Posts Tagged ‘Doctors’

By Emma Wilkinson

Health reporter,BBC News

A vaccine patch could cut out the need for painful needles and boost the effectiveness of immunisation against diseases like flu, say US researchers.

The patch has hundreds of microscopic needles which dissolve into the skin.

Tests in mice show the technology may even produce a better immune response than a conventional jab.

The patch has hundreds of tiny needles

Writing in Nature Medicine, the team of researchers said the patch could one day enable people to vaccinate themselves.

Each patch, developed by researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, contains 100 “microneedles” which are just 0.65mm in length.

They are designed to penetrate the outer layers of skin, dissolving on contact.

To test the technology, the researchers loaded the needles with an influenza vaccine.

One group of mice received the influenza vaccine using traditional hypodermic needles and another group were vaccinated with the patch.

Patches that had no vaccine on them were applied to a third group of mice.

Three months down the line the team found the patch appeared to produce a more effective immune response in mice, then infected with the flu virus, than a standard vaccination.

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BBC Health News

A stem cell therapy for osteoarthritis is to be tested on patients in the UK for the first time.

A year-long trial, funded by Arthritis Research UK, will mix stem cells with cartilage cells in the lab and inject them back into damaged knee joints.

The new treatment could be an alternative to joint replacement surgery, experts hope.

Stem cell therapy is a less invasive

treatment than joint replacement

Scientists from Keele University will study up to 70 people from the end of this year.

The trial will be run at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry, Shropshire as part of a five-year research programme.

Three treatments are being tested in a randomised trial of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee.

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BBC Health News

Botox has been approved as a preventive treatment for chronic migraine by UK drug regulators.

It comes after a trial of more than 1,300 patients showed success in reducing the frequency of headaches.

But only patients who suffer headaches for at least 15 days a month, half of which come with migraine symptoms, are eligible, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said.

Chronic migraines can dramatically

impair quality of life

It is thought around 700,000 people in the UK get chronic migraines.

Migraine charities said many of those would not have been properly diagnosed and that some patients can really struggle to find a treatment that works.

Injections of botox, or botulinum toxin, are more commonly associated with smoothing out wrinkles.

It is not exactly clear why it may work in chronic migraines but it is thought that, as well as being a muscle relaxant, it may work to block pain signals.

In clinical trials, patients were given up to five courses of injections of botox into specific head and neck muscles every 12 weeks.

After 24 weeks, those treated with Botox had fewer days with a migraine than those who received a placebo injection.

By one year, nearly 70% of those treated with Botox had a 50% reduction in the number of migraines compared with before the trial.

The final results were published in Headache in May this year.

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