Posted on by: Jackie A. Thayer

Spouses of ICU Patients Have Their Own Heart Attack Risk|thirdAGE

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Heart Health

Having a spouse in a hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) may make a person more likely to have a heart attack or cardiac-related hospitalization themselves within a few weeks of the ICU admission, according to new research published in the American Heart Association’s flagship journal Circulation.

“Spouses of ICU patients should pay attention to their own physical health, especially in terms of cardiovascular disease,” said the study’s senior author Hiroyuki Ohbe, M.D., M.P.H., a Ph.D. student in the department of clinical epidemiology and health economics in the School of Public Health at The University of Tokyo

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Posted on by: Jackie A. Thayer

Imaging identifies breast cancer patients unlikely to benefit from hormone therapy

Imaging identifies breast cancer patients unlikely to benefit from hormone therapy
Bright spots indicate that cancer cells have responded to a one-day challenge with estrogen in this positron emission tomography (PET) scan of a woman with breast cancer. In a small study, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that only women whose tumors responded to estrogen challenge benefited from hormone therapy. The findings could help doctors choose the treatments most likely to help their patients. Credit: Farrokh Dehdashti

Hormone therapy commonly is given as a targeted treatment for women whose cancer cells carry receptors for estrogen. But the therapy only works for about half of all

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Posted on by: Jackie A. Thayer

Importance of diagnosis-to-treatment interval in newly diagnosed patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

Patient characteristics

A total of 199 patients were identified (Table 1), with a median age of 70 years (range 28–87). 81% were > 60 years, 51% were male, 68% were Stage III/IV, 60% had IPI score 3–5, and 16% were diagnosed in other facilities. Forty-eight percent were treated with CHOP, 52% were given dose-reduced THP-COP regimen, and 94% were combined with rituximab. The reasons for omitting Rituximab were CD20 negativity (n = 1), severe infusion reaction (n = 1), early death before using Rituximab (n = 2), concerns about tumor lysis syndrome (n = 4), and details unknown (n = 

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Posted on by: Jackie A. Thayer

Consenting for treatment in advance to reduce leaving the hospital against medical advice among patients with addiction

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Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Patients with substance use disorders (SUDs) being treated for serious medical conditions are more likely to leave the hospital against medical advice (AMA) than those without addiction. A special type of contract with healthcare providers might enable patients to consent in advance to life-saving medical care—even if they later refuse treatment, according to a commentary in the Journal of Addiction Medicine, the official journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM).

The Substance Use Advance Directive (SUAD) “has the potential to greatly improve the current state of treatment for life-threatening comorbid conditions in SUD

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