Back Treatment For Elderly No Better Than Bogus One
Pain and disability were virtually the same up to six months later, whether patients had a real treatment or a fake one.
Tens of thousands of Americans each year are treated with bone cement, especially older women with osteoporosis, some of them stooped and unable to stand up straight. The treatment is so widely believed to work that the researchers had a hard time getting patients to take part when it was explained that half of them would not get the real thing.
“All of us who do the procedure have seen apparently miraculous cures,” said Dr. David F. Kallmes, a radiologist [...]
Bone Agent Linked to Problems In Neck Surgeries
“Some of these complications are life-threatening because the neck is such a sensitive area,” said lead author Dr. Kevin Cahill of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston. The study appears in Wednesdays Journal of the American Medical Association.
Smaller studies have shown BMP promotes better healing of the bone and fewer repeat surgeries to fix failed spinal fusions. The product also makes it unnecessary to surgically harvest the patients own bone from the shin or hip for a graft.
However, the powerful protein can make bone grow in unwanted places if its incorrectly used. There are no official guidelines for its [...]
Mixed-race Patients Struggle to Discover Marrow Donors
But because the 28-year-old bodybuilder is one-quarter Japanese, his doctor warned him the outlook was grim. Glasgows background would make it almost impossible to find a match, which usually comes from a patients own ethnic group.
The doctor “didnt say it was slim-to-none. He didnt say it would be hard. He said zero chance,” Glasgows mother, Carole Wiegand, recalled with tears in her eyes. “When Nick heard that, it sent him plummeting.”
At a time when the number of multiracial Americans is rising, only a tiny fraction of donors on the national bone-marrow registry are of mixed race. The National Marrow Donor [...]
New Artificial Ankles Offer Another Option To Bone Fusion
Now the nation is embarking on a new generation of artificial ankles designed to work more like the joint youre born with, a move specialists hope finally will offer less pain and more function to thousands who hobble although its too soon to be sure.
“These third-generation prostheses really mimic a natural ankle, which is really what makes them different,” says ankle specialist Dr. Steven L. Haddad of the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute and an orthopedic surgery professor at Northwestern University.
If the newer implants pan out, its a market ripe for growth. More than 200,000 people seek care for ankle [...]
Bone Marrow Transplants May Cause AIDS Reduction: Berlin’s Charite Hospital
Dr. Gero Huetter said Wedneday his 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin who was not identified, had been infected with the AIDS virus for more than a decade. But 20 months after undergoing a transplant of genetically selected bone marrow, he no longer shows signs of carrying the virus.
“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Huetter said.
It has not come. Researchers at Berlins Charite hospital and medical school say tests on his bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues have all been clean.
However, Dr. Andrew Badley, director of the HIV and immunology research lab at the Mayo Clinic [...]