Measles vaccination rates remained low after Ohio outbreak

BOSTON — Measles vaccination coverage remained well below herd immunity rates nearly 2 years after a large measles outbreak in central Ohio, according to data presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting.
“Outbreak response can contain transmission in the short term, but improving vaccination coverage often requires sustained long-term work,” Rosemary A. Martoma, MD, MBChB, a fellow in general academic pediatrics and the computational health informatics program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told Healio. “Real-time surveillance, strong primary care

Large study finds no difference between balanced fluid, saline

BOSTON — A study of more than 8,000 children in five countries with suspected septic shock showed no difference in kidney complications when they received balanced fluid vs. 0.9% saline for resuscitation.
The results were published April 24 in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented the next day here at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting.
“Saline has the advantage of a long record — 150 years of use,” Scott L. Weiss, MD, MSCE, FCCM, chief of critical care medicine and vice chair of research in the department of pediatrics at Nemours Children’s Hospital, told Healio in an

Combination treatment could be safer, more effective for drug overdoses involving severe agitation

A team of Marshall University researchers has published a new study suggesting a potential breakthrough in how doctors manage severe agitation caused by methamphetamine and/or cocaine use, particularly in cases in which opioids have also been used. Michael Hambuchen, PharmD, Ph.D., with Marshall's School of Pharmacy and Todd Davies, Ph.D., at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, are studying the use of dexmedetomidine-naloxone for treatment. Their preclinical study was published in the Journal of Pharmacy of Pharmaceutical Sciences and is available here.

Their parents lived to 100. Do their diets have clues to longevity?

A new study from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University suggests that the children of a parent who lived to age 100 or older tend to have slightly healthier eating habits than those who do not come from such a robust lineage. The research offers one of the first comprehensive looks at the dietary habits of centenarian offspring, a group that shares roughly half of their parents' longevity genes and many years of their life environments.

Diagnosing cancer with a drop of blood

What if doctors could more accurately diagnose and monitor blood cancer with a simple blood draw? This vision is becoming a reality thanks to research at Rapid Novor, a Waterloo-based company co-founded by Dr. Bin Ma, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo.

Taking the guesswork out of drug development for Chagas disease

Researchers at Kent have established a computational protocol that could accelerate the development of more effective treatments for life-threatening parasitic infections such as Chagas disease, by enabling scientists to accurately identify reactions that can result in successful drug candidates without the need for trial and error. The research is published in the journal ChemistryOpen.

Antibodies can selectively shut down harmful T cells without weakening whole immune system

The immune system is the frontline protection against infection, continually searching for and destroying unknown pathogens. While typical operation of the immune system scans for threats, some systems attack the body's own healthy cells, leading to autoimmune diseases, like multiple sclerosis. Treatment of autoimmune diseases is a difficult balance, and one that has not yet been successfully achieved.