Word: deathe
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...Zhongcong Xie, now an associate professor of anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues published the first in a series of studies demonstrating that commonly used general anesthetics can cause cell death and plaque accumulation in brain cells - both potential hallmarks of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. More recently, at the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, anesthesiologist Dr. Robert Wilder published a study that found a link between exposure to anesthesia and surgery in infancy and learning disabilities later in life. Both doctors have since been approached with inquiries from concerned patients - but armed only with early data, neither can offer...
...calcium. Doctors wishing to treat these patients hypothesized that blocking the receptor that enables calcium to enter cells could protect stroke patients from severe brain damage. But in the course of researching this possibility, they found that switching off the receptor in a healthy brain cell led to the death of that cell - an unexpected and troubling result, given that many common anesthetics block the same receptor. At first this made little sense, but other researchers began to speculate that preventing calcium entry might be the cause of injury...
...role of calcium in the healthy brain is critical, particularly in young children, whose brains undergo rapid neural development from the last trimester in utero up through ages 1 to 2. Infants' brains expand quickly, then ruthlessly prune back brain cells - a process of orderly cell death, known as apoptosis. In an experiment in young rats undergoing this crucial stage of neural development, Christopher Turner, an assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, witnessed out-of-control apoptosis in the brains of rats treated with drugs that mimicked the action of the general anesthetic...
...cause cognitive impairment in rats.) He saw a vicious cycle of apoptosis and the accumulation of beta-amyloid protein - the sticky plaques that build up in Alzheimer's patients' brains - among the cells. But in this case, it may have been an excess of calcium that led to cell death. Xie and his colleagues have since found that the Alzheimer's drug memantine, which works by reducing calcium levels inside cells, can slow the rate of isoflurane-induced cell death. "That certainly suggests that Dr. Turner and we could be looking at the different sides of the same coin...
...latest study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offers a snapshot of 1,088 H1N1 cases in California that were severe enough to require hospitalization - or resulted in death - between April 23 and Aug. 11 of this year. Experts at the California Department of Public Health, who led the study, say their findings are largely in line with the growing body of data on the worldwide pandemic flu, confirming, for instance, that the 2009 H1N1 flu disproportionately affects younger patients. The California research team found that the median age of hospitalized H1N1 patients...