoacoustic tomography (PAT) can overcome these problems. The system shoots light into tumors, which slightly heats up the cancer cells and produces high frequency sound waves that provide images of the tumor. But the PAT system lacks an optimal contrast agent that can easily enter skin cancer cells and make them visible.
The scientists developed such an agent by attaching a peptide (one of the building blocks of proteins) that targets skin cancer cells to gold "nanocages." These hollow gold nanoparticles have a box-like shape and are barely 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. When injected into mice with skin cancer, the nanocages improved the image quality of the cancer cells by three-fold compared to nanoparticles lacking the peptide. The gold nanocages also show promise as a way to kill skin cancer cells using heat or anti-cancer drugs, they add.
Article:
"In Vivo Molecular Photoacoustic Tomography of Melanomas Targeted by Bioconjugated Gold Nanocages"
SOURCE: American Chemical Society, August 13, 2010
With the help of volunteers aged 18 to 89, UC Irvine researchers have identified for the first time in humans a long-hidden part of the brain called the perforant path. Scientists have struggled for decades to locate the tiny passage, which is believed to deteriorate gradually as part of normal aging and far more quickly due to Alzheimer's disease.
"The nice thing about this is we may be able to predict Alzheimer's very early," said Craig Stark, UCI associate professor of neurobiology & behavior.
That's what prompted Diana Burns of Anaheim to participate in the study. In late 2008, when she forgot yet again where she'd put her purse, and then couldn't remember why she was in the laundry room, Burns decided she had to know: Was she, like her aging mother, going to be a victim of the debilitating loss of brain function known as Alzheimer's disease?
"When you're a caregiver for somebody with Alzheimer's, you always wonder if it's going to happen to you," said Burns, who had quit her job to stay home the day her mother was found unconscious and bleeding half a mile from their house, with no idea how she got there. "I was becoming concerned because I myself was forgetting things, so I thought, 'Now is the time to find out.'"
Burns, 64, searched online for human clinical trials and found UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory. Soon Stark, the center's interim director, and his staff had her ensconced in their big MRI machine.
The UCI researchers developed and used a new ultrahigh-resolution technique - outlined in a paper published June 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - to electronically peer through dense matter near the brain's hippocampus in search of the perforant path.
The passageway is basically a bundle of nerve fibers, lined up like straws, connecting a region called the entorhinal cortex to the seahorse-shaped hippocampus. By monitoring the brains of Burns and others via their ultrahigh-resolution technique - know as diffusion tensor imaging - the UCI team was able to detect water molecules moving in the exact area where they knew the passage had to be. The scientists then painstakingly tracked the progress of the molecules along the length of the fiber bundle, thereby identifying the perforant path.
"There was definitely an 'aha' moment when we knew we had finally found it," said Mike Yassa, postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper. They were also able to measure the strength of the passageway, confirming that in normal brains it weakens gradually with age, reducing the capacity to quickly recall details but not wiping out memory.
The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Aging. With additional funding, the UCI team is now examining people with mild cognitive impairment - often the first stage of Alzheimer's. They expect to see far faster deterioration of the perforant path. Such a finding could aid the testing of new medicines.
"Let's say you're a drug company, and you think you've got a potentially effective treatment for slowing Alzheimer's," said Stark. "You want to try it on people in the most preliminary stages of that disease, not those just experiencing normal aging."
So what about Burns? Fortunately, the scientists detected no signs of dementia. Her data helped create a baseline image of a normal, aging brain. "I'm healthier than a horse," she joked, speaking via cell phone from a quilt show, where she was enjoying a rare day off from caring for her mother.
Burns is happy she volunteered for the trials - both because she got answers about her own memory and because the research may help others. "I couldn't donate money," she said, "but I could donate time."
SOURCE: University of California – Irvine, August 12, 2010
Scottsdale Healthcare is the only Arizona hospital system testing a new under-the-skin device that uses an electrical shock to interrupt possibly fatal heart rhythms, restoring a normal heartbeat for patients at high risk of sudden cardiac arrest.
The first Arizona patient received the device Thursday at Scottsdale Healthcare Shea Medical Center. Scottsdale Healthcare is the only Phoenix area hospital and one of only 35 in the world participating in the study.
The subcutaneous implantable cardioverter defibrillator (S-ICD) uses life-saving electrical impulses under the skin near the heart, instead of placing electrical wires through veins to access the heart used in conventional methods.
Clinical trials to study the S-ICD's safety and effectiveness are underway at Scottsdale Healthcare under the guidance of Thomas Mattioni, MD, medical director of electrophysiology.
"The S-ICD is unique because it is implanted entirely under the skin and does not need wire placement inside the heart, which should simplify surgery and eliminate the need for x-rays, reducing patient exposure to radiation," says Dr. Mattioni.
"This could be a big step forward in improving the safety of a well-established and highly effective therapy," he says Dr. Mattioni.
Potential patients will be screened to determine eligibility for the device study at Scottsdale Healthcare. Those with implanted conventional ICDs are not eligible, unless removal of that ICD is required for other reasons, explains Dr. Mattioni.
"Qualified patients are those whose cardiac diagnosis indicates the need for an ICD, among other criteria," he says. "Our goal is to significantly improve on current ICD therapy and reduce complications associated with transvenous leads, to simplify device implantation, programming and follow up, and ultimately save more lives."
Sudden cardiac arrest:
Sudden cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack, which is a loss of heart muscle caused by blockage is a vessel that supplies blood to the heart.
Manufactured by Cameron Health, Inc. of San Clemente, Calif., the S-ICD detected 100% of induced and spontaneous episodes of irregular heart rhythms in early studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine
SOURCE: Scottsdale Healthcare, August 7, 2010
AAA Warman Home Care is a family-owned Residential Service Agency which has been providing in-home health care services to thousands of clients for the past twenty years. Warman specializes in providing the highest quality of private duty, non-medical care and companionship for the elderly, those recuperating after hospitalization / rehabilitation, the terminally ill, disabled, alone or at-risk. It is our goal to assist our clients in living the most independent, healthy and comfortable lives in the privacy of their own homes.
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