Word: effective
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...series of advances in computer-imaging technology have enabled doctors to peer directly into the brain while a stroke is under way. The sharply detailed pictures reveal the type of stroke that is occurring, how far along the stroke has progressed and even whether various treatments are having an effect. Surgeons have also fine-tuned procedures in which they can perform preventive maintenance on some stroke-prone arteries. But the best is yet to come: researchers are developing medications that will actually protect portions of the brain from damage for as long as 12 hours after a stroke, giving doctors...
Still, in vitro has had an astounding ripple effect that has reached many branches of infertility research. Twenty years of manipulating human eggs, embryos and sperm have led researchers to solutions to problems that in vitro alone cannot help. Couples carrying severe genetic disorders and infertile men have become parents as a result, and methods are being explored to restore fertility in both men and women who are undergoing cancer treatment. The same technique can be used for women who postpone childbearing to a point in their lives when their fertility would naturally diminish...
Medical advances are already having a pronounced effect on the seniors' quality of life. A yearly federal survey of 20,000 people 65 and older showed a steady decrease through the 1980s in chronic disabilities of all kinds--with the most dramatic reductions in the 85-plus segment. "It is evolutionary, not revolutionary," says Kenneth Manton, a demographer at Duke University in North Carolina. Nonetheless, it is a welcome relief for the aging. "Life is a lot better now for older people than it was just 20 years ago," says Dr. Harold Karpman, a Beverly Hills, California, cardiologist...
...produced lower bone mass, a dangerous condition for older people. Moreover, because lab animals do not have the life-span of humans, all this remains highly speculative. Dr. Anna McCormick, chief of the biology section at the National Institute on Aging, cautions that cutting calories may never be an effective method of retarding age in humans. But, she says, "there may be a way to find a hormone or a drug that would have the same effect...
...this may be at this stage of exploration, the end goal is abundantly clear: intervening sufficiently in the aging process to improve the quality of the later years and perhaps even extend them. "Ultimately," says Smith, "we'd like to be able to design drugs that have an effect on disabling processes...