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(04/21/16 6:06pm)
Marijuana has been in the spotlight recently for its alleged medicinal properties, prompting 23 states and the District of Columbia to legalize medical cannabis. As medical marijuana becomes increasingly accepted as a viable alternative to traditional therapies, the recreational value of the drug is also increasing.
(03/31/16 9:12pm)
Autism has long baffled scientists. Its intense heterogeneity and seemingly enigmatic cause have led clinicians and researchers to struggle to devise a cure. However, in the midst of this confusion, several problematic and often disturbing misconceptions about the nature of autism have arisen. I set out to dispel some of the myths surrounding autism.
(03/10/16 3:39pm)
The brain is a diverse organ that forms the basis of learning, memory, behavior and personality. Structural differences in the brain among individuals can help account for differences in how we act, think and look.
(04/30/15 8:05pm)
“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” While the common saying may be cliché, a new study may provide scientific support for the importance of sleeping and waking early.
(04/16/15 3:25pm)
The brain regulates nearly everything about us — homeostasis, perception and cognitive function — but how specific brain regions connect and work together is still not perfectly understood. Recently, a team at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Texas-Houston uncovered a previously unknown role of the region that initiates the processing of visual input. The brain’s primary visual cortex, referred to as V1, is responsible for sensing visual information about the world around us. The primary visual cortex, located in the occipital lobe at the back the brain, creates a map of our visual field. This map is then relayed to other areas of brain, which make decisions based on these visual clues and generate a motor response. This is the traditional or canonical view. However, a recent study conducted by Dr. Marshall Shuler and his team implicates the V1 region in more than just visual sensing. The work, published in Neuron, suggests that the V1 primary visual cortex plays a role in making time-based action decisions following visual stimuli. Shuler is an assistant professor within the department of neuroscience at the School of Medicine. In order to investigate the role of V1 in time-based action, Shuler’s team used mice fitted with a special set of goggles capable of presenting a visual stimulus in the form of light and thereby stimulating the V1 region. The mice, thirsty from a lack of water, were given access to a waterspout. Water would flow from the spout at a specific time interval following a light stimulus that was presented in the goggles. Licking the waterspout in the target interval gave the mice a small amount of water as a reward. However, if they timed it incorrectly, they would receive no water. The researchers then investigated whether mice were capable of being trained to receive the most water. That is, could mice learn to wait and time their licks to get the most water after V1 cortex stimulation by visual cues? This allowed the researchers to test the role of the V1 cortex in making time-based action decisions. The team found that mice could indeed be trained to receive the maximal amount of water. With increased trials, the mice gradually learned to time their licks in order to receive the greatest amount. But this result does not relate the V1 cortex to time-based action. In order to test the role of V1 in time-based action making, they measured the activity of V1 neurons during the same waterspout activity. Shuler and his team found that there was a “trial-by-trial correlation between the neural representation of the interval and the action” in 77 out of the 122 neurons they measured. That is, longer V1 neural firing indicated a longer delay between the visual stimulus and the mouse licking the waterspout. But this correlation was only present when mice were given a visual stimulus. In cases of a non-visual stimulus (such as nose-poke entry), there was no such correlation between neural activity and action. This showed that the V1 region may indeed be regulating time-based action following a visual stimulus. The researchers next tried to optogenetically stimulate V1 neurons, seeing whether it was possible to influence the mice’s behavior by presenting different signals to the V1 cortex. Optogenetics, a relatively new development in the field of neuroscience, enables researchers to stimulate genetically-altered neurons with light. Upon optogenetic stimulation of V1 neurons, the researchers found that he was able to change the waiting time in visually stimulated mice. Consistent with his neural activity findings, they found no change in the non-visually stimulated mice upon optogenetic perturbation. The results suggest that the V1 primary visual cortex, traditionally thought of as being the primary visual sensory area in the brain, may actually play a far larger role in making decisions and performing time-based actions. His findings expand our traditional view of the brain as a compartmentalized organ, with each region having a specific function.
(04/09/15 2:42pm)
As healthcare costs continue to rise, the U.S. continues to search for ways to provide affordable coverage to all citizens. The Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid are modern players in the long fight against increasing healthcare costs. However, a new quantitative study may soon change the way we think of hospital costs. The healthcare industry in the U.S., made up of physicians, hospitals and insurance providers, represents a $3.8 trillion dollar industry, according to Forbes. Yet, a McKinsey Study showed that the United States, while spending more on healthcare per capita than any other developed country, does not enjoy higher health outcome measures such as percent obesity and life expectancy. Many theories exist regarding this paradox: the higher cost of medical procedures, an overly bureaucratic administration, increased length of inpatient stay and even a lack of preventative medicine. However, whatever the reason may be, it is clear that a systematic cost reduction is critically needed. Minimally invasive surgery has flourished in the current age of technology-based medicine. Through innovations in biomedical engineering, physicians can perform what were once open surgeries with minimally invasive tools such as laparoscopic devices and robotically controlled instruments. The Mayo Clinic reports that because patients often have just a very small incision, there is lesser chance of painful and life-threatening postoperative infections. Recovery times also increase because less healthy tissue is damaged during the procedure. Surgical procedures represent a substantial single contributor to aggregate healthcare expenses. A new study led a professor of surgery at the Hopkins School of Medicine, Marty Makary, and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Surgery, took a quantitative approach to surgical costs by studying the cost savings and number of postoperative complications avoided by performing minimally invasive surgery versus open surgery. Makary said in the report that minimally invasive surgery is an often-overlooked opportunity to make surgery safer and less costly. For their study, the researchers used the 2010 National Inpatient Sample for patients undergoing an appendectomy (the removal of the appendix), a partial colectomy (removal of part of the colon) or a lung lobectomy (removal of part of the lung). In order to limit the effect of confounding variables, Makary removed instances of emergency surgery and high-risk patients. From this dataset, Markary and his team were able to observe open and minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) with and without postoperative complications. In order to study the cost of postoperative complications associated with open surgery, the researchers considered seven postoperative complications listed in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Patient Safety Indicators. The team first built a two-stage regression model for excess cost in cases with and without postoperative complications. From their model, Markary was able to create two simulations in which patients with open surgery instead underwent minimally invasive surgery and from there compute the cost savings, number of complications avoided and number of hospital days avoided. In the first simulation, hospitals that were performing a low number of MIS (i.e., up to the 83rd percentile of hospitals) performed as many MIS as the 83rd percentile. In the second scenario, all hospitals increased their number MIS by 50 percent from the baseline. The investigators found that there was a marked decrease in surgical costs, postoperative complications and hospital stays in both simulations. If hospitals increased their rate of MIS to that of the 83rd percentile, patients could have 169,819 fewer days in the hospital and 4,306 fewer postoperative complications. In total, this would mean a $377 million reduction in annual cost. As Makary concludes, the team’s results indicate that MIS is underutilized and should be a choice given to patients more often. While not applicable in all cases, lower cost, less harmful minimally invasive surgeries may be an effective solution to reducing the fiscal burden of healthcare while also improving patient satisfaction.