Medicine

I made a comment earlier mentioning Limbitless and I am curious what it's reach really is, have people heard of it, has it helped a number of people, or few?

It was a non-profit starter in ties with the University of Central Florida to provide prosthetics to those whom could not afford it.

Edit: I just added a URL for reference in the body

edit: I've modified the title to include important context

Orr, an associate professor at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, worked in collaboration with researchers at the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the Barrow Neurological Institute at Dignity Health St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

The findings are published in “Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain” and update the 2016 guidelines of the American Headache Society for the management of migraine attacks in emergency departments.

The research recommends occipital nerve blocks should be offered in emergency rooms to treat acute migraine attacks.

The use of intravenous Prochlorperazine which blocks dopamine receptors in the brain is recommended but is not readily available. That leaves the greater occipital nerve block where a local anesthetic and a corticosteroid are injected near the greater occipital nerve.

“The occipital nerves at the base of the skull bring in pain signals to the same area of the brain where pain signals from all over the head are coming in. By anesthetizing these nerves, patients get relief,” said Orr.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42880974

Web archive link

The exact number of people living with HIV in Russia is unknown. Data on HIV-related deaths is no longer published.

...

It’s no longer clear how many people in Russia have died of HIV. Starting in 2025, the authorities stopped releasing these statistics, along with most demographic metrics. Data on new cases, now published annually rather than monthly, is also harder to find.

Foreign nationals in Russia test positive for HIV less often than Russian citizens.

Like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, Russia is one of the few countries that deport foreigners with HIV. Foreign nationals are required to undergo HIV testing if they want to live in Russia for more than 90 days, work there, obtain a residence permit, or if they are refugees or have applied for refugee status.

...

Russia’s worst HIV rates are in the Urals and Siberia. Conservative-leaning Vologda is among the regions with the highest number of HIV-positive pregnant women.

...

To assess HIV prevalence across Russia’s regions, [researchers] examined several indicators, such as the share of infected pregnant women and the proportion of people with HIV receiving antiretroviral therapy. The situation proved most severe in the following regions:

• Kemerovo
• Tomsk
• Chelyabinsk
• Altai
• Krasnoyarsk
• The Leningrad region
• The Komi Republic
• Irkutsk
• Perm
• The Chukotka Autonomous Okrug

Because all pregnant women in Russia are advised to undergo HIV testing, this indicator provides an indirect measure of the situation in each region. “If more than 1 percent of pregnant women in a region are infected for three consecutive years, it means the virus has spread beyond vulnerable groups,” [researchers] authors conclude. On average, the rate across Russia is 0.6 percent, but it exceeds 1 percent in 14 regions, 11 of which have reported infection rates at this level for several years already.

Vologda Governor Roman Filimonov has lobbied to end local abortion services and promoted the region as a proving ground for “conservative” values. However, the data show that HIV among pregnant women is rising, from 0.17 percent in 2022 to 1 percent in 2023 and then 2 percent in 2024.

The article has more in depth discussion than the excerpts that I've pulled here, please give it a read if you are curious

VANCOUVER - Maya Cassady was just two months away from graduating high school with honours when she obtained her mental health records through a freedom of information request.

Just hours after reading the contents, which included doctors' ponderings about a diagnosis, the 17-year-old took her own life.

It was March 30, 2023. Since Maya's death, her mother, Hilary Cassady, has become an advocate for youth mental health, raising flags about young people using FOIs to access their charts — and risking misinterpreting the contents.

Cassady said she believes Maya concluded her mental health condition was untreatable, after reading terminology about her case that was never discussed with either of them.

And while the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of B.C. said the head of a health authority could block the release of documents deemed potentially harmful to a recipient, it said it would "not be possible" to screen all requests.

Cassady said the emergency room psychiatrist who saw Maya on the visit that was the subject of her request did not even know she had sought the records.

In most of B.C.'s health authorities, including Vancouver Coastal Health where Maya was treated, people can request their medical records without the consent of a legal guardian starting at age 12.

Cassady said she was unsure when her daughter made the FOI request, but believes she collected it from the family mailbox the same day she died.

The request, Cassady said, focused on a four-day stay at Lions Gate Hospital in February 2023 after an acetaminophen overdose that a doctor believed was an "impulsive" suicide attempt by Maya.

Cassady said her daughter's friends reported seeing her reading the FOI documents and Googling terms on her ferry commute to school from Bowen Island, off West Vancouver, and again during her spare period later that morning. She died later that day.

"She had given up hope when she felt that her diagnosis was untreatable — that was the response when she Google searched some of the terminology in the report," Hilary said of her daughter.

She said she drew that conclusion after looking at her daughter's phone in the days after her death, trying to piece together her state of mind. She said one of the last search results that showed up in the teen's phone browser was that her symptoms were "untreatable."

"That is etched in my brain," she said of the word, sure of what she saw but noting that she has not been able to duplicate the search results since.

Cassady said her daughter searched, "Is persistent depressive disorder lifelong?" She also looked up terms, including "axis II traits" and "bd-ii," which most commonly refers to bipolar II, her mother said.

The chart also classified the girl's "admitting diagnoses" as "chronic dysthymia vs unspecified depressive disorder," and said the teen was "not acutely suicidal."

Cassady said Maya had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder but neither of them had been informed of most of the other terms included in her chart, including the working theory she may have undiagnosed borderline personality disorder.

Diagram:

Excerpt:

A three-year-old boy has astounded doctors with his progress after becoming the first person in the world with his devastating disease to receive a ground-breaking gene therapy.

Oliver Chu has a rare, inherited condition called Hunter syndrome - or MPSII - which causes progressive damage to the body and brain.

In the most severe cases, patients with the disease usually die before the age of 20. The effects are sometimes described as a type of childhood dementia.

Due to a faulty gene, before the treatment Oliver was unable to produce an enzyme crucial for keeping cells healthy.

In a world first, medical staff in Manchester have tried to halt the disease by altering Oliver's cells using gene therapy.

Prof Simon Jones, who is co-leading the trial tells the BBC: "I've been waiting 20 years to see a boy like Ollie doing as well as he is, and it's just so exciting."

At the centre of this remarkable story is Oliver - the first of five boys around the world to receive the treatment - and the Chu family, from California, who have put their faith in the medical team at Royal Manchester Children's Hospital.

A year after starting the treatment, Oliver now appears to be developing normally.

"Every time we talk about it I want to cry because it's just so amazing," says his mother Jingru.

Choledocholithiasis Song to help!

https://youtu.be/RKC8IkUaY4k

Researchers have identified five distinct phases of brain architecture that unfold from infancy to the late 80s.

The Euro News article is more accessible, if you want a quick summary of what the study showed.

You can also check out this Open Access link to the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65974-8

Intro:

Our brain structure moves through five distinct phases marked by four turning points, at ages nine, 32, 66, and 83, according to the study

The research is the first to identify major phases of brain wiring across the lifespan, shedding new light on what our brains may be particularly vulnerable to during different life stages, for example, childhood learning disabilities and age-related conditions like dementia.

“Looking back, many of us feel our lives have been characterised by different phases,” said Duncan Astle, the study’s senior author and a professor of neuroinformatics at the University of Cambridge.

Astle’s team compared the brain scans of about 3,800 people aged zero to 90. The scans track how water molecules move through the brain, allowing the researchers to map neural connections and home in on key moments of developmental change across the lifespan.

Song explaining types of brain bleeds https://youtu.be/85EyO13uNT0

https://youtu.be/85EyO13uNT0

You can find the document with the recommendations here: https://www.accessbc.org/_files/ugd/9fd619_d886fad898444a609c6fa08a824c36ec.pdf

Medical revision song So Long To Pinky, Here Comes The Thumb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdshDBLGcsw

https://youtu.be/XdshDBLGcsw

Author: Joel Lexchin | Associate professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto; York University, Canada; University of Sydney

New drug approvals by Health Canada are based on the results of clinical trials. But before clinical trials can go ahead, they need to be approved by ethics committees known as Research Ethics Boards (REBs).

Virtually all hospitals where research is conducted have REBs, as do universities and other institutions. The REBs are supposed to ensure that patients understand the nature of the research and have given informed consent, that the trials are conducted in an ethical way that minimizes any harm to them and that the investigators are competent to do the research.

Given the crucial role they play, it’s important that REBs are not influenced by factors like financial motives, conflicts of interest or the goals of drug companies. Without oversight, these factors may encroach on the decisions made by REBs in Canada.

I can hold it together and be serious when needed, but my default bedside manner is playful. Like when I'm taking off EKG stickers or adhesive bandages I say "Please enjoy this complimentary wax; it's free with your stay!"

And they tell you when you communicate through an interpreter that you should just talk how you normally do and let the interpreter focus on translating both the info AND your paraverbal communication, but I feel like not a lot of people actually do that because sometimes interpreters seem really put off by me at first. And I'm in psych so I actually use humor therapeutically and even to a certain extent diagnostically (if I can get a flash of a smile their affect is probably more constricted than blunted, for instance).

But my favorite was the lady who synced up with me about halfway through when the patient was trying to minimize her needs and I was like "GIRL you gotta tell me these things that is literally so easy for me to fix!" And I just saw the look of dawning recognition before the interpreter literally flipped her hair to the side and went "...AMIGA-"

Please listen and support Medical revision songs! https://youtu.be/mnV02q88-gg

The linked report includes a video (2 min).

A woman with Parkinson's disease who played a clarinet while undergoing brain stimulation said she was "delighted" with how it went.

Denise Bacon, 65, from Crowborough in East Sussex, experienced instant improvement in her finger movements as the electrical current was delivered to her brain, doctors at King's College Hospital said.

The retired speech and language therapist underwent deep brain stimulation (DBS) after suffering symptoms of Parkinson's.

She was diagnosed with the disease in 2014 and it has affected her ability to walk, swim, dance and play her clarinet.

ABSTRACT

Background

In 2020, the Netherlands adopted an opt-out registration system for organ donation meaning that consent for donation is presumed except when someone actively objects against this. This change in organ donation default policy may change the division of roles between relatives and physicians during conversations.

Objectives

To compare role performance of relatives and physicians in organ donation conversations in the opt-in and opt-out systems.

Methods

We applied an institutional ethnographic approach to compare cases from the former opt-in system in which there was ‘no registration’ to the ‘presumed consent cases’ in the opt-out system.

Results

We audio-recorded six no registration conversations from the opt-in period, and compared these with eight presumed consent conversations from the opt-out period, and conducted sixteen interviews with physicians conducting the conversations. The data show the effect of the system transition on the role division between relatives and physicians in donation conversations. In the opt-in system, physicians and relatives together aimed for a yet to be taken decision, while in the opt-out system, the physicians started the conversation with the registered choice. Ethical deliberation about organ donation is therefore pushed to the background the role of the physician is more tilted to providing relevant factual information and implementing the patient’s choice.

Conclusions

The change to opt-out did likely alleviates the burdensome role of relatives to make morally charged donation choices for their relatives, since organ donation conversations about patients presumed to consent commence with a clear picture of what the potential donor’s wish is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oGwUpOOut4

In a lengthy letter to students, the dean of the faculty of medicine said the anatomy lab in the Tupper Building was tested over the summer and results showed that formaldehyde levels no longer meet provincial standards.

The school attempted to fix the problem through changes to the ventilation system, but it failed a second round of tests.

This was the first time formaldehyde was tested in a decade, he said. When the tests were done this summer, Dalhousie discovered that Nova Scotia had lowered the acceptable level in 2017.

Those regulations allow 0.1 parts per million, whereas the former threshold was 0.3 ppm.

Anderson did not explain why Dal had not conducted tests in 10 years, nor did he reveal the exact results.

"Although our test results are no longer compliant within Nova Scotia, our current testing levels at the Tupper Building laboratory are compliant with the previous allowable thresholds in Nova Scotia and the current allowable thresholds in New Brunswick," he wrote.

Dalhousie has now stopped work with specimens at all three medical school locations: Halifax, Cape Breton and Saint John.

Air quality testing is underway in the Saint John lab.

I thought this one was really cool!

TLDR:

Blood-type antigens act like nametags on cells, and the UBC enzymes act as molecular scissors, snipping off the ‘nametag’ that marks type A and revealing type O beneath.

Summary:

Published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the achievement marks a major step toward helping thousands of patients get kidney transplants sooner.

In a first-in-human experiment, the enzyme-converted kidney was transplanted into a brain-dead recipient with consent from the family, allowing researchers to observe the immune response without risking a life.

For two days, the kidney functioned without signs of hyperacute rejection, the rapid immune reaction that can destroy an incompatible organ within minutes. By the third day, some blood-type markers reappeared, triggering a mild reaction, but the damage was far less severe than in a typical mismatch, and researchers saw signs that the body was beginning to tolerate the organ.

Older History:

The breakthrough is the result of more than a decade of work. In the early 2010s, Dr. Withers and colleague Dr. Jayachandran Kizhakkedathu, a UBC professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine and the Centre for Blood Research, were focused on making universal donor blood by stripping away the sugars that define blood types.

Those same sugars, or antigens, coat organ blood vessels. If a recipient’s immune system detects the wrong antigen, it attacks. Type-O patients—more than half of kidney waitlists—can only receive type-O organs, yet type-O kidneys are often given to others because they’re universally compatible. As a result, type-O patients typically wait two to four years longer, and many die waiting.

Traditional methods for overcoming blood-type incompatibility in transplants require days of intensive treatment to strip antibodies and suppress a recipient’s immune system—and require organs from living donors. This new approach changes the organ rather than the patient, meaning transplants could be performed faster, with fewer complications, and for the first time could unlock the use of blood-type mismatched organs from deceased donors—when every hour can determine whether a patient lives or dies.

The chain of discoveries that led up to this:

The key to this approach is the 2019 discovery by the UBC team of two highly efficient enzymes that remove the sugar that defines type-A blood, effectively converting it to type O.

The next challenge was applying this to whole organs, achieved in 2022 when a Toronto team showed lungs could be converted. After successful tests on blood, then lungs and kidneys (with the University of Cambridge) outside the body, the question remained: Could an enzyme-converted organ survive inside a human immune system?

The answer came in late 2023 on an overseas trip for Dr. Kizhakkedathu. “Our collaborators showed me their data where, using our enzymes, they had converted a human kidney and transplanted it into a brain-dead recipient. It was working beautifully.” He stayed up late to call Dr. Withers first thing in the B.C. morning. “I was so thrilled. It was a dream moment.”

Future:

Regulatory approval for clinical trials is the next hurdle, and the partner UBC spin-off company Avivo Biomedical will lead development of these enzymes for transplant application and to enable the creation of universal donor blood on demand for transfusion medicine.

The best way to learn the skull floor openings and what runs through them :)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ro_rNoUcNg

https://youtu.be/6Ro_rNoUcNg

Medical song about Airways, please listen and share :)

https://youtu.be/N1gu_F8IVwQ

Please listen and share if you can :)

https://youtu.be/lbUEeyzeCFg

In more complex bone problems like severe, irregular fractures or resections done as part of bone cancer treatment, the bone won’t heal on its own. The most common means of stabilizing the injured site and making recovery possible is metal-based grafts, implants usually made with titanium alloys.

The problem with such implants is that they are difficult and expensive to manufacture, and it’s very hard to make them patient-specific. “3D printing has been highlighted as a novel approach to make such personalized implants, but this also requires substantial time and money,” said Jung Seung Lee, a biomedical engineering researcher at the Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. So his team wanted to find a way to make bone implants that would be faster and cheaper than a 3D printer.

What they came up with was a modified glue gun. The idea was to make the implant right at the injured site during surgery. The surgeon would point the bone-healing gun at the fractured bone, pull the trigger, and create a stabilizing scaffold by extruding a filament that would solidify in the fracture and hold the bone together. “It was basically a tweaked commercially available hot glue gun. We modulated the temperature, and by adjusting the tip module, we could control the resolution of the extruded scaffold,” Lee said.

Coming up with the gun design, though, was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out the ammo.