Doc Blog

Drugs are regularly prescribed to children in outpatient care that have not been licensed for children. The pharmacologist Bernd M?er and his colleagues present the result of their health services analysis in the new edition of Deutsches ?zteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2009; 106[3]: 25). In 2005, about 14 million children and adolescents were prescribed [...]

A new study from the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research has revealed the consequences of heavy and binge drinking on pregnancy even after these drinking patterns have stopped. The study, to be published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, investigated the relationship between prenatal exposure to alcohol and the effects on [...]

A study published next week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine suggests that elderly people with damaged kidneys are at greater risk of cardiovascular disease, such as heart failure and stroke, and other causes of mortality. The findings indicate that greater efforts should be made to encourage elderly people who have impaired kidney function [...]

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered how a whole class of commonly used chemotherapy drugs can block cancer growth. Their findings, reported online this week at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition, suggest that a subgroup of cancer patients might particularly benefit from these drugs. The [...]

Many older adults worry - a lot. Almost one in 10 Americans over age 60 suffer from an anxiety disorder that causes them to worry excessively about normal things - like health, finances, disability and family. Although antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can improve anxiety symptoms in younger adults, little [...]

Early attempts at islet cell transplantation to treat diabetes date to the nineteenth century, decades before the discovery of insulin in the 1930s. In recent years, research has focused on the anatomical sites best suited for hosting transplanted islet cells. Experimental sites have included the spleen, liver, peritoneal cavity, omentum, subcutaneous tissues and gastric submucosa. [...]

WHO has received US$ 9.7 million in grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to work with UNICEF to conduct crucial research in children’s medicines, with the aim of increasing the number of child-size medicines designed and formulated specifically for children. Currently, many medicines are only designed for adults. More than 50% of medicines [...]

A formula used to measure kidney function in children with chronic kidney disease has been revised to make it more precise, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. This study is based on data collected by the Chronic Kidney Disease in Children (CKiD) clinical trial, funded [...]

The use of chemotherapy following surgery reduces the risk of death from operable pancreatic cancer by around 30 per cent, says new research published in the British Journal of Cancer.Pancreatic cancer is the tenth most common cancer. Nearly 7,600 people are diagnosed with the disease in the UK each year. But, survival rates remain a [...]

Most of the rabies virus circulating in dogs in western and central Africa comes from a common ancestor introduced to the continent around 200 years ago, probably by European colonialists. In the current issue of Journal of General Virology a team of scientists from Africa, USA and France report that within this common ancestry there [...]