All news from General Surgery

Regulation Can Improve Surgery

According to a study, researchers evaluated that patients have good reason to worry about mistakes in the operating room and their chances of recovery. Surgeons currently work under a decentralized regulatory structure that undermines evidence-based surgical care.

Because of this structure, surgeons operate on patients using procedures that do not have a solid grounding in research, which can compromise patient safety. Darrow argues that federal agencies should fill the gap in the surgical literature by collecting evidence on surgical procedures, analyzing the data, and determining which of these procedures maximize patient welfare.

Patient's Pain And Suffering Treated With Palliative Care

Merriam-Webster defines the word palliate as a transitive verb that means "to reduce the violence of (a disease); also: to ease (symptoms) without curing the underlying disease." In other words, to palliate means to make a patient comfortable while treating his disease.

This definition should translate into actions being taken to relieve a patient's pain and suffering while doctors and others involved in his treatment work to make him better, or at least comfortable. The study was published with permission from the American Life League.

Nerve Stimulation Improves Quality Of Treatment In Depression Patients

According to a study, researchers estimated the quality-of-life(QOL) change associated with treatment as usual (TAU, any antidepressant treatment) versus adjunctive vagus nerve stimulation treatment (VNS + TAU) in a population of patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) for 5 years.

People with depression who are treated with nerve stimulation experience significant improvements in quality of life, even when their depression symptoms don't completely subside. The study was published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Complex Drugs For Detecting And Treating Patients At ED

The objective of the study, which began in 2016, was to identify illicit drugs that caused overdoses in patients at two hospital emergency departments in Maryland. At a time when drug overdoses are becoming more prevalent and lethal, a new report provides a snapshot of regional illicit drug use and, for the first time, highlights the complexity of detecting and treating patients at hospital emergency departments for a severe drug-related event.

Drug Overdoses

Emergency physicians were battling a spike in accidental drug overdoses and related deaths thought to be linked to a group of designer drugs called synthetic cannabinoids that mimic the chemicals in marijuana, known on the street as Spice or K2.

One doctor described "atypical overdoses," patients with breathing difficulties and constricted pupils who responded well to the opioid overdose-reversing drug naloxone, and then required sedation for acute agitation, violence, and hyperactivity, all unrelated to opiate withdrawal.

Threshold Effect In Audio-Visual Noise Decreases With Development

A study has shown there is a developmental shift in sensory dominance as children grow older. Even with an acute sense of hearing adults don't always pick up exactly what someone has said. That's because from childhood to adulthood we rely on vision to understand speech and this can influence our perception of sound. The research 'The threshold for the McGurk effect in audio-visual noise decreases with development' has been published in Scientific Reports.

Revealing Protein Interaction By Atomic Force Microscopy

For the first time, researchers have seen how proteins involved in the daily biological clock interact with each other, helping them to further understand a process tied to numerous metabolic and eating disorders, problems with shift work, jet lag and mental health issues.

Researchers used high-speed atomic force microscopy to visualize the kinetics of the proteins' interactions. In the presence of adenosine triphosphate, the energy currency of living cells the proteins rapidly and rhythmically bound to each other, leading to a regulative process called phosphorylation.

Their results, detailed in the article "Revealing circadian mechanisms of integration and resilience by visualizing clock proteins working in real time," were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Circadian Clock Protein BMAL1 Regulates IL-1? in Macrophages via NRF2

Researchers have revealed insights into how the body clock controls the inflammatory response, which may open up new therapeutic options to treat excess inflammation in conditions such as asthma, arthritis and cardiovascular disease. By understanding how the body clock controls the inflammatory response, they may be able to target these conditions at certain times of the day to have the most benefit.

These findings may also shed light on why individuals who experience body clock disruption such as shift workers are more susceptible to these inflammatory conditions. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a leading international multidisciplinary scientific journal.