Discover the Science of Health
In a move to re-engineer the process of translating scientific discoveries into new drugs, diagnostics, and devices, the National Institutes of Health has established the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). The action was made possible by Congress’ approval of a fiscal year 2012 spending bill and the president’s signing of the bill, which includes the establishment of NCATS with a budget of $575 million.
A New Orleans woman recently lost an arm to necrotizing fasciitis — the so-called “flesh-eating bacteria” — after injecting a drug called “bath salts,” according to a case study report in the medical journal Orthopedics [1]. She presented with cellulitis, a skin infection, two days after attending a party at which she injected the drug. The infection initially responded to administered antibiotics, but then worsened. The woman lost not only her arm, but her breast and a large portion of her chest wall to amputation. The significant removal of tissue was necessary to prevent the spread of the bacteria.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston are working on a robotic endoscope. The size of a large pill, the magnetic microswimmer is powered by strong magnetic fields generated by an MRI machine.
The technology was recently published in the journal Biomedical Microdevices. A 20mm long, 5mm wide swimming tail made of copper and flexible polymer vibrates due to the magnets in the MRI machine and propels the capsule endoscope in the stomach. Propulsion speed is on the order of several millimeter per second.
What makes this endoscope truly different from current “capsule endoscopies,” which involves swallowing a pill-sized camera that takes pictures continuously until it is passed, is that electronics and microsensors embedded in the robotic endoscope will allow an operator to manipulate the magnetic field and guide the movement of — literally steer — the device through the GI tract.
In the future, the microswimmer may allow doctors to find difficult-to-diagnose, early stage cancer or allow for treatments such as biopsies or local drug delivery.
It’s not you. You’re not imagining it. It really, actually, legitimately is harder to keep weight off than it is to lose it in the first place. You really do feel hungrier than you used to, and still the pounds keep creeping back on. This is the conclusion that Dr. Joseph Proietto and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne just published in the New England Journal of Medicine [1].
Lose weight image via ShutterstockA new series of billboard and television ads is outraging Georgians, who object to the “Stop Sugarcoating It, Georgia” campaign being run by the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta pediatric hospital. The ads depict overweight and obese children in a variety of settings, and are meant to shock parents into action.
