Robot-assisted total knee replacements tend to have better outcomes on average, a new study reports. Unfortunately, there’s a downside – having a surgical robot assist a human surgeon can make the procedure much more costly. Patients who had a robot-assisted knee replacement stayed in the hospital nearly a half-day less, and were significantly less likely to develop complications like infections, excessive blood loss, and fractures, dislocations or mechanical complications of their prosthetic, researchers report. However, robotic knee replacements cost an average $2,400 more than the conventional procedure, researchers found. Researchers said they hope the study will help doctors and patients make educated decisions regarding the best option for knee surgery. “As the population continues to age, there will be a greater demand for safe and effective total knee replacement surgery, also known as total knee arthroscopy (TKA),” lead researcher Dr. Senthil Sambandam, an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said in a news release. In knee replacement procedures, surgeons cut away bone damaged by arthritis and replace it with metal and plastic parts. Surgeons perform most knee replacements by hand, judging how much bone to remove based on training and expertise. However, a growing number of these procedures are performed using surgical robots that rely on imaging scans or anatomical landmarks to determine where to cut. Using a robot…  read on >  read on >

Antibiotic-resistant meningitis or severe, long-lasting joint infections: That’s what three U.S. “medical tourists” brought home after seeking out unapproved stem cell treatments in Mexico, according to a new report. The germ involved in all three cases was Mycobacterium abscessus, explained a team led by Dr. Minh-Vu Nguyen, an infectious disease specialist at National Jewish Health in Denver.  “Stem cell treatments have been linked to bacterial infections, and procedure-related infection risks associated with medical tourism are known,” Nguyen and colleagues warned in their report.   All three patients contracted their infections in late 2022 or early 2023, and “as of March 28, 2024, treatment is ongoing for all three,” according to the report.  According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, M. abscessus “is part of a group of environmental mycobacteria and is found in water, soil, and dust. It has been known to contaminate medications and products, including medical devices.” The bacterium typically infects soft tissue under the skin, but can also trigger serious lung infections, as well.  It’s very difficult to transmit M. abscessus person-to-person, but “people with open wounds or who receive injections without appropriate skin disinfection may be at risk for infection by M. abscessus,” the CDC explained.  “Infection with this bacterium usually does not improve with the usual antibiotics used to treat skin infections,” it noted. The cases outlined in…  read on >  read on >

Every cold and flu season, folks are flooded with ads for zinc lozenges, sprays and syrups that promise to shorten their sniffles. Zinc might indeed reduce the duration of common cold symptoms by about two days, a new evidence review says. However, the evidence is not conclusive, and taking zinc can come with some unpleasant side effects, researchers said. “The evidence on zinc is far from settled,” senior researcher Susan Wieland, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a news release. “We need more research before we can be confident in its effects.” The theory behind zinc is that the essential mineral, which is found in many foods, might interfere with the cold virus’ ability to replicate in the nose, mouth and throat, researchers said. Lab studies have shown zinc can do this in petri dishes and mice, but human studies are needed to show if it will work in real people. For this review, researchers evaluated 19 human trials examining zinc as a cold treatment and 15 as a means of preventing colds. In particular, eight studies with nearly 1,000 participants combined investigated zinc as a treatment to reduce cold duration. The pooled results of those studies showed that it might help reduce the length of a cold by about two days, down from an average week-long duration…  read on >  read on >

People who carry two copies of the gene mutation most strongly implicated in Alzheimer’s disease are almost certain to develop brain changes related to the degenerative disorder, a new study says. A single mutated APOE4 gene has been found to pose the strongest genetics-driven risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s, researchers said. Virtually everyone with two copies of the APOE4 gene mutation wound up with higher levels of Alzheimer’s-related brain by age 55, compared to people with another version of APOE, researchers reported May 6 in the journal Nature Medicine. By age 65, more than 95% of people with two APOE4 genes showed abnormal levels of amyloid protein in their cerebrospinal fluid and 75% had positive amyloid scans, researchers said. Amyloid beta plaques are one of the hallmark symptoms of Alzheimer’s. These findings suggest that having two copies of the APOE4 gene could represent a new genetic form of Alzheimer’s disease, said Dr. Juan Fortea, director of the Memory Unit at the Sant Pau Research Institute’s Neurology Service in Barcelona, Spain. “This gene has been known for over 30 years and it was known to be associated with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. But now we know that virtually all individuals with this duplicated gene develop Alzheimer’s biology,” Fortea said in a news release. “This is important because they represent between 2 and 3%…  read on >  read on >

Researchers say they’ve identified a human “neural compass” — a pattern of brain activity that helps prevent humans from becoming lost. For the first time, the internal compass humans use to orient themselves and navigate through the environment has been pinpointed in the human brain, researchers reported May 6 in the journal Nature Human Behavior. This discovery could increase understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, in which a person’s navigation and orientation are frequently impaired. “Keeping track of the direction you are heading in is pretty important. Even small errors in estimating where you are and which direction you are heading in can be disastrous,” said lead researcher Benjamin Griffiths, a psychology fellow at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. “We know that animals such as birds, rats and bats have neural circuitry that keeps them on track, but we know surprisingly little about how the human brain manages this out and about in the real world,” Griffiths added in a news release. Tracking neural activity in humans usually requires participants to remain as still as possible, but for this study researchers employed mobile EEG devices and motion capture to analyze the brain waves of people on the move. A group of 52 participants moved their heads — or sometimes just their eyes — to orient themselves based on cues from different computer…  read on >  read on >

An injectable gene therapy caused measurable improvements in vision among a small group of people with inherited blindness, an early-stage clinical trial says. Researchers recruited 14 people with Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), a rare genetic condition that causes babies to lose some or all of their sight from birth. Eleven of the 14 had measurable improvements in the vision of one eye that received a single injection of a gene-editing medication, researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Our patients are the first congenitally blind children to be treated with gene editing, which significantly improved their daytime vision,” researcher Dr. Tomas Aleman, a pediatric ophthalmologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in a news release. “While more research is needed to determine who may benefit most, we consider the early results promising,” added lead researcher Dr. Eric Pierce, director of Mass Eye and Ear Ocular Genomics Institute and Berman-Gund Laboratory for the Study of Retinal Degenerations in Boston. “To hear from several participants how thrilled they were that they could finally see the food on their plates – that is a big deal,” Pierce said. “These were individuals who could not read any lines on an eye chart and who had no treatment options, which is the unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders.” LCA affects 2 to 3 out…  read on >  read on >

Primates are capable of tending to wounds using medicinal plants, a new case report says. A male Sumatran orangutan treated a facial wound with a climbing plant known to have anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties, researchers say in the journal Scientific Reports. The orangutan, named Rakus by observers, plucked leaves from a vine called Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria) and chewed on them, researchers said. Rakus then repeatedly applied the resulting juice onto his facial wound for several minutes, before fully covering the wound with a poultice formed by the chewed leaves, researchers said. This is the first documented case of a primate applying a known naturally occurring medicinal substance to a wound, researchers said. It indicates that the medical wound treatment people receive at home and in urgent care clinics might have arisen in a common ancestor shared by humans and orangutans, the research team says. “The treatment of human wounds was most likely first mentioned in a medical manuscript that dates back to 2200 BC, which included cleaning, plastering, and bandaging of wounds with certain wound care substances,” researcher Caroline Schuppli, an evolutionary biologist with the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, said in a news release. Rakus’ behavior shows “it is possible that there exists a common underlying mechanism for the recognition and application of substances with medical or functional properties to…  read on >  read on >

Folks struggling to quit smoking might need a bump up on the dose of medication they’re using to help them stop, according to new clinical trial results. Patients are more likely to successfully quit if the dose of their smoking cessation treatment is increased in response to an initial failure, researchers report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They also found that the drug varenicline (Chantix) is more effective than nicotine replacement therapy in helping smokers quit. “These data indicate that sticking to the same medication isn’t effective for smokers who are unable to quit in the first six weeks of treatment,” lead researcher Paul Cinciripini said in a news release. He’s chair of behavioral science at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “Our study should encourage doctors to check in on patients early in their cessation journey and, if patients are struggling, to try a new approach, such as increasing medication dosage,” he added. Smokers taking varenicline who failed to quit in the clinical trial’s first phase were seven times more likely to quit by the end of the second phase if their dosage was increased, researchers found. There also was a nearly twofold increase in success if smokers switched from nicotine replacement therapy to varenicline, results show. Varenicline works similarly to the anti-opioid medication buprenorphine, by partially…  read on >  read on >