Month: May 2021

When Dr. Jordan Anderson pictures the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he imagines himself outside the room of one of his patients in the intensive care unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He remembers staring at the man’s ventilator last April and May, wondering if the desperate attempts by the team of medical professionals over several weeks to keep him alive were really what he would have wanted. The man spent weeks ventilated on a heart-lung bypass machine, known as an ECMO. For the entire time the physician in the internal medicine residency program at Brigham and Women’s was caring for the patient, the man was sedated on the ventilator. It was “touch-and-go,” with doctors having daily conversations with the man’s family. Anderson never got the chance to introduce ...

New York: Hospitalised Covid-19 patients with an often undetected sign of heart failure were nearly five times more likely to die, according to new research. The study showed Covid-19 patients with a first-phase ejection fraction -- a measure of the left ventricular ejection fraction until the time of maximal ventricular contraction -- of less than 25 per cent had a nearly five-fold higher risk of death than those with an ejection fraction of 25 per cent or higher. The team also found that a similar proportion of people with similar risk factors who did not have Covid-19 had low values of first-phase ejection fraction. This suggests that the damage to the heart may be due to chronic pre-existing cond...

A year full of social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing and staying at home to prevent coronavirus spread rendered the 2020-2021 influenza season practically non-existent. Public health and clinical laboratories reported 2,038 flu cases during the season from Sept. 27, 2020 to April 24, 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, the agency estimates about 38 million people were sick with the flu during the 2019-2020 season. “It’s been an amazing year,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of California-Berkeley in the school of public health. “In all my years of being a flu watcher … I’ve never seen anything like this.” While low flu incidence is unarguably a good thing, it raises questions about th...

Carlene Knight, 54, is one of the first patients in a landmark study designed to try to restore vision in those who have a rare genetic disease that causes blindness. Josh Andersen/OHSU hide caption toggle caption Josh Andersen/OHSU Carlene Knight, 54, is one of the first patients in a landmark study designed to try to restore vision in those who have a rare genetic disease that causes blindness. Josh Andersen/...