The Best Christmas Gift

Some of the best Christmas gifts fit in stockings and babies born around the holidays are no exception. That's why babies born at Magee-Women's Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center get special stockings if they're in the hospital on Christmas Day.

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Holiday Newborns Go Home in Christmas Stockings 2014

Source: ABC News

The Never-ending Mannequin Challenge

 Every day is a mannequin challenge for ALS patients.


View in YouTube:
The never-ending Mannequin Challenge


Source: YouTube

Hospital command center

The people who manage patient flow at hospitals might like a crystal ball that shows them when their resources are about to be overwhelmed. Hospitals are trying out what might be the next best thing. They're wiring command centers with monitors that display predictive analytics fueled by every conceivable data source that gives a glimpse of a patient's movement through the facility.

Taking a cue from other industries that assemble command centers to manage complex logistics, GE Healthcare equipped Johns Hopkins with the company's first Wall of Analytics, which features 22 information screens that can pull data from 14 sources, including the electronic health record, admission software and OR scheduling applications. GE is working with a handful of other hospitals to deploy the technology.

Although the command center at Johns Hopkins has been up and running for less than a year, the hospital has seen a 30% reduction in ER patients who have to wait for an inpatient bed and a roughly 70% reduction in patients who must be held in the OR because there's no recovery or inpatient bed for them, according to Jim Scheulen, Johns Hopkins Hospital's chief administrative officer for emergency medicine and capacity management.

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Hospital command centers help manage flow

Source: Modern Healthcare Modern Healthcare business news

Pokemon Goes Lab

The new game Pokémon Go is certainly a popular craze, but is it good for your health?

Pokémon Go involves the use of a smartphone app in a virtual scavenger hunt for cartoon characters, but in real locations. Glasgow general practitioner and BMJ columnist Dr Margaret McCartney believes the game's health benefits may outweigh its well-documented risks.

"Most health apps that promote physical activity tend to get users who want to be healthy. Pokémon Go isn't marketed as a health app, but players still end up doing a lot of walking,"

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Do the Health Benefits of Pokemon Go Outweigh the Risks?

Source: Medscape

Can healthy people benefit from health apps?

A health app is a piece of smartphone software that purports to offer the user some health benefit. Many of these apps are aimed at people with diagnoses; for example, they teach the correct use of an asthma inhaler or collect blood pressure results by syncing wirelessly with a blood pressure monitor. But many are aimed at people with no diagnosis: for example, apps that allow users to track their calorie intake and exercise, or even their sleep patterns.

Some apps have the potential to encourage healthier habits and are accessible to most people, writes Iltifat Husain, but Des Spence notes the lack of any evidence of effectiveness and the potential for encouraging unnecessary anxiety.

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Can healthy people benefit from health apps?

Source: The BMJ

Chocolate Organs

This newly redesigned box set of chocolate anatomy includes one of each of our regular size anatomical chocolate pieces. This assortment of 16 pieces comes as a mix of milk and dark chocolate. The box has a beautiful decorative lid to make this a unique anatomy gift for doctors, surgeons, medical student gift, graduation gift or unique chocolate gift for the occasion of your choice. Each anatomically correct chocolate rests in a paper cup then in a dark brown 16 place tray.

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Anatomically Correct Doctors Medical Organs Chocolates Gifts Boxes Columbus Ohio

Source: Visual Anatomy Limited

66% of People Diagnosed with Cancer Survive At Least 5 Years

Two out of three people with invasive cancer survive five years or moreTwo out of three Americans with invasive cancer—the kind that has spread to nearby healthy tissue—are living five years or more after diagnosis, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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66% of People Diagnosed with Cancer Survive At Least 5 Years

 Source: TIME

Aaaagh....It was a long night shift

I feel like night shifts are killing me

Imge credits: brains-and-bodies

Regular coffee drinkers have cleaner arteries

Drinking a few cups of coffee a day may help people avoid clogged arteries - a known risk factor for heart disease - Korean researchers believe.

They studied more than 25,000 male and female employees who underwent routine health checks at their workplace. Employees who drank a moderate amount of coffee - three to five cups a day - were less likely to have early signs of heart disease on their medical scans. The findings reopen the debate about whether coffee is good for the heart.

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Regular coffee drinkers have 'cleaner' arteries

 Source: BBC News

Sauna Use Associated with Reduced Risk of Cardiac Mortality

A sauna may do more than just make you sweat. A new study suggests men who engaged in frequent sauna use had reduced risks of fatal cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Although some studies have found sauna bathing to be associated with better cardiovascular and circulatory function, the association between regular sauna bathing and risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) and fatal cardiovascular diseases (CVD) is not known.

Jari A. Laukkanen, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, and coauthors investigated the association between sauna bathing and the risk of SCD, fatal coronary heart disease (CHD), fatal CVD and all-cause mortality in a group of 2,315 middle-aged men (42 to 60 years old) from eastern Finland.

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Sauna Use Associated with Reduced Risk of Cardiac, All-Cause Mortality

Source: Jama

Image: Jenni Gästgivar

Anatomical Sand Sculpture

“Life,” by Benjamin Probanza of Acapulco, Mexico, took 2nd place in a sand sculpting contest in Treasure Island, Florida.

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Anatomical Sand Sculpture

Source: Anatomic US

Rotating Night Shift Work Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

Night shift work has been consistently associated with higher risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer. In 2007 the World Health Organization classified night shift work as a probable carcinogen due to circadian disruption. In a study in the current issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that women working rotating night shifts for five or more years appeared to have a modest increase in all-cause and CVD mortality and those working 15 or more years of rotating night shift work appeared to have a modest increase in lung cancer mortality. These results add to prior evidence of a potentially detrimental effect of rotating night shift work on health and longevity.

Sleep and the circadian system play an important role in cardiovascular health and antitumor activity. There is substantial biological evidence that night shift work enhances the development of cancer and CVD, and contributes to higher mortality.

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Rotating Night Shift Work Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

Source: Elsevier
Image credits: Jill Colbourne

Health-promoting Nordic diet reduces inflammatory gene activity in adipose tissue

A Nordic study led by the Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition at the University of Eastern Finland discovered that the health-promoting Nordic diet reduces the expression of inflammation-associated genes in subcutaneous adipose tissue. In overweight persons, the expression of these genes reduced without weight loss. To a certain extent, the adverse health effects of overweight are believed to be caused by an inflammatory state in adipose tissue. The results were published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Overweight is associated with problems in sugar and lipid metabolism as well as with atherosclerosis, and these may be caused by a low-grade inflammatory state resulting from disturbed adipose tissue function. Long-term research into the role of diet in the function of adipose tissue genes and inflammatory state remains scarce.

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Health-promoting Nordic diet reduces inflammatory gene activity in adipose tissue 
 

Source: University of Eastern Finland

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Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2012

Anatomy of Obesity

Look at the differences in the organs of these two people. The left person has a layer of fat surrounding all the organs, I mean look at his/her heart! There is no way all those organs can efficiently do their job when they are that compacted. Next take a look at the joints of both people, especially the ankles. The human body is not designed to support that much extra weight.

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Changing My Life, One Step at a Time

Source: Emily James Fitness

Time to go skiing

Anatomy sports underwear

Non-communicable diseases increase premature death globally

In the first in a series of papers has been published in the Lancet today, Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 has been updated to GBD 2013 three years later. The authors aimed to ascertain changes in the global, regional and national burden of mortality for 240 causes of death across 188 countries between 1990-2013. Using similar methods to those used in GBD 2010, but with the addition of new data and improvements in their statistical modelling, the authors found several exciting results.

Generally, although has been a reduction in age- and sex- specific mortality, there has been a shift towards a greater proportion of deaths being due to non-communicable disease and injury. Rising death rates from some important NCDs such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, selected vascular conditions such as atrial fibrillation, and chronic kidney disease, as well as stagnant mortality from leading causes of death such as cancers of the lung, liver, prostate, pancreas, and kidney have the potential to reverse some of these gains made in premature mortality reduction.

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The Global Burden of Disease: non-communicable diseases increase premature death

Source: Biomed Central

Simon's Cat Hates Cell Biology

Every time she opens the book, she will fall in sleep within a minute


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Simon's Cat - Scientist cat

Source: Simon´s Cat

Needle-stick injuries among health care workers

Around 600000 - 800000 injuries in every year occur in USA. Half of cases are not reported. Half of all hepatitis B and C in some parts of Africa and Asia are due to contaminated sharps. 2/3 of hepatitis B and C in Eastern Mediterranean are due to contaminated sharps. Over 2/3 of hepatitis B in Central and South American are due to occupational exposure

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14 needle-stick injuries among health care workers

Source: Mgh Cetd

Anatomy panties

Educational underwear

Source: Cosmopolitan

HIV and sex workers

With heightened risks of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, sex workers face substantial barriers in accessing prevention, treatment, and care services, largely because of stigma, discrimination, and criminalisation in the societies in which they live. These social, legal, and economic injustices contribute to their high risk of acquiring HIV. Often driven underground by fear, sex workers encounter or face the direct risk of violence and abuse daily. Sex workers remain underserved by the global HIV response. This Series of seven papers aims to investigate the complex issues faced by sex workers worldwide, and calls for the decriminilisation of sex work, in the global effort to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

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TheLancet.com - HIV and sex workers

Download full poster here

Source: The Lancet