Month: March 2011

NIH recently announced a new strategic plan to guide diabetes-related research throughout the next decade. The plan, developed by a federal work group led by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), identifies research opportunities with…

On March 21, 2011, Roland Zahn began a 620-mile hike across Germany. The route will take the 74-year-old from his birthplace in Leipzig to Tübingen, the city where his right leg was amputated in 2006. He plans to complete the…

AMP 1, a team of stand-up amputee basketball players will challenge an able-bodied team at a Long Island, N.Y. charity basketball game on March 25, 2011. The AMP 1 team will demonstrate how, with the help of modern high-tech prosthetics,…

Trent Waggoner, an amputee from Indiana, has submitted a design to include the Knoxville, Tenn.-based Amputee Coalition’s logo to Toyota Racing’s “Sponsor a Car” Program. The design receiving the most votes will be placed on a NASCAR race car. To…

Despite innumerable technological advances in prosthetics throughout the years, the fact remains that the prosthesis is a foreign body. When the prosthesis is implanted, its alien nature becomes even more evident — due to the open site where the device…

During a radical surgery to treat a rare bone cancer, surgeons at University of California (UC) San Diego Health System and Moores Cancer Center removed 50% of a patient’s pelvis. Instead of amputating the connected leg, the surgical team, comprised…

Clinicians have an ethical imperative to share important decisions with patients, and patients have a right to be equal participants in their care, according to a group of experts. In December 2010, 58 people from 18 countries attended a Salzburg…

Patients admitted to a hospital with major trauma and treated with the steroid hydrocortisone were less likely to be diagnosed with hospital-acquired pneumonia than patients who received placebo, according to a study in JAMA. Antoine Roquilly, MD, University of Nantes,…

NIH has awarded a $3.4 million grant to Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, both affiliated with Yeshiva University in New York, to identify cognitive factors that influence mobility in older people — in particular,…

In the two decades since the start of the “Back to Sleep” campaign, doctors and surgeons have seen a surge in the number of infants with position-related head deformities called deformational plagiocephaly (DP). Amid often-conflicting recommendations, there’s still a lack…