Dr. House
Dr. House
Thursday, March 31, 2016
FDA To Allow Blood Centers To Screen Blood Using Experimental Zika Test.
, “The move means that Puerto Rico, which had halted local blood donations...will soon be able to resume collecting donations from residents. And it should help blood banks elsewhere in the country avoid similar ordeals.” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said the FDA will work “with blood centers in Puerto Rico to try to help as many as possible make use of the investigational test.” The new blood test “makes it much less likely that officials will have to declare blood donation moratoriums in states like Florida, Texas and Louisiana this summer, as they were forced to do in Puerto Rico.” Meanwhile, Dr. Simone Glynn, the chief of the branch of blood epidemiology and clinical therapeutics at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute stressed that without a screening test for the Zika virus, “you don’t know whether blood transfusions with infection might be occurring.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/health/zika-virus-blood-test-puerto-rico.html?_r=0
Blood Test Helps Measure Women’s Ovarian Reserve.
It’s a question that can keep many women up at night, whether there’s still enough time to have a baby, but now more women are using an easy test that can take all the guesswork out of how much time is left on their biological clocks.” NBC News correspondent Janet Shamlian explained that “a simple blood test” with the nickname of “the baby deadline test is like a checkup for the ovaries.” The test “used to be for women already struggling to get pregnant,” but is “now being used to predict infertility problems.”
The NBC News (3/31, Dunn, Deo) website reports that the official name of the test is “the Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) test.” Some physicians “are now offering it as an option to healthy women to assess what they call their ovarian reserve.” The test, which “usually costs less than $100,” is a measure of AMH “circulating in a woman’s bloodstream” and “predicts the amount of possible eggs a woman has.” http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/baby-deadline-test-beat-your-biological-clock-n548196
Endometriosis May Be Linked To Higher Risk Of Heart Disease In Younger Women.
reports on its website that for the study, published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, investigators “followed 120,000 women over 20 years.” Approximately “12,000 participants had endometriosis.” Although “the overall rate for heart disease was 21 cases per 100,000 women under 40,” the investigators “found that for every 100,000 women with endometriosis, the heart disease rate increased to 65 cases.” http://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/endometriosis-increases-risk-heart-disease-young-women-n547381
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Pertussis Vax Wanes, Even With TDaP Booster Protecting against Bordetella pertussis infection remains challenging
"We observed an abrupt shift in the direction of rate ratios in 2010, the very year that children aged 11 years would have been the first cohort born after the 1997 transition from [whole-cell] to acellular vaccines to have received acellular vaccines for all doses of the childhood series," Skoff and Martin wrote.
They add that recent data show TDaP protection wanes at a faster rate among adolescents who received DTaP for their childhood vaccination as opposed to wP vaccine, and that "at least" a single dose of wP vaccine, especially when administered as the first dose, seems to improve protection associated with the TDaP vaccine. http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/Vaccines/56988?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2016-03-29&eun=g721819d0r
Monday, March 28, 2016
BPA Linked To Premature Births.
reported researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have found that “higher concentrations of the plastics chemical BPA in a pregnant woman’s system could increase the likelihood that her baby is born premature.” The study was published in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine. http://time.com/4272462/bpa-linked-to-premature-babies-study/
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