Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Good News: New Medical Advances Are Extraordinary

We haven’t been seeing a lot of good news these days, so I thought I might brighten things up by focusing on some good things that are happening.

There are extraordinary advances occurring in medical technologies that will dramatically change the face of medicine.

Robot assisted surgery now allows top surgeons to operate from half a world away, with minimally invasive techniques that let heart patients return to the activities of living within days, not weeks or months.

Metamaterials are allowing us to see single cell organisms (like viruses) I high definition color, not the X-Ray type images we see with electron microscopes. This will allow researchers to actually "see" the results of new cures.

It won’t be long before nanobots will be programmed and injected to perform heart or brain surgery, or to clean up clogged arteries. We may also use them to remove the calcification of Alzheimer' patients.

Researchers are perfecting ways to grow us new hearts and lungs and kidneys from our own DNA. This is already being done, particularly with bones and joints.

We will begin to debate the ethical dilemma that will come with this, just how far we should go with playing God. I won't deal with this here. I would rather focus on the good things coming in our lives.

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Monday, May 4, 2009

Good News for Varicose Vigilante Seniors on Alzheimer’s

Last week I read about a promising new treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease. It involves some ground-breaking work by Mark Pepsys, professor of medicine at University College in London.

For the past 30 years, Mr. Pepsys has been working on curing diseases that are caused by the abnormal buildup of amyloid protein. This protein is a key cause in the development of Alzheimer’s, as it gums up the works of the brain. In the 1990s he developed a drug called CPHPC that removes SAP, a blood protein that sticks to amyloid and prevents enzymes from dissolving it. This allows a kind of crust to form in the brain cells, (think of it as hair filling up your shower drain) that eventually stops brain function in certain areas, such as memory.

Mr. Pspsys gave CPHPC to five Alzheimer’s patients and the results were quite encouraging, to the point where this might pose as a medical breakthrough. It appears that Mr. Pspsys is getting some major pharmaceutical companies to show interest in his (hoped for) clinical trial of 80-100 patients. This trial, should it get funded, may prove to be the first real breakthrough in Alzheimer’s treatment.

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www.jaylumbert.com