Newsbriefs: Heart Failure Survival; Thyroid Cancer; Marriage’s Effect on Men’s Bones
Researchers develop risk calculator to predict survival in heart failure patients
A UCLA team has developed an easy-to-use “risk calculator” that helps predict heart failure patients’ chances of survival for up to five years and assists doctors in determining whether more or less aggressive treatment is appropriate. Given that heart failure impacts more than 5 million Americans and nu-merous variables affect patient outcomes, this type of risk-assessment tool can be very helpful to physicians and patients in assessing prognosis over time and guiding medical decision-making, the researchers say. Their new risk model was featured in the January 2014 edition of the journal Circulation: Heart Failure. The team assessed each variable in terms of predicting the following serious risks: mortality, the need for an urgent transplant, and the need for a mechanical pump known as a ventricular assist device. Using a complex statistical analysis, they determined that four of the 39 factors were predictive of these serious risks in both men and women and could predict survival over a five-year period.
Minorities and poor have more advanced thyroid cancers when diagnosed
UCLA researchers have found that minority patients and those of lower socioeconomic status are far more likely to have advanced thyroid cancer when they are diagnosed with the disease than white patients and those in higher economic brackets. In one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind, the UCLA team looked at nearly 26,000 patients with well-differentiated thyroid cancer and analyzed the impact of race and socioeconomic factors on the stage of presentation, as well as patient survival rates. Their findings were published in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Researchers hope the study will lead to strategies aimed at increasing access to healthcare and help make doctors who treat cancer more aware of how aggressive this cancer can be in certain socioeconomic and racial groups.
UCLA researcher highlights advances in nanotechnology’s fight against cancer
As cancer maintains its standing as the second leading cause of death in the U.S., researchers have continued their quest for safer and more effective treatments. Among the most promising advances has been the rise of nanomedicine, the application of tiny materials and devices whose sizes are measured in the billionths of a meter to detect, diagnose and treat disease. A recent research provides one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of research on nanomedicine-based approaches to treating cancer and offers insight into how re-searchers can best position nanomedicine-based cancer treatments for FDA approval. The article was published online Dec. 18, 2013 by the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine. Researchers describe the paths that nanotechnology-enabled therapies could take—and the regulatory and funding obstacles they could encounter—as they progress through safety and efficacy studies. In preclinical trials, nanomaterials have produced safer and more effective imaging and drug delivery, and they have enabled researchers to precisely target tumors while sparing patients’ healthy tissue. In addition, nanotechnology has significantly improved the sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging, making hard-to-find cancers easier to detect.
Marriage is good for men’s bones
In a study published online in January in the journal Osteoporosis International, researchers found evidence that men who married when they were younger than 25 had lower bone strength than men who married for the first time at a later age. In addition, men in stable marriages or marriage-like relationships who had never previously divorced or separated had greater bone strength than men whose previous marriages had fractured, the researchers said. And those in stable relationships also had stronger bones than men who never married. Although for women there were no similar links between bone health and being married or in a marriage-like relationship, the study authors did find evidence that women with supportive partners had greater bone strength than those whose partners didn’t appreciate them, understand how they felt, or were emotionally unsupportive in other ways.
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