May 11th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
Arthritis affects 21% of the population and the most common cause of disability in the United States.
Diabetes affects 7% of the American population–nearly a third unaware that they have the disease.
Patients with both arthritis and diabetes are caught in a conundrum. Physical activity is painful, yet their diabetes improves with physical activity. According to the [...]
May 10th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
Strict government oversite of opioid medications force physicians to balance the needs of their patients with demands from the government for better control of opioid medications. Fifty years ago cancer patients were denied opioids for their pain because of possible addiction.
Srinivasa Raja, MD, professor of anesthesiology, Johns Hopkins University Medical School, reports that less than 3% [...]
May 9th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
One of the complications from diabetes is blindness known as diabetic macular edema (DME). DME is characterized by swelling of the central portion of the retina (or macula) at the back of the eye. It is one of the most common causes of blindness, which occurs when fluid and protein deposits collect on or under [...]
May 8th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
Men and women differ on their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
French researchers studied nearly 7,000 people over 65 years from the general population of 3 French cities. None of the subjects had dementia, but 4 out of 10 had mild cognitive impairment at the onset of the study. At 2 and 4 years the participants [...]
May 7th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
Why diabetic patients are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease has not been understood. Researchers believe they may have identified the diabetes - Alzheimer’s connection.
David R. Schubert, PhD, professor Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, reports that blood vessels in the brain of young diabetic mice are damaged by the interaction of elevated blood [...]
May 6th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
Among nursing home residents the 2 most common medical conditions are dementia and urinary incontinence; often they coexist. The problem is that the drugs used to treat each condition are pharmacological opposites, which can reduce the effectiveness of one or both drugs.
Kaycee M. Sink, MD, MAS, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and colleagues, studied [...]
May 5th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
A relatively new and effective class of oral antidiabetic agents, thiazolidinediones, have gained in popularity and widely used to treat diabetic patients with insulin resistance. Two of the more popular drugs from this class are prioglitazone and rosiglitazone, which account for 21% of oral diabetes medications prescribed in the United States and 5% of those [...]
May 4th, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive brain disorder that affects motor skills, which worsen as the disease advances. It is thought that in the early stages of the disease the brain begins to reduce the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine. The reduced amount of dopamine results in trembling in the hands, arms, legs, and jaw. [...]
May 3rd, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
After a visit to the doctors office you want to believe that his or her diagnosis is accurate because it means you now have a path for recovery. The question is how often do doctors misdiagnose a patient’s symptoms?
The May issue of The American Journal of Medicine has a collection of articles relating to misdiagnoses [...]
May 2nd, 2008 by Richard Brassaw
Dementia is an umbrella term used to describe various cognitive degenerative diseases. A common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. A relatively rare hereditary form of dementia is frontotemporal dementia (FTD) with parkinsonism-17. Both of these forms of dementia share a common pathology–an over accumulation of tau proteins, which form tangled lesions in the brain’s neurons [...]
Category :
Arthritis and Lupus
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