Innholdsfortegnelse for Volume 1 Issue 3 i Aster Medical Journal (AMJ)

Dubai Health Authority (DHA) is the first in the region to offer this service. The CME Online platform, which can be accessed via Rashid Medical Library’s online portal, offers CME Online points accredited and recognised by DHA. BMJ Learning, UpToDate, BMJ Best practise, and Clinical Key are some course providers on the platform. Dr Wadeia Sharief, Director of the Department of Medical Education and Research, said that “Offering this service for free will ensure that medical professionals have an accredited source that is recognised by the authority to gain CME points. In addition to providing an online portal for CME points, Dr Sharief revealed that Rashid Medical Electronic Library is home to more than 18 million articles, 16,277 medical magazines, 220,761 books and over six million pictures and videos.…

1 Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America 1 Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America, Medical Society Consortium for Climate and Health, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America 3 Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America, Medical Society Consortium for Climate and Health, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America 4 Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America, Medical Society Consortium for Climate and Health, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America In the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, 195 nations agreed to work together to hold the rise in global temperature to “well below 2 degrees Celsius.” Recent research by the Intergovernmental Panel…

Dr. Cherniak and Rodgers Ssekawoko Muhumuza, the Ugandan clinical officer he was training, stared at the iPhone into which the scanner was plugged, watching Gordon’s lung expand and contract. “O.K.,” Dr. Cherniak finally said. “What do you recommend?” Gordon had a persistent cough and swollen lymph nodes, and looked tired and unwell. As other boys ran around outside, kicking a soccer ball made of rags and twine, he clung weakly to his mother. The scan on the iPhone’s screen suggested his lungs had fluid in them. As Dr. Cherniak nodded approval, Mr. Muhumuza prescribed an antibiotic, and ordered blood tests to rule out tuberculosis, malaria and H.I.V. He arranged for Gordon and his mother to get a ride to a local clinic for an X-ray and a night of observation.…

Siemens Healthineers says it has completed a $1.1 billion buyout of Corindus Vascular Robotics and its robot-assisted device for coronary and peripheral vascular procedures. Siemens Healthineers believes the addition of its imaging and artificial intelligence tools to Corindus' robotics platform will help it garner a stronger foothold into the vascular robotics sector. "The acquisition of Corindus, combined with Siemens' strong advanced therapies portfolio will help further advance the growth of vascular robotics," Michel Therin, president of advanced therapies at Siemens Healthineers, said in a statement.…

1 National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA 2 Human Exploration and Operations/Space Life and Physical Sciences and Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer, NASA, Washington DC and Baylor College of Medicine/Center for Space Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA 3 Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India Correspondence Address: Dr. Krishnan Ganapathy, Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation and Apollo Telehealth Services, Apollo Main Hospital, No. 21 Greams Lane, Off Greams Road, Chennai - 600 006, Tamil Nadu, India o a country where just 4 years ago, there was not a single neurologist or neurosurgeon living in areas where the majority of Indians lived,[1] a review of human health in outer space may seem incongruous. Physicians, however, should not live in silos confined…

Slowly and insidiously, they pile up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Abnormal bits of protein known as amyloid-β glom onto each other to form the infamous plaques that reminded German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer of millet seeds when he first spotted them in the brain of a deceased patient in 1906. And then there are the tau proteins, which normally help to stabilize the cellular skeleton of brain cells, but may start to form tangles as people age, or when tau is defective. The consequences are also familiar: Short-term memory loss usually comes first, then mood swings, language impairment, disorientation and confusion inevitably ensue. But how these symptoms result from the two faulty proteins and the tangles and plaques they create has long been unclear. To study Alzheimer’s…

For decades, Piri Welcsh has had professional and personal stakes in understanding the genetics of breast cancer. In the 1990s, the molecular geneticist participated in an international race to clone BRCA1, the first gene linked to breast cancer risk, and she works to this day in the lab of pioneering breast cancer geneticist Mary-Claire King at the University of Washington. And then there’s Welcsh’s own family. Her grandmother died of breast cancer, her mother is a breast cancer survivor, and her aunt was just diagnosed with breast cancer. Since the days of the BRCA1 discovery, researchers have identified more than 100 genes that, in certain forms, raise breast cancer risk. And yet that still leaves many people with elevated familial risk seeking answers. “Some families, like mine, are unsolved,” says…

Specialist Internal Medicine, Aster Hospital, Qatar INTRODUCTION Heat exhaustion is frequent in the summer months and may progress to heat stroke, which poses a threat to life. The enzyme Creatine Phosphokinase (CPK) is prognostic of heat stroke as its presence in the blood indicates tissue damage. High serum CPK typically occurs with physical exertion, particularly under high heat conditions, and is associated with rhabdomyolysis and hypokalemia [1], however this is not always the case. We present the case of one patient who demonstrated extremely high CPK levels and heat exhaustion symptoms despite limited heat exposure, demonstrating the importance of hematuria as an indicator of heat stroke risk. Case Summary The patient, a 33 year old male ship worker, arrived at Aster Hospital Qatar with unexplained hematuria along with generalized weakness,…

Growing up with a renowned geneticist father and a creative and socially responsible mother, Soumya Swaminathan practically had a career path set as a child. Today, she has paved her own trail as the first chief scientist the World Health Organization, is determined to revamp India’s TB programmes and prioritise digital technology to improve health care. Until recently, she was Deputy Director General of Programmes of the UN body. She has also served as the Secretary to the Indian government for health research and as Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). She is known for her research on tuberculosis at the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT), Chennai, which she joined in 1992 and went on to head. Swaminathan and her colleagues were among the first…

During two years of trials on two islands in the city of Guangzhou, researchers reduced the number of viable eggs produced by female Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus) – a major vector for dengue and the Zika virus – by more than 94 per cent. The international team from Michigan State University (MSU) and Sun Yat-sen University reported a corresponding plunge in adult females, which transmit the disease to humans by biting. Their numbers fell by 83 per cent in 2016 and 94 per cent in 2017. The breakthrough was achieved by combining two conventional methods of biological engineering for maximum effect. Zhiyong Xi, molecular geneticist at MSU and lead researcher of the team that published the study in the journal Nature, infected millions of factory-reared male mosquitoes with Wolbachia,…

Every year, in the first half of October, someone in Stockholm gives a few eminent people across the globe an overwhelming start to their day, by an early-morning phone call delivering extraordinary news. This year, hypoxia researchers William G. Kaelin, Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza, were among those who received those life-changing calls. They were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries of the molecular system by which cells sense and adapt to varying levels of oxygen availability. Cut back to May 2019. It’s high season at Mount Everest. This year has been the busiest since 1953, seeing a record headcount, but also documenting as many as eleven casualties. And most of these deaths have been due to hypoxia. Mount Everest, unconquerable Indomitable…

The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on October 7th 2019. Their work established the genetic mechanisms that allow cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. The findings have implications for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, anemia, heart attacks and strokes. Why did they win? “Oxygen is the lifeblood of living organisms,” said Dr. George Daley, Dean of Harvard Medical School. “Without oxygen, cells can’t survive.” But too much or too little oxygen also can be deadly. The three researchers tried to answer this question: How do cells regulate their responses? The investigators uncovered detailed genetic responses to changing oxygen levels that allow cells in the bodies of humans and other animals to sense and respond to fluctuations, increasing and decreasing how…

The last five decades have witnessed many feats in the human spaceflight program, the world over. Capsules have evolved from Vostok to Soyuz in Russia; in the US, flights began in capsules like Mercury, Gemini etc.. They culminated in the Apollo program for manned missions to the Moon. The Russian Soyuz vehicle has made many trips to earth's low earth orbits with humans on board and is currently the only operational human space transportation system available to humanity. The era has also witnessed the entry and exit of the USA's winged Space Transportation System – the Space Shuttle and the construction of the International Space transportation System (ISS) with the involvement of some of the space-faring nations. With the successful launch of manned 'Shenzhou', China has also entered the fray…

They say civilisation, as we know it, commenced with the taming of fire. The only mammal known to have conquered fire, humans subsequently went on to invent the wheel, tame hydro-power for electricity, and step into the ‘digital’ age. And now, in the biggest move ever so far, they have ventured into AI or Artificial Intelligence, where the machines they have invented have advanced so much that they know you ‘better than you know yourself’. Scary? Yes, very! And awesome too! The advent of the internet and the world wide web, and the consequent access to massive volumes of digital data relevant to one’s profession, has revolutionized the human approach to work in any sector. The medical profession is no different. And, like the other professions, it has become, as…

The surgery, performed last month at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was the most complex and extensive penis transplant to date, and the first performed on a combat veteran maimed by a blast. Two other successful penis transplants have been performed — in South Africa in 2014 and at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016 — but they involved only the organ itself, not the scrotum or surrounding flesh. This latest operation transplanted a single piece of tissue that measured 10 inches by 11 inches and weighed four or five pounds. This is an evolving branch of medicine spurred in large part by the wounds of war — particularly the blast injuries from improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s. The medical teams in Baltimore and Boston have spent years preparing for the surgery,…

1 Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas 2 Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas 3 Department of Radiology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas Correspondence Saad A. Khan, UT Southwestern Medical Center-Hematology Oncology, 5323 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas 75390-8852, TX. Email: Saad.Khan@UTSouthwestern.edu Abstract Tracheal head and neck squamous cell cancer recurrence without metastases may be related to physical displacement of cancer cells. Keywords: endobronchial metastases; head and neck cancer; proton therapy; squamous cell cancer 1. INTRODUCTION We report two patients with unique recurrences of head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC) who were disease-free at the primary site after surgery and chemoradiation. They then developed…

Department of Plastic, Cosmetic, Vascular & Reconstructive Surgery, Aster MIMS, Calicut, Kerala, India Congenital brachial artery aneurysms in the upper extremity are very rare(1).Although most brachial artery aneurysms are associated with systemic diseases, they can present as an isolated finding. These lesions can be asymptomatic masses or can present with pain, ischemia, or nerve compression. They must be differentiated from pseudoaneurysm, hematoma, vascular malformation, and other vascular lesions that can occur in the upper limb. We present a case of right axillary/brachial artery aneurysm in a 11 weeks-old male infant with Acute Limb Ischaemia, and the literature is reviewed. CASE REPORT An 11 week old male baby was brought to the Emergency Department by his mother with complaints of sudden onset swelling in the right axilla and excessive crying with…

Aster Medcity, Kochi, India ABSTRACT A 67-year-old lady with a background of Chronic Seronegative Arthritis being treated as Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Systemic Hypertension was referred to our hospital with progressive deterioration of sensorium over the past two months, and a high-grade fever since two weeks prior with a diagnosis of a urinary tract infection. An extensive workup was done, with PET-CT proving useful, and subsequent knee biopsy culture growing Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (TB), with other lesions suggestive of TB in her spine and meninges, and an abscess in her left elbow joint. A modified regimen of anti tubercular treatment was started, which arrested further deterioration. We wish to highlight the diagnostic dilemma we had, and the treatment hurdles we faced in this patient, even with a multidisciplinary approach and the best…

With degrees in medicine, astrophysics and engineering, Fong has dedicated as much of his life to discussing the health challenges of space travel as he has to treating trauma patients. In Extreme Medicine, he writes of those challenges as well as more terrestrial medical advancements that have pushed the boundaries of possibility. “While our medical pioneers weren't concerned with geographical conquest,” he writes, “they were very much in the business of exploration.” From the tale of a young woman revived after hours without a heartbeat in an icy Nordic river to stories of World War II soldiers who served as early guinea pigs for facial skin grafting, Fong interweaves historical accounts with engrossing stories of clinical doctors charting new territories to save their patients. In each case, their encounter with…