Our A To Z Guide To Advances In Medicine

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ALZHEIMER'S

A nunnery might seem an odd place to conduct medical research, but some of the most intriguing advances in Alzheimer's last year came from studying a group of nuns who agreed six years ago to give their brains to science. A long-term study of 678 School Sisters of Notre Dame showed--surprisingly--that something as simple and non-medical as a handwritten missive, penned in youth, may be able to predict a person's chances of getting Alzheimer's later in life. That link is still quite controversial; less so are some of the study's other findings, such as the protection the brain apparently gets from higher education pursued in young adulthood or from engaging in constant mental activity like playing card games or teaching during one's golden years.

ARTIFICIAL HEART

The Tin Man traveled all the way to Oz for his heart, but someday patients with advanced cardiac disease may not have to go so far. Almost 20 years after the bulky Jarvik artificial heart failed so miserably, AbioMed, a Massachusetts-based bioengineering company, developed a new, miniaturized version called the AbioCor. The device, totally self-contained (except for a belt-worn battery pack), was implanted in six terminally ill patients; the first, Robert Tools, survived for five months, many months longer than his doctors dared hope. Doctors have had even more success with a small pump that takes over just one of the heart's chambers. (See LVAD.)

ALS

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the paralyzing disease that took the life of Yankee great Lou Gehrig, is showing up in Gulf War veterans at twice the rate it occurs in other military personnel. That's the conclusion of the Defense Department and the Veterans Administration after reviewing the medical records of 2.5 million servicemen and women. ALS, which destroys nerve connections in the brain and spinal cord and causes muscles to atrophy, is the first disease directly linked to the generalized symptoms of Gulf War syndrome.

ASPIRIN

It's a painkiller, a blood thinner and a heart saver as well. But taking aspirin in combination with ibuprofen (in the form of Advil or Motrin) can render the multi-purpose pill powerless. Ibuprofen, it turns out, blocks aspirin's blood-thinning ability 98%; more studies are needed to determine whether people who take both drugs need to worry about a higher heart-attack risk. In the meantime, doctors note that aspirin does not cancel the effects of other major painkillers, including rofecoxib and acetominophen.

ASTHMA

Last July a Maryland woman participating in a Johns Hopkins Hospital study designed to better understand asthma inhaled an experimental chemical, developed a severe reaction and died. The government reacted swiftly: it shut down all federally funded human research at the hospital for four days. The death was only the latest in a series of mortalities in clinical trials and prompted Hopkins and hundreds of other institutions where human trials are conducted to scrutinize their procedures. Since then, hospital review boards have tightened their protocols for clinical trials, requiring that doctors be closely monitored and patients fully informed of the risks.

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