The official MedZine Blog

Also this week MedZine brings you the latest medical news on various medical specialisms. In this editorial some striking studies are highlighted. This week you can read about re-visiting via ER, breastfeeding in combination with immunosuppressives and recovery after American Football.

Re-visiting the hospital

As a doctor you probably prefer to see patients leave the hospital instead of arriving. Or at least when the patient has recovered. Unfortunately, there are also patients who are back in the hospital quickly after leaving it. This week, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) publishes several studies investigating these re-visits.

Scientist from Yale School of Medicine looked into data form over five million patients that were discharged from American hospitals in 2008 and 2009. Almost eighteen percent of these patients came back to the ER or were re-admitted to the hospital within thirty days. Many of these re-visits (forty percent) were visits to the ER.

Also researchers from the Boston Children’s Hospital investigated re-admissions, specifically in children’s hospitals. According to the researchers, re-admissions are often used as an indicator of quality of care that patients receive during their stay in the hospital. The number of re-admissions differs strongly between the various American children’s hospitals. Re-admission was often linked to the disease that caused the original admission. Some of the diseases that are associated with high levels of re-admissions are anaemia and neutropenia.

Breastfeeding and immunosuppressives

One should always be careful with medication that is subscribed to women who are breastfeeding.
Research this week in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology states that Tacrolimus barely reached the mother’s milk. Tacrolimus is among others prescribed after organ transplantation. Previously, women were advised not to breastfeed while using the drug, because it was feared that the developing immune system of the child would be repressed. Research with fourteen woman shows that this fear is ungrounded.

Sport is not always healthy

It is a generally excepted fact that sporting in most cases is healthy. However, not all sports are healthy, and American Football is one of these unhealthy sports. Researchers at the University of California have developed a new imaging technique that for the first time shows the brain damage in living people that can be caused by American Football. In the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, they describe how the association between protein tau and repeated brain damage can be used to make an early diagnosis and to follow the brain damage in athletes in time.

By Medix Publishers