SALUD (142)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) —
Zully Broussard thought she was going to help one person by donating a kidney.
Instead, she helped six.
The Sacramento woman's donation to a Benicia man set off an organ swap that resulted in five more sick people getting new kidneys at a San Francisco hospital. Three transplants were completed Thursday, and the remaining three will be done Friday.
"I thought I was going to help this one person who I don't know. But the fact that so many people can have a life extension, that's pretty big," Broussard said.
Domino-like kidney swaps are still relatively new, but they are becoming increasingly common.
With a total of a dozen patients and donors, this week's surgeries at the California Pacific Medical Center represent the largest kidney donation chain in its transplant center's 44-year history, hospital spokesman Dean Fryer said. The patients at are between 24 to 70 years old, and most of them are from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Transplant chains are an option when donors are incompatible with relatives or friends who need kidneys.
In this case, six donors are instead giving kidneys to strangers found through a software matching program developed by 59-year-old David Jacobs, a kidney recipient whose brother died of kidney failure. Its algorithmic program finds potential matches using a person's genetic profile.
Jacobs, of San Francisco, said he understands firsthand the despair of waiting for a deceased donor.
"Some of these people might have waited forever and never got the kidney," he said. "But because of the magic of this technology and the one altruistic donor, she was able to save six lives in 24 hours."
Fewer than 17,000 kidney transplants are performed in the U.S. each year, and between 5,000 and 6,000 are from living donors, considered the optimal kind.
Kidney swaps are considered one of the best bets at increasing live-donor transplants, and they are becoming more common as transplant centers form alliances to share willing patient-donor pairs. The United Network for Organ Sharing has a national pilot program underway.
In 2001, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, performed a transplant chain that started as a two-way kidney exchange and grew to 30 pairs.
Jacobs' kidneys failed in early 2000 from a genetic disease. In late 2003, a living unrelated donor provided an organ for a transplant.
A new chance at life got him thinking.
"I talked to my doctor about kidney-paired donation. He was excited about the idea but didn't know how to do it," he recalled. "I was a tech person. I've been in technology my whole professional career. I thought of it as an enterprise software problem I could solve."
He said the two months he imagined it would take to take to develop the software stretched into six years.
The National Kidney Foundation reports more than 100,000 people in the United States are awaiting kidneys, and 12 people die a day while waiting.
Broussard said her son died of cancer 13 years ago and her husband passed away 14 months ago, also from cancer.
Asked why she volunteered to donate a kidney to a stranger, the 55-year-old said: "I know what it feels like to want an extra day."
By MARIA CHENG
LONDON (AP) --
Britain has become the first country in the world to allow the creation of human embryos from the DNA of three people, a technique intended to help mothers avoid passing on genetically degenerative diseases to their babies.
The bill granting the controversial techniques was passed Tuesday by the House of Lords, after being approved earlier this month by the House of Commons.
The methods involve altering an egg or embryo before it is transferred into a woman which had previously been forbidden by British law. They are intended to avoid passing on defects in the mother's mitochondria, which can result in diseases including muscular dystrophy, heart, kidney, liver failure and severe muscle weakness.
Fluoride could be causing depression and weight gain and councils should stop adding it to drinking water to prevent tooth decay, scientists have warned.
A study of 98 per cent of GP practices in England found that high rates of underactive thyroid were 30 per cent more likely in areas of the greatest fluoridation.
LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Her performance as a vibrant woman fading into the darkness of Alzheimer's is doing more than earning awards for actress Julianne Moore. The movie "Still Alice" is raising awareness of a disease too often suffered in isolation, even if the Hollywood face is younger than the typical real-life patient.
Some things to know about Alzheimer's:
ALZHEIMER'S IS INCREASING BUT THE EARLY-ONSET FORM ISN'T COMMON
The movie is about a linguistics professor stricken at the unusually young age of 50 with a form of Alzheimer's that runs in her family. That type of Alzheimer's accounts for a small fraction of the brain-destroying disease.
About 35 million people worldwide, and 5.2 million in the U.S., have Alzheimer's or similar dementias. The vast majority are 65 or older. Barring medical breakthroughs, U.S. cases are expected to more than double by 2050, because of the aging population.
As many as 4 percent of cases worldwide are thought to be the early-onset form that strikes people before age 65, usually in their 40s or 50s, said the Alzheimer's Association's chief science officer, Maria Carrillo, who served as a scientific adviser for the movie. In the U.S., the association estimates that's 200,000 people.
TOM MURPHY, AP Business Writer
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) —
Hackers broke into a health insurance database storing information for about 80 million people in an attack bound to stoke fears many Americans have about the privacy of their most sensitive information.
The attack on Blue Cross Blue Shield insurer Anthem could be a sign that hackers have shifted their focus away from retailers and toward other targets, cybersecurity experts say.
The nation's second-largest insurer said it has yet to find any evidence that medical information like insurance claims or test results was targeted or taken in a "very sophisticated" cyberattack that it discovered last week. It also said credit card information wasn't compromised, either.
But the hackers did gain access to names, birthdates, email address, employment details, Social Security numbers, incomes and street addresses of people who are currently covered or have had coverage in the past.
And the hackers may not be done with the insurer, as they look for fresh targets after previous ones like the retailers Target and Home Depot shore up their defenses.
TERRY TANG, Associated Press
PHOENIX (AP) —
A woman died hours after giving birth to quadruplets at a Phoenix hospital, a close friend of the family said Saturday.
Erica Morales, 36, never got to hold her newborns before she passed away early Friday morning after a C-section surgery at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center, Nicole Todman said.
"They were transporting her from the surgery to whatever room, and she was still unconscious at that point. So, no, she never got to see them," Todman said.
Morales was about seven months into her pregnancy when she delivered three girls and one boy Thursday, according to Todman. She has been one of the few able to visit the premature newborns and said they are doing well.
"They're beautiful," Todman said. "They have tubes in their mouths and their noses. They've got little monitors and wires all over their body."
The infants will likely remain hospitalized for the next two months while doctors help them to get stronger and each reach a goal weight of 5 pounds, Todman said. Currently, they all weigh between just above 2 pounds to just above 3 pounds, she said.
MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) —
House Republicans are making a final push this month to give schools a temporary break from healthier school meal standards.
The school meal rules, phased in since 2012 and championed by first lady Michelle Obama, require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains in the lunch line. The standards also limit sodium, sugar and fat.
Some school nutrition directors have lobbied for a break, saying the rules have proven to be costly and restrictive. House Republicans have said they are an overreach, and have pushed a one-year waiver that would allow schools to opt out of the standards if they lost money on meal programs over a six-month period.
The waiver language stalled this summer after the first lady lobbied aggressively against it and the White House issued a veto threat. The food and farm spending bill that contained the provision was pulled from the House floor, a move House Republicans attributed to scheduling issues.
But the waiver has new life this month as lawmakers are expected to pass a catchall spending bill to keep government programs running. Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama, the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the school meal spending, has been pushing to include the waiver in the wide-ranging bill.
By Becky Lang
Sit. Stand. Repeat. The trick: You can’t use your hands. This deceptively simple measure of flexibility and strength can predict who will live longer, according to a study by Brazilian physician Claudio Gil Araújo.
The study came about when Dr. Araújo noticed that many of his patients, particularly older people, had trouble with ordinary motions such as bending down to pick up something from the floor. As people age, he knew, reduced muscle power and loss of balance could greatly increase the risk of dangerous falls.
So Dr. Araújo and his colleagues developed the sitting-rising test, or SRT, to determine a person’s core strength, flexibility, and longevity.
By Tia Ghose
Thousands of kids have faced serious — and potentially deadly — side effects after consuming energy drinks, new research shows.
Many of these cases involved serious side effects, such as seizures, irregular heart rhythms or dangerously high blood pressure, the researchers found. And it was children under age 6 who often consumed the beverages without knowing what they were drinking.
By Meaghan Cameron
Hate crunches? Love the results but not the pain? Guess what? You don't have to do crunches to tone your middle. Here are six moves to try instead:
Practice proper posture
When you sit, stand, and walk with good posture, you’re engaging your ab muscles. Simply following mom's advice to sit up straight also improves lung capacity and makes you look leaner. Practice contracting your abs at your desk, or set a timer to remind you to sit up straight when the 3 p.m. slump hits.
Planks
A common yoga move, planks require you to engage all of your muscles to stay elevated off the floor; but your abs do the bulk of the work. Though you aren't moving or lifting weight, you have to constantly squeeze your abs to hold the position—most people can't last 30 seconds on their first attempt. To kick it up a notch invest in Shaun T's Insanity which dishes out many different forms of the plank pose incorporating runs, jumps and push-ups done at a heart pumping speed.
Push-ups
A push-up is essentially a higher-value plank, and like planks the old-standby exercise works nearly every muscle. Plus, if you do them fast, pushups become an aerobic workout as well. Women can start on their knees and still get killer results. Alternately, invest in P90X, a series of DVDs that will show you many different versions of pushups (and much more) to keep your body guessing.
