According to studies published in Kidney Medicine, patients who started urgent start peritoneal diagnosis in an integrated health care system had good survival and modality retention rates one year later. Furthermore, experts propose that in circumstances requiring an unanticipated dialysis start, urgent start PD should be explored. Sijie Zheng, MD, PhD, of Kaiser Permanente Medical […]
Category Archives: Blogs
Telemedicine and e-Health in the Management of Psoriasis
The COVID-19 pandemic has opened up new opportunities in telemedicine, including for people who have psoriasis. In most cases, medical management of psoriasis can be safely and effectively handled via this medium. The term “telehealth” is used even more broadly, to include technology used to collect and send patient data, such as email and remote patient monitoring. […]
Root Cause Analysis–Finding the Root of the Problem
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a popular and often-used technique that helps people answer the question of why the problem occurred in the first place. It seeks to identify the origin of a problem using a specific set of steps, with associated tools, to find the primary cause of the problem, so that you can […]
Antibiotic allergy labels in hospitalized and critically ill adults
A Vanderbilt study shows that physicians can safely identify and disprove low-risk penicillin allergies using an oral amoxicillin challenge in consenting patients, even those in the intensive care unit (ICU) who are recovering from critical illness. This finding, reported in The Journal of Antibiotic Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, shows that similar approaches can be made in other […]
Deaths From Heart Disease and Stroke Rose Sharply During Pandemic
While the official national death toll for COVID-19 soars upward of 130,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), experts warn that the number of pandemic-related deaths is much higher. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond analyzed national weekly death data from January to mid-April of this year and compared it with data from […]
Omicron infection linked with common respiratory illness in children
Although young children with Covid-19 generally experience mild illness, the omicron coronavirus variant has led to more children being hospitalized with Covid-19 in recent months at a rate five times higher than with the Delta variant. All the kids included in the study were below five and were not vaccinated. The current Omicron wave that […]
Long COVID: Can it cause persistent lung disease?
For nearly two years, the collective attention of researchers worldwide has focused on understanding what infection with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, does to the human body. As a result, scientists have amassed evidence of a wide range of effects on the heart, lungs, brain and various other organs. Much of that insight has […]
Gene Therapy in Rare Respiratory Diseases: What Have We Learned So Far?
The genes in your body’s cells play an important role in your health — indeed, a defective gene or genes can make you sick. Recognizing this, scientists have been working for decades on ways to modify genes or replace faulty genes with healthy ones to treat, cure or prevent a disease or medical condition. Now […]
Air pollution exposure linked to increased autoimmune disease risk
Long term exposure to air pollution is linked to a heightened risk of autoimmune disease, particularly rheumatoid arthritis, connective tissue and inflammatory bowel diseases, finds research published online in the open access journal RMD Open. Environmental air pollution from vehicle exhaust and industrial output can trigger adaptive immunity–whereby the body reacts to a specific disease-causing entity. […]
Remote monitoring: Keeping your heart health in check with technology
Cardiology, Evolving technology is altering the way healthcare is delivered, and remote patient monitoring (RPM) is leading a transformation in primary and specialty care settings. Cardiology was one of the first specialties to incorporate RPM with the introduction of connected cardiac implants Remote monitoring: Keeping your heart health in check with technology. Now, the particularities […]