Health News and Scoops

Advocating the need for a medical Team Approach in the treatment and recovery from breast cancer, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), in partnership with the American Society of Breast Surgeons (ASBS), urges breast cancer patients, and their physicians, to insist that their treatment be handled by a team of healthcare physicians with the appropriate expertise for each procedure and level of care.

The Team Approach to breast cancer care brings together an interdisciplinary group of key medical professionals – gynecologist, radiologist, breast surgeon, medical oncologist, and a plastic surgeon – who work together at the onset of a woman’s breast cancer diagnosis to develop and implement a treatment plan tailored for each patient. When the Team Approach is implemented at the time of diagnosis through treatment and recovery, it can result in significantly improved patient outcomes and quality of life.

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More than 17,000 Americans have already died in 2010 from blood clots in the lungs. The Vascular Disease Foundation’s Venous Disease Coalition, reminds us of this sobering fact on its homepage with a new counting widget at www.venousdiseasecoalition.org, and urges Americans to learn the risks of venous blood clots to help prevent these deaths.

The condition, called deep vein thrombosis (DVT), occurs when a blood clot forms in the deep veins, usually of the leg. DVT can be dangerous in two ways.

First, DVT can be fatal if a blood clot breaks free and travels through the heart and into the lungs. This complication, called pulmonary embolism (PE), causes between 100,000 and 300,000 deaths per year in the United States. Second, because blood clots can permanently damage the veins, as many as half of DVT survivors can experience long-term leg pain, heaviness and swelling that can progress to difficulty walking, changes in skin color and open leg sores (known as ulcers). This condition, called post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS) or “chronic venous insufficiency”, can significantly impair quality of life.

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Quality of life and motor function are impaired by shuffling and freezing of gait in people with Parkinson’s disease.

It is well known that certain auditory and visual cues can improve motor function in people with PD.

Dr. Alberto Espay, presented the results of his study which showed successful treatment of gait impairment for Parkinson’s disease by using a new patented device, the GaitAid.

Patients in the study received the device for in-home use during a two week period. The participants used the device daily for 20 minutes. Gait parameters were measured before, during and after the two week period.

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Freezing of Gait (FOG) is an often incapacitating symptom common in Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s patients experiencing FOG feel as if their feet are glued to the floor. Will power to keep moving has no effect, leaving the Parkinson’s patient frozen in place. The associated physical and psychosocial consequences have a great impact on the patients’ quality of life, and injuries are common as the end result is often falling.

Neurologists prescribe pharmaceuticals commonly causing an array of side effects including mood changes and hallucinations. Furthermore, at advanced stages, FOGs are resistant to treatment with medications.

The resultant loss of independence and treatment costs of injuries add substantially to the health care expenditures associated with Parkinson’s disease.

Doctors have known for over 50 years that Parkinson’s patients suffering from FOG can walk almost normally when certain visual cues are placed in their path. The use of tranverse lines drawn on the floor have been studied extensively with good results.

Some challenges have kept this treatment strategy from leaving the clinical study setting:

1. The requirement of drawing cues on the ground in the patient’s own environment.
2. The distance between the visual cues needs to be regularly adjusted to be appropriate for different ways of walking during different parts of the day and at different days.

The GaitAid device was developed to provide the benefits of this treatment strategy while solving these problems. It provides easy to use state of the art technology to display these cues through special glasses. The device provides cues which are automatically appropriate for each step taken no matter how big or fast. It is like having an expert physical therapist at your disposal drawing the cue needed for your next step just where it needs to be. In addition, clinical research has shown that, by providing separate cues for each foot as provided by the GaitAid, the improvement is two fold what was achieved by the transverse lines (same for both feet) strategy.

The GaitAid is the first device to offer a lasting improvement in walking as opposed to other devices on the market targeting FOG. With the GaitAid, one has the opportunity to train and improve so that later improved walking is possible without the device.

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