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Cedars-Sinai Women's Heart Center Launches Advanced Preventive Women's Clinic For Women With Menopause Symptoms Who Are At Risk For Heart Disease
Women who are at risk for heart disease and who are also experiencing menopause symptoms now have an added re - a highly specialized clinic in the Division of Cardiology at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. The Advanced Preventive Women"s Clinic at the Women"s Heart Center recently opened and is offering comprehensive cardiac risk assessments designed specifically for women who are in menopause. The clinic also offers menopausal patients state-of-the-art screenings, as well as personalized medicine therapies and counseling, including high-risk hormone counseling.
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Pharmacy Bodies Work Together To Promote The Integration Of Pharmacy Within Lord Darzi's Primary & Community Care Strategy
"Maximising Health Gain Through Community Pharmacy" is the title of two jointly badged publications from pharmacy organisations CCA, NPA, RPSGB, PSNC and AIMp. The documents, which were produced in collaboration with the NHS Alliance, were launched to the NHS this week, as part of a strategy to promote the role of pharmacists to commissioners, managers, general practitioners and others in primary care. The documents also seek to influence the commissioning of pharmacy services by PCTs under World Class Commissioning and the integration of pharmacy into Practice Based Commissioning (PBC).
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N.D. Judge Vows To Act Quickly On Challenge To State Ultrasound Law
North Dakota Judge Douglas Herman failed to issue a temporary injunction on Thursday to prevent a state law from going into effect that requires abortion clinics to offer women the chance to view ultrasound images 24 hours prior to obtaining an abortion, the AP/Bismarck Tribune reports. Judge Herman promised to issue an opinion "as soon as possible" on the constitutional challenge to the state law, which is set to take effect on Aug. 1. The Center for Reproductive Rights filed the challenge, arguing that it creates an unnecessary burden on a woman"s right to an abortion.The group also said that a provision in the law is confusing and that the state"s only abortion provider is unsure how to comply. According to the AP/Tribune, the provision in question reads: "The auscultation of the fetal heart tone must be of a quality consistent with standard medical practice in the community." Suzanne Stolz, an attorney for CRR, said the bill"s language could require the Red River Women"s Clinic -- the only abortion clinic in the state -- to offer women the chance to hear audio of the fetal heartbeat in addition to the ultrasound image. She added that the clinic "cannot afford to guess what the law means and hope that it is right."Assistant Attorney General Douglas Bahr said that the law requires the clinic only to offer the option of an ultrasound, not provide one. He added that most people understand that an ultrasound includes both images and audio and that he does not "know why the clinic doesn"t feel it can offer this to the patient." Cass County state"s attorney Birch Burdick, a co-counsel with Bahr, said that although some of the language in the law is "a little confusing," he would not prosecute clinic officials if they make an attempt to apply the law until the judge rules.Tammi Kromenaker, the director of the clinic, said, "We"re disappointed that we did not get an injunction today but we felt that some of our questions were answered," adding that the clinics had offered women the option of viewing an ultrasound for the last 18 months (Kolpack, AP/Bismarck Tribune, 7/31).
Endocrinology

Adult Brain Changes With Unsuspected Speed

The human brain can adapt to changing demands even in adulthood, but MIT neuroscientists have now found evidence of it changing with unsuspected speed. Their findings suggest that the brain has a network of silent connections that underlie its plasticity. The brain"s tendency to call upon these connections could help explain the curious phenomenon of "referred sensations," in which a person with an amputated arm "feels" sensations in the missing limb when he or she is touched on the face. Scientists believe this happens because the part of the brain that normally receives input from the arm begins "referring" to signals coming from a nearby brain region that receives information from the face. "We found these referred sensations in the visual cortex, too," said senior author Nancy Kanwisher of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, referring to the findings of a paper being published in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. "When we temporarily deprived part of the visual cortex from receiving input, subjects reported seeing squares distorted as rectangles. We were surprised to find these referred visual sensations happening as fast as we could measure, within two seconds." Many scientists think that this kind of reorganized response to sensory information reflects a rewiring in the brain, or a growth of new connections. "But these distortions happened too quickly to result from structural changes in the cortex," Kanwisher explained. "So we think the connections were already there but were silent, and that the brain is constantly recalibrating the connections through short-term plasticity mechanisms." First author Daniel Dilks, a postdoctoral researcher in Kanwisher"s lab, first found the square-to-rectangle distortion in a patient who suffered a stroke that deprived a portion of his visual cortex from receiving input. The stroke created a blind region in his field of vision. When a square object was placed outside this blind region, the patient perceived it as a rectangle stretching into the blind area - a result of the the deprived neurons now responding to a neighboring part of the visual field. "But the patient"s cortex had been deprived of visual information for a long time, so we did not know how quickly the adult visual cortex could change following deprivation," Dilks said. "To find out, we took advantage of the natural blind spot in each eye, using a simple perceptual test in healthy volunteers with normal vision." Blind spots occur because the retina has no photoreceptors where the optic nerve exits the eye, so the visual cortex receives no stimulation from that point. We do not perceive our blind spots because the left eye sees what is in the right eye"s blind area, and vice versa. Even when one eye is closed, we are not normally aware of a gap in our visual field. It takes a perceptual test to reveal the blind spot, which involves covering one eye and moving an object towards the blind spot until it "disappears" from view. Dilks and colleagues used this test to see how soon after the cortex is deprived of information that volunteers begin to perceive shape distortions. They presented different-sized rectangles just outside the subjects" blind spot and asked subjects to judge the height and width at different time points after one eye was patched. The volunteers perceived the rectangles elongating just two seconds after their eye was covered - much quicker than expected. When the eye patch was removed, the distortions vanished just as fast as they had appeared. "So the visual cortex changes its response almost immediately to sensory deprivation and to new input," Kanwisher explained. "Our study shows the stunning ability of the brain to adapt to moment-to-moment changes in experience even in adulthood." Notes: Chris Baker (NIH) and Yicong Liu (MIT undergraduate student) contributed to this study, which was supported by the NIH and NIMH. Written by Cathryn Delude, McGovern Institute, MIT News Office [Click here to find your own blind spot: http://web.mit.edu/bcs/nklab/media/blindSpotDemo.shtml]. Jen Hirsch McGovern Institute for Brain Research


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