Posts tagged as:

medicine

A meta-meta-analysis from the CDC

November 30, 2010

As a meta-oriented post, Metamodern is pleased to report a meta-meta-analysis.
In this month’s issue of the CDC-sponsored journal Preventing Chronic Disease, we find, published as a “Systematic Review”:
Quality of Systematic Reviews of Observational Nontherapeutic Studies
…Of the 145 systematic reviews we found, fewer than half met each quality criterion; 49% reported study flow, 27% assessed [...]

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For the next Nobel Prize in Medicine,
I nominate…

November 3, 2010

During a three-month test across eight hospitals, several continents, and almost 4,000 patients, a new technology reduced serious surgical complications by 36% and deaths by almost 50% — in raw numbers, over 150 cases of severe harm and nearly 30 patient deaths.
This performance was demonstrated in the spring of 2008 with the prototype [...]

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Trehalose vs. trehalase

September 18, 2010

Update, 3 March 2011: Trehalose reportedly “has good blood–brain barrier penetration”.

My recent post, “Trehalose, autophagy, and brain repair” references a few of the papers that suggest potential advantages to absorbing and circulating some of the wonder-sugar, trehalose. The problem is trehalase.

– Trehalose –

In us animals, trehalase metabolizes trehalose into glucose, but the details differ widely. [...]

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Autophagy:
Why you should eat yourself

July 24, 2010

I’d like to say a few words about one of the hottest and, in my view, most important areas in biomedicine: autophagy, a process crucial to health, disease, and aging. Autophagy research is expanding rapidly.
In autophagy (“self eating”), cells engulf and digest their own macromolecules and organelles. Autophagy serves two functions: providing critical nutrients in [...]

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Data-mining the bioscience literature

June 24, 2010

Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics now meet paperomics: Automated trawling, not of whole slices of nature, but of whole slices of the scientific literature — the idea is to look for indirect links among papers that may indicate undiscovered links in nature.
From the Computable Genomix website:
…Powered by patent pending next generation text mining technology, GeneIndexer [...]

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Needless Megadeaths:
A Suggestion for Science in the Public Interest

June 16, 2010

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Learning Bioinformatics

March 12, 2010

Bioinformatics is huge, growing, fast, and has a surprising range of applications to molecular systems engineering. Here’s a PLoS article: “A Quick Guide for Developing Effective Bioinformatics Programming Skills”. From the abstract:
Successful adoption of these principals will serve both beginner and experienced bioinformaticians alike in career development and pursuit of professional and scientific goals.

[...]

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Talk at 09 ISMICS

June 5, 2009

I was up in San Francisco this morning for the annual meeting of the International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (ISMICS). These are the innovative surgeons who’ve been developing instruments and procedures that greatly reduce the collateral damage of surgical interventions, accomplishing what must to be done with less damage to skin, muscle, fascia, [...]

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Early 21st Century Medicine

November 21, 2008

After the nurse punctured my right arm, the IV drip of a sedative and an opioid analgesic (fentanyl) was supposed to keep me hydrated while inducing “twilight anesthesia”, a painless, semi-conscious state accompanied by amnesia. However, I recall observing the first half or so of the procedure, commenting on the high quality of the doctor’s [...]

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