Archive for the ‘Medicare Providers’ Category

If you suspect that someone is suffering from a heat-related illness:

* Call 911 if you suspect heat stroke.

* Get the person out of the heat and into a shady, air-conditioned or other cool place. Urge them to lie down.

* If the person can swallow safely, offer fluids such as water and fruit or vegetable juices, but not alcohol or caffeine.

* Apply a cold, wet cloth to the wrists, neck, armpits, and groin. These are places where blood passes close to the surface of the skin, and a cold cloth can help cool the blood.

* Encourage the person to shower, bathe, or sponge off with cool water if it is safe to do so.

If you are having a hard time paying for home cooling and heating costs, there are some resources that might help. Contact the National Energy Assistance Referral service (link is external), your local Area Agency on Aging (link is external), senior center, or social service agency.

Scientists have identified a class of naturally occurring bacteria that can strongly inhibit malaria-causing parasites in Anopheles mosquitoes, a finding that could have implications for efforts to control malaria.

Researchers have begun screening the first definitive collection of thousands of approved drugs for clinical use against rare and neglected diseases. They are hunting for additional uses of the drugs hoping to find off-label therapies, for some of the 6,000 rare diseases that afflict 25 million Americans. The effort is coordinated by the National Institutes of Health’s Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC).

A new working group at the National Institutes of Health will examine the future of the biomedical research workforce in the United States. The group will recommend actions to the Advisory Committee to the Director to ensure a diverse and sustainable biomedical and behavioral research workforce.

A new study in rats is shedding light on how sleep-deprived lifestyles might impair functioning without people realizing it. The more rats are sleep-deprived, the more some of their neurons take catnaps — with consequent declines in task performance. Even though the animals are awake and active, brainwave measures reveal that scattered groups of neurons in the thinking part of their brain, or cortex, are briefly falling asleep, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered.

Scanning the genomes of more than 100,000 people from all over the world, scientists report the largest set of genes discovered underlying high cholesterol and high triglycerides — the major risk factors for coronary heart disease, the nation’s number one killer. Taken together, the gene variants explain between a quarter and a third of the inherited portions of cholesterol and triglyceride measured in the blood. The research, representing scientists from 17 countries, appears in two papers in the Aug. 5 issue of Nature.

Researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health have for the first time activated mouse egg cells at the earliest stage of their development and brought them to maturity. In a related experiment, the researchers replicated the finding by also bringing human eggs to maturity in the laboratory.

The National Institutes of Health today launched a multidisciplinary network of experts who will explore new approaches to understanding the origins of health disparities, or differences in the burden of disease among population groups. Using state-of-the-science conceptual and computational models, the network’s goal is to identify important areas where interventions or policy changes could have the greatest impact in eliminating health disparities. The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), part of NIH, is contracting with the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, Ann Arbor, to establish the Network on Inequality, Complexity, and Health (NICH).

People with treatment-resistant bipolar disorder experienced relief from symptoms of depression in as little as 40 minutes after an intravenous dose of the anesthetic medication ketamine in a preliminary study; while the patient group was small, this work adds to evidence that compounds in the class to which ketamine belongs have potential as rapid and effective medications for depression, including bipolar depression.

Nobel Prize winner Harold E. Varmus, M.D., today took the oath of office to become the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) 14th director. NCI is one of the 27 Institutes and Centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), currently known for its therapeutic benefits against HIV, also reduced the spread of the virus among people with a history of injection drug use, according to a population-based study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a component of the National Institutes of Health. The study was published today in the Lancet.

Today’s older Americans enjoy longer lives and better health than did previous generations. These and other trends are reported in Older Americans 2010: Key Indicators of Well-Being, a unique, comprehensive look at aging in the United States from the Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics.

The National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health announces the appointment of five new members: Francisco Garcia, M.D., M.P.H., Ronda S. Henry-Tillman, M.D., F.A.C.S., Karen E. Kim, M.D., Claire Pomeroy, M.D., and Paul F. Terranova, Ph.D.

Today we congratulate the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) and the people of South Africa on the positive findings from the CAPRISA 004 microbicide study, which marks a significant milestone both for the microbicide research field and HIV prevention as a whole.

To coincide with the 2010 International AIDS Conference in Vienna, NIDA has written a special issue of NewsScan on HIV/AIDS which features recent articles on the connection between drug abuse and HIV/AIDS and prevention and treatment strategies, authored by researchers supported by NIDA and other leading research organizations.

A clinical trial in Cambodia has found it possible to prolong the survival of untreated HIV-infected adults with very weak immune systems and newly diagnosed tuberculosis (TB) by starting anti-HIV therapy two weeks after beginning TB treatment, rather than waiting eight weeks, as has been standard. This finding by scientists co-funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis, brings physicians closer to optimizing the treatment of severely immunosuppressed individuals with HIV-TB co-infection. The findings were presented today at the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna by principal investigators Francois-Xavier Blanc, M.D., Anne E. Goldfeld, M.D., and Sok Thim, M.D.

Almost $6 million has been awarded to investigators and programs to help researchers in the early stages of careers in women’s health research. The funding is from the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) and other co-sponsors. The money will go to 12 new and continuing Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) programs nationwide. This is the fifth funding round of an innovative, interdisciplinary career development program for men and women junior faculty in women’s health research.

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