Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital will get a $12.7 million federal grant to help improve care for Northeast Ohio children who frequently visit the emergency room or have complex health conditions and behavioral problems.
The grant, announced Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, will fund Rainbow's Physician Extension Team (PET), which aims to improve care and reduce health care costs by helping doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and health educators work more cooperatively.
The program will provide individualized training to primary care doctors and give them round-the-clock telephone access to nurses and doctors who can supply advice and referrals and help coordinate care.
The Cleveland hospital estimates the program will help more than 68,000 children with Medicaid insurance, as well as children with other insurance in several counties across Northeast Ohio.
Read the complete story at Cleveland.com.
A blood test that quickly detects bacterial infection may help hospitals avoid the overuse of antibiotics and the dangers of antibiotic resistance if it proves effective in clinical trials.
Summa Health System in Akron will begin a trial of the test, called PCT (for procalcitonin), this summer to see if it will help diagnose bacterial infection in pneumonia patients.
Pneumonia is an inflammation of the lungs caused by an infection by bacteria, viruses or other pathogens. The infection can be particularly severe in the very young and very old, and it can be fatal. More than 1.1 million people were hospitalized with pneumonia in 2009 (the mose recent year available), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 50,774 people died from the illness.
About half of all pneumonia cases are caused by viruses, which aren't treatable with antibiotics. Such treatment on viral pneumonia would only increase the cost of care and contribute to the problem of antibiotic resistance and opportunistic infections, such as Clostridium difficile or C. diff.
Read the complete story at Cleveland.com.
A small Valley View biotech business has secured a $4.5 million vote of confidence from the National Institutes of Health to fund three projects that will develop and test products for the treatment of Parkinson's disease and web-based education products for high school neuroscience courses.
The first grant, a small business innovative research award (SBIR) for $3 million, is the single largest in Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies' six-year history. The company employs over 20 people.
The grant will fund the development of an in-home telemedicine system to monitor and evaluate gait and balance in response to medication and deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's patients. The company already has a system in place, called Kinesia HomeView, that captures video and results from motor tests and transmits them to a server where doctors log in and check on their patients.
The grant will help the company add gait and balance measures to that platform, said president and principal investigator Joseph Giuffrida. In clinical trials starting this summer at University Hospitals and the University of Cincinnati, the company will use a motion sensor to see how deep brain stimulation affects gait and if their results are consistent with what a doctor would gather in an office visit.
Read the complete story on Cleveland.com.
After not performing liver transplants from living donors for a year, the Cleveland Clinic has ramped up its program to address a long transplant waiting list. The Clinic's goal for 2012 is to conduct 12 surgeries with living liver donors, at a pace of one a month.
That would be almost as many as the 14 liver transplants using living donors the Clinic did between 2008 and 2010. None of the liver transplants for 247 patients at the Clinic in 2011 involved living donors.
So far this year, four Clinic patients have received a portion of a liver from a living donor, equaling the number in 2010. For the past several years, the Clinic has been the only liver transplant center in Ohio to perform surgery using living donors.
Nearly 17,000 people are currently on the national liver transplant waiting list, 194 of them patients at the Clinic, said Dr. William Carey, director of the Hepatology (Liver) Center in the Clinic's department of gastroenterology.
Read the complete story on Cleveland.com.
A key tool used by Mary Welsh’s brain surgeon at Cleveland Clinic last year was the hospital’s intraoperative MRI suite, called IMRIS.
A technology available since the 1990s, the latest version of intraoperative MRI allows Cleveland Clinic doctors to perform surgery, bring the MRI machine into the operating room on overhead rails, scan the patient and continue the procedure based on the new image.
Using IMRIS lengthens surgery by up to an hour, but it can save patients from repeated operations, said brain surgeon Michael Vogelbaum.
“There is incremental risk with every surgery, and so if we can get the job done with a single surgery, that presents less risk,” he said.
In Welsh’s case, Vogelbaum used conventional image guidance — technology that orients an MRI scan taken before surgery to the patient’s position during the operation — to find and remove her tumor.
Read the complete story in the Canton Repository.
In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, physician-scientists at University Hospitals Case Medical Center's Seidman Cancer Center and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine are studying a promising new non-invasive technology for colon cancer screening.
The five-year study is recruiting patients to compare the effectiveness of stool DNA (sDNA) testing with colonoscopy for detecting large colon polyps.
sDNA is a novel test that detects colon cancer in its earliest stages, based on analysis of stool DNA.
Developed in the laboratory of Sanford Markowitz, MD, PhD, oncologist with the UH Seidman Cancer Center and Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, sDNA is a recommended screening by the American Cancer Society.
Read the complete story and watch the video on WKYC.com.
Heart cancer is not a very well known cancer – but it does happen.
Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic see this rare disease quite often, and a recent case required them to come up with a novel treatment plan for it.
Jovetta Means, 64, was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma – an extremely rare type of cancer in her heart. The mother of seven was rushed to a hospital in Fort Wayne, Ind., after suffering from shortness of breath and abdominal pain.
“My husband was upstairs and I…crawled up the stairs,” Means said. “I said, ‘Something's wrong, something's not right,’ and I collapsed."
After undergoing various tests, Means was told she had a tumor in her aorta and clots throughout her body. She said her doctors didn’t give her a treatment plan, simply telling her family she only had days to live.
Read the complete story on FoxNews.com.
A new community breast health education program launched on Thursday in Cleveland will pave the way for a national rollout in 17 other cities over the next two years by Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
Forty seven people -- including a couple of men -- received their initial training as Komen Community Health Advisors. That training equips them with the skills to go out into Greater Cleveland to provide breast cancer education and assistance with scheduling mammograms and accessing other health care services.
The target audience: uninsured, underinsured and poor women.
The community health advisors will be dispatched into the world in which they live, work, worship and socialize, said Komen Northeast Ohio Affiliate executive director Sophie Sureau. "Their target population is their current circle of influence," she said.
The day-long training followed a regional breast health summit attended by 150 others, featuring top officials from the Komen national office as well as the Cleveland Clinic, the MetroHealth System, Sisters of Charity Health System and University Hospitals.
Read the complete story at Cleveland.com.
A team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have identified a new mechanism by which colon cancer develops. By focusing on segments of DNA located between genes, or so-called "junk DNA," the team has discovered a set of master switches, i.e., gene enhancer elements, that turn "on and off" key genes whose altered expression is defining for colon cancers. They have coined the term Variant Enhancer Loci or "VELs," to describe these master switches.
Importantly, VELs are not mutations in the actual DNA sequence, but rather are changes in proteins that bind to DNA, a type of alteration known as "epigenetic" or "epimutations." This is a critical finding because such epimutations are potentially reversible.
Over the course of three years, the team mapped the locations of hundreds of thousands of gene enhancer elements in DNA from normal and cancerous colon tissues, pinpointing key target VELs that differed between the two types.
Read the complete story at ScienceDaily.com.
Researchers at University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine are getting closer to their goal of providing less-toxic and more-effective treatment options for patients with acute leukemia. That's the good news from two studies published this month.
The two most common types of acute leukemia -- cancer that starts in the bone marrow or blood cells or platelets -- are acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, different because of the cells affected.
Although leukemia occurs in children and young adults, the median age of diagnosis for AML patients is 67 years. ALL is the most common type of pediatric cancer in the United States, but it also affects adults.
Read the complete story at Cleveland.com.