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THE FUTURE OF medicine has arrived.
No, we’re not talking about robot surgeons, implantable memory-augmentation devices, or doctors wearing Google Glass.
The game-changing innovations on this list are more than distant dreams or inventions no one really knows what to with yet. Most should be available as early as 2015.
Every year, the Cleveland Clinic in America comes up with a list of new devices or treatments that are expected to help improve our daily lives and reduce our risks of developing disease. Only time will tell whether their considerable promise pans out.
Here are the top 10 new medications, treatments, and technologies they think we should watch out for in 2015:
What if there were a drug that could lessen the brain damage caused by a stroke by targeting the blood clot that caused it and breaking it up?
As it turns out, there is. It’s called tPA, and the faster it’s given after a stroke, the safer and more effective it is. Here’s the problem: Most people don’t get the drug in time, and it can only be administered via IV.
Mobile stroke treatment units solve this problem by taking tPA directly to the patient. The units are essentially ambulances outfitted with everything health professionals need to treat a patient suffering from a stroke and staffed by an onboard paramedic, a critical care nurse, and a CT technologist. A broadband video link allows the onboard team to virtually contact a hospital stroke neurologist to guide treatment.
Close to half the world’s population is at risk for developing dengue, a disease characterized by high fever, nausea and vomiting, and pain behind the eyes and in the muscles, bones, and joints. The virus kills some 20,000 people each year and is spread by mosquitoes. One of the biggest challenges in creating a vaccine against dengue is that it is caused by five different related, but not identical, strains. Even protection from one type will still leave you susceptible to the four other forms.
But scientists have reason to be hopeful this year.
A vaccine that just went through the last phase of testing was found to be 60% effective, on average, in protecting people against the disease, and 95.5% protective against the disease in its most severe form, as dengue hemorrhagic fever. The new vaccine also reduced the number of people who needed to be hospitalized by bringing down the onset of fever by 80%. Fever is one of the virus’s most potentially fatal complications, especially when it occurs in children under age 10. The vaccine is expected to be available in early 2015.
Bye bye, needles.
Instead of getting blood drawn the conventional way, a new technology will let doctors — or pharmacists, even — run hundreds of tests with a single drop of blood from a finger prick, drastically reducing the cost.
Too much cholesterol in the blood can collect inside our arteries and plug them up, causing heart disease and death. While many people use statins, a special type of drug that can help lower cholesterol, some people’s cholesterol levels simply don’t respond to treatment.
There’s a new type of injectable drug just for those patients called PCSK9. In studies, the drug has been successful at reducing cholesterol levels in people whose high cholesterol levels didn’t respond to statins.
The best part? No trip to the hospital or clinic required. The drug can be injected at home, like insulin, and only requires one or two treatments a month.
Chemotherapy and radiation can save lives, but the intense treatment harms healthy cells in the process of taking down cancerous ones. As a result, many cancer patients experience side effects ranging from hair loss to crippling nausea and extreme fatigue.
But a new class of drugs targets cancer cells and leaves healthy tissues alone. The drugs are a form of precision treatment that combines antibodies — the molecules the immune system uses to locate and stop harmful viruses — with a powerful toxin that kills a cancerous cell from within.
While these drugs, called antibody-drug conjugates, won’t be a cure-all, more than 24 are in clinical trials for solid tumors and blood cancer. Some that have been designed to treat other types of cancer, including HER2-positive breast cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, are already available.
The first pacemaker was implanted in 1958. Since then, doctors have continued using pacemakers connected electrically to the heart via a complex system of tiny wires. Unfortunately, those wires can break or get dislodged in the body. Their insulation can also become cracked and lead to an infection.
This new pacemaker is wireless, 10% of the size of a conventional pacemaker (about the size of a large vitamin), and is implanted directly in the heart — no lengthy surgery required.
Doctors simply use a catheter in a leg vein to steer the device into the heart, a process that takes about 20 minutes. The lithium-battery-powered device lasts up to 7 years and is currently undergoing late stage clinical trials. It was first implanted into a patient in the US last February.
Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis is a deadly, untreatable disease whose cause remains unknown. Scar tissue builds up inside the lungs, thickening its tissues and making breathing difficult. Many people diagnosed with IPF only live another 3-5 years.
Two new drugs found to reduce scar tissue and improve lung function in patients got approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October. One appears to work by calming inflammation while the other blocks a protein that tells the lungs to make scar tissue. We don’t yet know if these drugs will work for all patients, but they’re the first that show promise in slowing the disease’s progression.
Nearly 1.7 million cases of breast cancer were diagnosed worldwide in 2012, according to the World Cancer Research Fund. Radiation therapy, the leading treatment used to beat back the disease, can be inconvenient and expensive.
The Cleveland Clinic estimates that intraoperative radiation therapy, which would involve giving a patient a single dose of radiation after surgery to remove tumours, would cost one-fifth the price of traditional radiation treatment, which can sometimes involve up to 20 doses.
Most people at risk of heart failure treat their condition with two drugs: ACE inhibitors and beta blockers, which work by opening up the blood vessels and making it easier for the heart to push blood throughout the body. But they’re not a perfect fix.
A new drug could further reduce the risk of heart failure. In a study of 8,000 patients, researchers testing the new treatment, called Angiotensin Receptor Neprilysin Inhibitor (ARNI), had to stop testing because the patients receiving the new drug had far better health outcomes than those taking traditional drugs. Compared to people taking traditional heart failure drugs, people getting ARNI were 20% less likely to be hospitalized for heart failure and 16% less likely to die from any cause during the study.
- Erin Brodwin, Business Insider
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So rather than hire some lifeguards they are banning swimming but, In order to enforce it, they will have to post guards to arrest people for swimming. Have FG finally found their match in incompetence.
@Dan: stopping people who can’t swim from going into water with a dangerous under current seems pretty sensible to me
@Dan: Yes, more like twins.
@Fergus Sheahan: Maybe not being able to swim yet actually going for a swim should stop them????
@Fergus Sheahan: Where in the article did it mention people who can’t swim?
@Fatima Murtaza: Hate to be cynical but I’d say money will change hands now, just to be allowed to use the beaches. And the people accepting the bribes will all be in favour of the new temporary law. No lifeguards will be trained, but the money will be spent on courses and consultants, while volunteers do the rescuing. Oh, hang on, wrong country ;-)
Seeing them on bondi beach I can understand. I doubt very much they are going to obey the ban either.
Should they not have set up a tribunal to investigate this for several years before issuing a report with recommendations and conclusions that can then be examined by a review group first? The Indian politicians have a lot to learn from our guys, they need to start sending all expenses paid fact finding missions to Ireland to see how best to drain the public purse!
@Jarlath Murphy: Err, It’s Pakistan not India.
@Just Me: It’s the nature of indifferent governments really. They probably have the sand already priced by the ton and sold off to property developers.
I bet very few women have drowned there
@Matty Kineven: Don’t think they won’t go in because of the burka , it’s the women who are suffering in the heat because of the sack they have to wear .
@Ken Hayden: “Who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? And who are we to say, even, that they’re wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?
Well, who are we NOT to say this? Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this?” – Sam Harris
@Matty Kineven: “An ancient culture” Judaism , Hindu , Buddahism , Yazedi , Christanity , and more, are all older than Islam . Not so ancient in the time frame of the world . The 7th century AD, is not ancient.
@Just Me: I’m not really interested in having a debate over the meaning and time frame of the word “ancient”. Thanks all the same.
@Matty Kineven: No problem then, if you’re that touchy, choose your words more carefully, OK.
@Just Me: I think you’ll find that you are the touchy one. Anyway they’re not my words but I’ll pass the message on to Mr. Harris, okay?
@Matty Kineven: I’d still be keen on watching the Pakistani version of baywatch though .
Journal.ie, Edhi foundation is not an ambulance service only, please don’t make it sound like one.
I sent Journal a link on Mr Edhi’s passing last year, about his national and international services. Google chose to honour the Pakistani Humanitarian, on their search bar. But I suppose it was below Journal to do so.
@Fatima Murtaza: Not necessarily, perhaps the Journal simply wasn’t interested.
The irony of this ban is that thousands will die from heat stroke sitting on a beach .
‘devout Pakistanis’… Who writes this rubbish!
If you are drowning and you are not allowed to swim then surely there will be more deaths.
have your say