Medical Equipment And Supplies

Babies deprived of oxygen during birth may now be treated with a cap that cools the head to prevent or reduce brain damage, U.S. health officials said last week. Natus Medical Inc.'s Cool-Cap device may be an option for about 5,000 to 9,000 U.S. babies born each year with moderate to severe hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, the Food and Drug Administration said as it announced the product's approval.

Forget those old, bulky electrodes of the past. Researchers have created a device that can track your heart, brain and muscle activity as effectively as conventional monitoring systems -- and is thin enough to be laminated onto the skin like a temporary tattoo. Down the line, such electronic patches could be used to monitor vital functions, aid in physical rehabilitation or perhaps be deployed in covert military operations. John Rogers, a materials scientist with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed the research and its potential future uses.

People with chronic kidney failure face a bleak future. Conventional dialysis cleanses the blood of only about 17% of the toxic chemicals that a healthy kidney removes. And donor organs are scarce. The 300,000 Americans who depend on dialysis to stay alive are crippled by an array of complications caused by the buildup of dangerous poisons in their blood, and only one-third survive more than five years. Experimental devices in development could help turn this situation around.

Millions of Americans receive implanted cardiovascular devices such as pacemakers and stents, but many of the devices are not subjected to rigorous safety and effectiveness research before being approved for use, according to a study released Tuesday. It's common for such devices to receive Food and Drug Administration approval based on information from only a single study, which "raises questions about the quality of data on which some cardiovascular device approvals are based," said the authors, from UC San Francisco.

Since the moment a decade ago when Dane Titsworth picked up a box and a disc in his spine burst, he has been in ever-worsening pain. So it was with great hope that the Bakersfield building maintenance manager agreed last year to a new procedure. It meant replacing the deteriorating disc in his lower back with a Charite-brand artificial one -- the first artificial replacement disc approved in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that it has warned the nation's six largest manufacturers of hearing aids to stop "misleading the public" about the effectiveness of their products or face regulatory action. In letters sent April 16, the agency told the companies that their advertising, promotion and labeling create "unrealistic expectations" about the performance of the devices. About 5.

The Grateful Dead bought eight, Knotts Berry Farm ordered several. Doctors, medical schools, nursing schools, universities, research labs, high schools, anatomists, attorneys, physical therapists, athletic trainers and the entertainment industry buy them. All have purchased authentic plastic reproductions of life-sized human skeletons from Medical Plastics Laboratory, a life-sized plastic human skeleton factory, in existence 39 years in this Texas town 110 miles south of Ft. Worth.

A federal judge has dismissed Amway Corp.'s lawsuit accusing Irvine-based Nikken U.S.A. Inc. of copying patented designs for pain-blocking magnets. Amway, headquartered in Ada, Mich., filed the suit in Nashville in June. The direct marketing giant alleged that shortly after it introduced a line of magnetic pads that purportedly block pain signals from reaching the brain, Nikken did too. Nikken countersued in U.S.

Surgeons in Louisville, Ky., placed an artificial heart in a patient's chest Monday--the first fully self-contained artificial heart to be implanted in a human being. The patient, who was not identified by either name or gender, was believed by doctors to be within a month of death at the time of the operation and is not expected to survive more than a few weeks with the new titanium-and-plastic heart, which remains an experimental device.

More than 1,000 hypodermic needles washed ashore at Huntington Beach on Thursday afternoon, forcing the closure of more than two miles of shoreline, authorities said. The first needles were discovered by a city lifeguard at about 3:30 p.m. Soon the devices were surfacing hundreds at a time, prompting Orange County health officials to declare the beach off-limits and order it roped off with yellow police tape.

An implantable device that shocks an erratically beating heart and works to keep both ventricles beating synchronously reduced hospitalizations for heart failure by 41%, according to results reported Tuesday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The results, reported online in the New England Journal of Medicine, were significantly better than preliminary results announced in June, when the trial was halted prematurely because of its success. "This is a real breakthrough" for patients with mild to moderate heart disease, said Dr. Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist at USC's Keck School of Medicine, one of the study sites.

The abrupt shutdown of two aging nuclear reactors that produce a radioisotope widely used in medical imaging has forced physicians in the U.S. and abroad into a crisis, requiring them to postpone or cancel necessary scans for heart disease and cancer, or turn to alternative tests that are not as accurate, take longer and expose patients to higher doses of radiation. Because of limits on testing produced by the shortage, some patients will undergo heart or cancer surgeries that could have been prevented by imaging, and others will miss needed surgeries because of the lack of testing, said Dr. Michael Graham of the University of Iowa, president of SNM, formerly the Society of Nuclear Medicine.

The California Nurses Assn. filed a complaint with state regulators Thursday alleging that UC Irvine Medical Center has been using faulty pain control pumps that have caused at least five patients to receive an accidental overdose of narcotics.

Thousands of military veterans are waiting to find out if they were exposed to infectious diseases by government clinics that performed colonoscopies and other procedures with equipment that wasn't properly sterilized. Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Katie Roberts said officials are working to determine if mistakes that may have exposed patients to infections at medical centers in Tennessee and Florida and a clinic in Georgia could have happened at other VA facilities too. The VA recently warned some veterans who had colonoscopies as far back as five years ago at its hospitals in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Don't place headphones for portable MP3 music players in your front shirt pocket or drape them over your shoulder if you've got a pacemaker or defibrillators, says a Harvard scientist. The results can be shocking. There was detectable interference for 15% of pacemaker patients and 30% of those with defibrillators when headphones, including those for Apple Inc.'s iPod and iPhone, were placed within an inch of the heart devices, according to a study reported Sunday at the American Heart Assn.

The government paid more than $1 billion in questionable Medicare claims for medical supplies that showed little relation to patients' conditions, including blood glucose strips for sexual impotence and special diabetic shoes for leg amputees, congressional investigators say. Billions more in taxpayer dollars may have been wasted over the last decade because the government-run health program for the elderly and disabled paid out claims with blank or invalid diagnosis codes, such as a "?"

If the courts take abortion rights away, some groups vow they will literally take the power to end a pregnancy into their own hands. The Los Angeles-based Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers has begun distributing a videotape that teaches women how they can perform a controversial type of early abortion in small, "self-help groups." The federation has sold hundreds of copies of the 28-minute videotape at $25 each, said Shauna Heckert, a member of the federation board.

washington -- Army Master Sgt. Harold Kinamon entered a military hospital in Ohio for routine respiratory surgery to help him sleep better. The operation, in October 2005, progressed smoothly. He went home with nothing more than a raw throat and a painkiller contained in an adhesive patch on his skin. That night, Kinamon, 41, died in his sleep -- killed by an overdose of the drug delivered through the patch.

The government is putting millions of Medicare dollars at risk by authorizing fictitious sellers of wheelchairs, prosthetics and other medical supplies to submit reimbursement claims with only limited review, congressional investigators say. A Government Accountability Office study, obtained by the Associated Press, sought to follow up on oversight gaps that have plagued the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services since at least 2005.

Drug developer Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. said Friday that it would sell its wound therapy and surgical care unit for $4.1 billion to two private equity firms. The company will sell the ConvaTec unit to Nordic Capital and Avista Capital Partners. Proceeds from the sale will help fund Bristol-Myers' strategy of shifting its focus to biopharmaceuticals. That strategy has already resulted in the $525-million sale of the New York-based company's medical imaging unit as well as plans to sell 10% to 20% of its Mead Johnson Nutritional unit.