SCOTTISH HOSPITAL NEWS


SCRUBS OFTEN CONTAMINATED WITH BAD BUGS: RESEARCH


Bad bugs readily spread from patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) to nurses’ scrubs and the room, according to research presented at IDWeek 2016™. The sleeves and pockets of the scrubs and the bed railing were the most likely to be contaminated.


The study tracked the


transmission of bacteria known to be particularly troublesome in hospitals, including those such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which are resistant to many antibiotics.


Researchers set out to learn more


about the spread of bacteria leading to hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) by focusing on the triangle of transmission in the hospital: patient, environment (room) and nurse. HAIs affect one in 25 hospitalized patients on any given day, and almost half of HAIs occur in the ICU, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).


The study, funded by CDC, included 167 patients who received care from 40 nurses during three separate 12-hour ICU shifts, for a total of 120 individual shifts. All nurses cared for two or more patients per shift and used new scrubs for each shift. Researchers took


samples (cultures) twice a day from the nurses’ scrubs, patients and the patients’ rooms and found 22 (18 per cent) transmissions of the same strain of bacteria, confirmed by microbiological and molecular analysis. Of those transmissions: 6 (27 per cent) were from patient to nurse, 6 (27 per cent) were from were from the room to the nurse and


10 (45 per cent) were from patient to the room. The types of bacteria transmitted were: 7 methicillin- susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), 5 MRSA, 3 Stenotrophomonas


maltophilia (SM), 3 Acinetobacter baumaniicomplex (ABC), 2 Klebsiella pneumoniae (KP) and 2 Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PS).


RESEARCHERS FIND KEY TO DRUG RESISTANT BOWEL CANCER


There are around 41,000 cases of bowel cancer diagnosed in the UK each year, leading to around 16,000 deaths. Now, new research at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference in Liverpool has discovered that blocking a molecule could bypass bowel cancer’s defence against the drug cetuximab.


Cetuximab is used to treat advanced bowel cancer, and just under half of bowel cancer patients are given the drug. While it helps many patients, there are some for whom it doesn’t work at all and for others it loses effectiveness.


To understand why this happens, scientists at Queen’s University Belfast treated bowel cancer cells in the lab with cetuximab. They found that some cells survived the treatment by increasing the activity


of a protein called ADAM17. But, if they gave a drug that blocked the protein ADAM17 at the same time as cetuximab, the cancer cells died.


For other cancer cells, cetuximab treatment alone stopped them growing initially, but over time they became resistant and started growing again. In these cases, the cancer cells were finding a different way to outmanoeuvre the treatment that didn’t involve ADAM17.


‘While some bowel cancer patients respond well to cetuximab treatment,’ said Dr Sandra Van Schaeybroeck, the lead researcher based at Queen’s University Belfast, ‘many will relapse, or not benefit from the drug. Our work shows that combining this treatment with an ADAM17 inhibitor could be a promising avenue of therapy for patients who don’t respond to cetuximab by itself. More work is needed before we can safely test this combination in patients, but the prospect of cutting off cancer’s path to resistance is very exciting.’


CUTTING NERVES TO KIDNEYS IMPROVES


INSULIN RESISTANCE: STUDY Incapacitating specific nerves to the kidneys improves the work of insulin on another organ, the liver, according to research from Cedars- Sinai recently published in the journal Diabetes.


‘To our surprise, we found that renal denervation - cutting nerves to the kidneys - dramatically improved the liver’s sensitivity to insulin,’ said Malini Iyer, PhD, the lead author of the study conducted at the Bergman Laboratory in the Cedars-Sinai Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute.


In the study, researchers cut the


KIDNEY DISEASE RISK FOR SOME PREGNANT WOMEN


Research from the University of Aberdeen has found that that there was an increased risk of chronic kidney disease later in life for mothers who had high blood pressure during pregnancy.


The study followed women up to sixty years after the pregnancy and found that those who experienced


nerves to the kidneys of laboratory animals that had become insulin- resistant from being fed a high-fat diet. After the procedure, their livers had a healthy response to insulin, effectively curing the animals of insulin resistance - a prediabetic condition. Kidney function remained normal following the procedure.


The next step, researchers say, is to pinpoint the most effective method for surgically silencing nerves in the kidneys of humans to begin investigating the procedure’s potential for treating diabetic patients.


hypertensive disorders (high blood pressure, pre-eclampsia or eclampsia) are more likely to suffer from kidney disease at a later date than those who had normal blood pressure.


This, the first study of this magnitude to investigate the long-term effects of hypertension in pregnancy is published in the journal – Pregnancy Hypertension: An International Journal of Women’s Cardiovascular Health.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48