(Press-News.org) CHICAGO—Data on glaucoma risk in people with migraine and on innovative uses of mobile, digital technology are featured in today's Scientific Program, to be presented at the 2010 American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) – Middle East-Africa Council of Ophthalmology (MEACO) Joint Meeting. The AAO-MEACO meeting is in session October 16 through 19 at McCormick Place, Chicago. It is the largest, most comprehensive ophthalmic education conference in the world.
The Blood Pressure-Glaucoma Connection in People with Migraine
Yury S Astakhov, MD, PhD, of Pavlov Medical University, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, studied how day- and at night-time blood pressure levels may be related to the development of glaucoma in people with migraine. Understanding such effects is important for doctors in determining how to treat patients with multiple diseases.
Migraine is a known risk factor for open-angle glaucoma, a disease that can cause blindness due to damage to the optic nerve. The association between the two is stronger for people with "normal tension" glaucoma (NTG), in which the pressure within the eye is normal but optic nerve damage occurs nonetheless. It is also known that glaucoma patients who have low blood pressure at night are more likely to develop visual field loss (reduction of the full range of vision, which occurs first in the peripheral vision).
Dr. Astakhov's team compared day- and night-time systolic and diastolic blood pressures in 12 patients who had migraine and glaucoma (8 with NTG) against 16 patients with migraine but no glaucoma. The only significant difference between the groups was in night time diastolic pressure: migraine patients with glaucoma had excessive decreases–more than 20 percent–in their diastolic pressure levels.
"We conclude that low diastolic blood pressure at night is a possible risk factor for glaucoma in patients with migraine," Dr. Astakhov said.
iPhone Images: Good Enough for Medical Use?
Like the rest of society, medicine increasingly relies on digital systems and mobile devices to manage work flow and enhance communications. Eye M.D.s (ophthalmologists) routinely evaluate internet-transmitted images of patients' eyes as part of diagnosis and treatment. Usually images are viewed at computer workstations with standard display screens. University of Pittsburg School of Medicine researchers wondered whether handheld devices like the iPhone would work equally well.
In the study, Eye M.D.s from the University of Pittsburg Eye Center evaluated three aspects of diabetic retinopathy, a potentially blinding disease that affects many people with diabetes, by reviewing both the standard computer monitor and iPhone images for 55 patients (110 eyes). The doctors then made recommendations for follow up treatment.
"We found high consistency–more than 85 percent agreement–between evaluations based on the standard computer monitor and on the iPhone for all image sections tested," said Dr. Michael J. Pokabla. "There were no significant differences between evaluations and recommendations using the two systems, and the doctors rated the iPhone images as excellent. We conclude that mobile devices like the iPhone can be used to evaluate ophthalmic images," he added.
No Eye M.D. in the House? Videoconferencing Brings the Expert to the Outback When no ophthalmologist is available on site, some emergency rooms (ERs) in remote medical centers in rural Australia now use videoconferencing to receive diagnosis and treatment advice for their eye injury and ophthalmic illness patients.
A telecommunication link at a major metropolitan teaching eye hospital, the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital (RVEEH), is connected with four ERs that serve large regions of rural Australia. Dr. Christolyn Raj and her team studied the effectiveness of this approach by reviewing the initial six months of RVEEH videoconference interactions with the regional ERs.
Diagnoses were altered in approximately 60 percent of cases and management plans were changed in about 70 percent of cases following videoconference consultations, study results show. The average consultation time was 10 minutes.
"Videoconferencing is a sustainable, effective way of providing prompt eye management advice to rural emergency doctors," Dr. Raj said. "Although it can never replace face to face clinical care, it is a useful tool to have at one's fingertips and its use will undoubtedly increase in coming years," she added.
###
About the American Academy of Ophthalmology
AAO is the world's largest association of eye physicians and surgeons—Eye M.D.s—with more than 29,000 members worldwide. Eye health care is provided by the three "O's" – opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists. It is the ophthalmologist, or Eye M.D., who can treat it all: eye diseases and injuries, and perform eye surgery. To find an Eye M.D. in your area, visit the Academy's Web site at www.aao.org
Contact: October 15 through 19
Media Relations 510.725.5677
mwade@aao.org
October 20 onward
415.561.8534
media@aao.org
END
CHICAGO— Genetic medicine is the focus of two presentations at today's Scientific Program of the 2010 American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) – Middle East-Africa Council of Ophthalmology (MEACO) Joint Meeting. The AAO-MEACO meeting is in session October 16 through 19 at McCormick Place, Chicago. It is the largest, most comprehensive ophthalmic education conference in the world.
Seeking Genetics-Specific Treatments for Age-Related Macular Degeneration
In the past decade ophthalmologists gained a powerful tool to control vision-damaging "wet" age-related macular degeneration ...
UPTON, NY — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have discovered a key difference in the way human cells and Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB, deliver unwanted proteins — marked with a "kiss of death" sequence — to their respective cellular recycling factories. This critical difference, described in a paper published online October 17, 2010, in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, may help scientists design drugs to disable the bacterial system while leaving normal ...
CHAPEL HILL – Since 2002, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended that women ages 65 and older be routinely screened for osteoporosis and has suggested that a 2-year screening interval might be appropriate. However, what length the screening interval should be is a topic that remains controversial and undecided, with no definitive scientific evidence to provide guidance.
Now a new study led by Margaret L. Gourlay, MD, MPH of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine finds that women aged 67 years and older with normal bone mineral ...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard University neurobiologists have created mice that can "smell" light, providing a potent new tool that could help researchers better understand the neural basis of olfaction.
The work, described this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience, has implications for the future study of smell and of complex perception systems that do not lend themselves to easy study with traditional methods.
"It makes intuitive sense to use odors to study smell," says Venkatesh N. Murthy, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. "However, odors are ...
Yale University researchers have found a gene that seems to be a key contributor to the onset of depression and is a promising target for a new class of antidepressants, they report Oct. 17 in the journal Nature Medicine.
"This could be a primary cause, or at least a major contributing factor, to the signaling abnormalities that lead to depression," said Ronald S. Duman, professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale and senior author of the study.
Scientists have had a difficult time pinning down the cause of depression, which afflicts almost 16 percent of Americans ...
The first research from the Breakthrough Generations Study could lead to a test to predict a woman's reproductive lifespan.
The findings, published today in Human Molecular Genetics, could have considerable impact on women in the UK and other western countries, where many start having children at a later age. Early menopause affects one in 20 UK women.
The study from scientists at the University of Exeter Peninsula Medical School and The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), funded by The Wellcome Trust, tested four genes associated with the menopause. They compared ...
While it's still hotly debated among scientists whether climate change causes a shift from the traditional form of El Nino to one known as El Nino Modoki, online in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists now say that El Nino Modoki affects long-term changes in currents in the North Pacific Ocean.
El Nino is a periodic warming in the eastern tropical Pacific that occurs along the coast of South America. Recently, scientists have noticed that El Nino warming is stronger in the Central Pacific rather than the Eastern Pacific, a phenomenon known as El Nino Modoki (Modoki ...
The American Heart Association is re-arranging the ABCs of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in its 2010 American Heart Association Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care, published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Recommending that chest compressions be the first step for lay and professional rescuers to revive victims of sudden cardiac arrest, the association said the A-B-Cs (Airway-Breathing-Compressions) of CPR should now be changed to C-A-B (Compressions-Airway-Breathing).
"For more than 40 years, ...
Increasing the amount that physicians are reimbursed by Medicaid for administering influenza shots may raise vaccination rates among poor children. That is the conclusion of a study published online today in the journal Pediatrics.
The study, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), analyzes state-by-state vaccination data over three flu seasons and contends that the number of poor children receiving the annual flu shot could be increased by up to one percentage point for every additional dollar provided to doctors to administer ...
Data from one liability insurance database in Colorado indicate that wrong-site and wrong-patient surgical and procedure errors continued to occur despite nationwide steps to help prevent them, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
"Any intervention involving a wrong site, wrong patient or wrong procedure represents an unacceptable surgical complication, classified as a 'never event' by the National Quality Forum," the authors write as background information in the article. In 2004, the Joint Commission introduced ...
