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NEWS:
Prediction System Significantly Increases Palliative Care Consults
Palliative Connect, a trigger system developed at Penn Medicine and powered by predictive analytics, was found to be effective at increasing palliative care consultations for seriously ill patients, according to a new study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. After the system was implemented, palliative care consultation increased by 74 percent. The study was published this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
"There's widespread recognition of the need to improve the quality of palliative care for seriously ill patients, and palliative care consultation has been associated with improved outcomes for these patients," said the study's lead author, Katherine Courtright, MD, an assistant professor of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care, and Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
According to the Center to Advance Palliative Care,
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Cheaper Drug Just As Effective Protecting Heart In Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
A new clinical trial conducted at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center found a cost-effective generic medication works just as well as a more expensive drug in preserving cardiovascular function in boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).
Results of this multi-center trial are in today’s Journal of the American Heart Association.
The researchers at The Ohio State University College of Medicine compared spironolactone and eplerenone – two potassium-sparing diuretic medications typically used to treat high blood pressure and help manage heart failure. In their previous work, the team showed that lower dose eplerenone is better than placebo in protecting the heart in boys with DMD.
“Even though it works well, the concern with eplerenone is that it’s more costly and less available worldwide,” said Dr. Subha Raman, a cardiologist and professor at Ohio State who led the r
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Improving Doctor-Patient Communication At The End Of Life: Multi-Center Study Suggests It Can Be Done
It’s one of the most difficult conversations a doctor will have with a patient: whether and when to turn off the life-saving device that has kept their heart beating. To find out whether an intervention could increase the number of discussions between clinicians and patients with heart failure about the kinds of treatments they would want at the end of their lives, also known as advance care planning, researchers at The Mount Sinai Hospital developed a rigorous six-center study to investigate a novel communication intervention. The study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The doctors developed an educational intervention in the form of a 90-minute training session that focused on advance care planning and the steps involved in deactivation, in addition to teaching standardized communication techniques such as asking open-ended questions and responding to patie
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Researchers Perform Thousands Of Mutations To Understand Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
•Researchers from CRG and IBEC in Barcelona use a technique called high-throughput mutagenesis to study Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), with unexpected results.
•Results showed that aggregation of TDP-43 is not harmful but actually protects cells, changing our understanding of ALS and opening the door to radically new therapeutic approaches.
•Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating and incurable nervous system disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, causing loss of muscle control and normally death within a few years of diagnosis. In ALS, like in other neurodegenerative diseases, specific protein aggregates have long been recogniSed as the pathological hallmarks, but it is not clear whether they represent the actual cause of the disease. Indeed, alleviating aggregation has repeatedly failed as a therapeutic strategy when trying to treat neurodegen
