Health and Medicine

When a man is first diagnosed with prostate cancer, the initial visit to the doctor becomes a blur. Complex decisions about treatment now face the patient, yet formulating adequate questions is often difficult. Further clouding the picture is the tendancy of some physicians to only recommend treatment options in which they specialize. To empower patients facing these difficult and complex decisions, Temple University’s College of Engineering and the Fox Chase Cancer Center (FCCC), armed

In a groundbreaking telemedicine development, doctors in Massachusetts earlier this month helped a physician at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to surgically repair the damaged knee of a meteorologist spending the winter in Antarctica. Using a “telemedicine” connection operated by Raytheon Polar Services Co. (RPSC) of Centennial, Colo., orthopedic surgeon Bertram Zarins and anesthesiologist Vicki Modest, both of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, helped South Pole physician Dr. Timothy Polla

As Congress considers legislative proposals aimed at saving Medicare+Choice, a new study published today on the Health Affairs Web site shows that under the best-case scenario, enrollment in the troubled managed care program would stabilize at about 5 million beneficiaries. Under the worst case of the four policy proposals to boost sluggish M+C reimbursement, enrollment would shrink to just 3.3 million by 2005, according to the article by health care scholars Kenneth E. Thorpe and Adam Ather

Two seemingly unrelated Native American children have one painful thing in common: juvenile Paget’s disease (JPD), an extremely rare, bone metabolism disorder. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Shriners Hospitals for Children, St. Louis, have discovered that the two patients also share an unusual genetic defect. The research team found that both patients are completely missing the gene for a recently discovered protein called osteoprotegerin, known to

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have found that women in a large study who used estrogen replacement therapy after menopause were at increased risk for ovarian cancer. The report was published in the July 17, 2002, issue of JAMA.* The scientists followed 44,241 women for approximately 20 years. Compared to postmenopausal women not using hormone replacement therapy, users of estrogen-only therapy had a 60 percent greater risk of developing ovarian cancer. The risk increased with

The annual sunburn is still a tradition for many Americans, with nearly 60 percent of young adults reporting at least one sunburn in the past year, according to a new study.

Sun damage is the leading preventable cause of both the most deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma, and of the most common forms, basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas. Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer, occurring in more than 1 million Americans annually. Sunburn represents severe skin damage and