Health

  2010 MAR 28 - (VerticalNews.com) -- It's time to re-think how patients are selected for cardiac catheterization, say doctors at Duke University Medical Center, after reporting in a new study that the invasive procedure found no significant coronary artery disease in nearly 60 percent of chest pain patients with no prior heart disease.

  "Our data show that up to two thirds of the patients undergoing invasive cardiac catheterization are found not have significant obstructive disease," says Manesh Patel, MD, a cardiologist with the Duke Heart Center. He's the lead author of the study published in the March 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine ...read more

  2010 MAR 28 - (VerticalNews.com) -- Nicotine takes much longer than previously thought to reach peak levels in the brains of cigarette smokers, according to new research conducted at Duke University Medical Center.

  Traditionally, scientists thought nicotine inhaled in a puff of cigarette smoke took a mere seven seconds to be taken up by the brain, and that each puff produced a spike of nicotine. Using PET imaging, Duke investigators illustrate, for the first time, that cigarette smokers actually experience a steady rise of brain nicotine levels during the course of smoking a whole cigarette ...read more

  2010 MAR 21 - (VerticalNews.com) -- An early test for fungal infections that measures how a patient's genes are responding could save the lives of some very sick patients. Researchers at Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy have devised an early gene-expression test for the fungal pathogen Candida that worked in mice.

  It is an entirely new and more rapid way to reveal an infection which occurs in very sick or immunocompromised patients, particularly critical care patients. Candidemia can kill 10-15 percent of critically ill patients within the first 24 hours of infection. If the disease goes undetected for up to three days, the mortality rate rises to 30 percent ...read more