Quirky Med
The latest handpicked news stories from the world of medicine/health which are sometimes too quirky or good to be true. See them here….
The Lean Gene: Thinness Is An Inheritable Trait
Your friend can eat whatever she wants and still fit into her prom dress, but you gain five pounds if you just look at that chocolate cake. Before you sign up for Weight Watchers and that gym membership, though, you may want to look at some recent research from TelAvivUniversity and save yourself a few hundred dollars.
A woman's waistline may have less to do with rigorous exercise and abstaining from sweets than it does with the genes of her parents, according to a new study by Prof. Gregory Livshits from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at TelAvivUniversity and colleagues from King's College in London. Dr. Livshits and his colleagues have found a scientific link between the lean body mass of a woman and her genes. They've determined that thinness -- like your smile or the color of your eyes -- is an inheritable trait.
Very few studies to date have been able to associate a body's lean mass with genetics. The topic is a specialty at the TelAvivUniversity lab, one of the top labs in the world to study the genetics of aging of body composition. This area includes the study of bone, fat and lean mass as it develops in a person over time.
Research on body composition components -- their growth, degradation and genes -- is part of Prof. Livshits' ongoing work on aging and health. Issues such as weight gain are complex, he says, especially when age is factored in.
So don't get too jealous of your friend's dress size. It may be mostly out of your hands -- and in your DNA.
Could Heart Transplants Become A Thing Of The Past?
Heart transplants save the lives of more than 2,100 Americans every year. But many more patients are still waiting for a new heart to become available, and hundreds will die without ever getting a second chance at life.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands more people aren’t sick enough to need a transplant, but struggle every day with severe heart failure that limits all aspects of their lives.
Could technology be the solution – whether temporary, or permanent – for many of these people? Could heart transplants ever become a thing of the past?
The answers are yes — and perhaps, says a University of Michigan heart surgeon who has dedicated his career to helping patients through both heart-assisting implanted technology and lifesaving heart transplants.
But until machines are good enough to make transplants obsolete, says Francis Pagani, M.D., Ph.D., we can harness technology to help many people with severe heart problems survive and even thrive.
Patients like Tim Cusatis, a 50-year-old Michigan man who had never felt sick until Super Bowl Sunday 2006 — the day doctors told him his heart was failing fast. A few weeks later, they told him that he’d die within weeks without a new heart.
After seeking help from the U-MCardiovascularCenter, he and his heart received a state-of-the-art technological boost, from a device called a HeartMate II.
At the time, the device was still experimental. The HeartMate device has since been approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in April of 2008.
Lucky for Cusatis, a donor heart that matched his own became available just seven weeks later – two years ago this week. But he knows many other people wait many more months than he did, waiting for chance, and the generosity of a grieving family, to save their lives.
The device that Cusatis received is one of the latest in a series of technologies that have been tried in the past 25 years, ever since the first truly successful use of a heart-assisting device.
These “third generation” devices use magnetic fields to keep the pumping components suspended within the implanted device, to reduce friction and wear, and improve the life of the device. A clinical trial of the first of these devices, called the Duraheart, may begin this summer.
