Screenings can help get kids to buckle up, wear bike helmets
Screenings and brief interventions for at-risk kids admitted to pediatric trauma centers and their parents provide the information needed to help curb risky behavior and prevent future injury, say researchers at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
Their study — now online and set to be published in the July issue of The Journal of Trauma Injury, Infection, and Critical Care — shows that 97 percent of participating families were able several months after their intervention to recall information about how seat belts save lives, and the importance of placing kids in the back seat of a car and having them wear bicycle helmets.
“We know that children who are admitted to a trauma center for treatment of an injury tend to be more likely to engage in high-risk behavior,” says study lead author Dr. Peter Ehrlich, director of the Pediatric Trauma Center at the children’s hospital. “So when we have them in our care, it provides us with an opportunity, or a teachable moment, to provide an intervention to counter risky behavior that could result in injury.”
These teachable moments, Ehrlich says, can be used for any risk-taking behavior and do not necessarily have to be focused on the condition that brought the child in for medical treatment.
U-M instrument gives glimpse of planet Mercury makeup
By measuring the charged particles in the planet Mercury’s magnetic field, a U-M sensor enabled the first observations about the surface and atmospheric composition of the closest world to the sun.
“We now know more about what Mercury’s made of than ever before,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, a professor in the departments of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and Aerospace Engineering. “Holy cow, we found way more than we expected.”
Zurbuchen is project leader of the Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS), a soda-can sized sensor on board the MESSENGER spacecraft, which performed the first of three scheduled Mercury flybys in January. A paper on FIPS’ results from this flyby is published in the July 4 edition of Science.
Since the Mariner 10 spacecraft’s 1975 discovery of Mercury’s magnetic field, scientists have speculated about how this magnetic field and the solar wind interact with the planet’s surface and exosphere, or thin atmosphere.
FIPS detected silicon, sodium, sulfur and even water ions around Mercury. Ions are atoms or molecules that have lost electrons and therefore have an electric charge.
Because of the quantities of these molecules that scientists detected in Mercury’s space environment, they surmise that they were blasted from the surface or exosphere by the solar wind.
The paper is called “MESSENGER Observations of the Composition of Mercury’s Ionized Exosphere and Plasma Environment.”
— Nicole Casal Moore, News Service
Stepfamilies make caring more complex in later life
Late-life remarriage complicates caring for an ailing spouse, according to a researcher who is conducting one of the first known studies to focus on the challenges facing older remarried caregivers — a growing segment of the older U.S. population.
“Caring for an aging spouse is extremely difficult under the best of circumstances,” says Carey Wexler Sherman, a research investigator at the Institute for Social Research (ISR). “When stepfamily tensions and conflicts are added to the mix, the stress can become overwhelming.”
With funding from the national Alzheimer’s Association, Sherman plans to interview about 125 men and women with the goal of documenting the type, level and quality of social support received from stepchildren and other social network members, and assessing how late-life remarriage affects caregiving.
“Past research and current public policy relies heavily on the assumption that most older people who develop dementia are in long-term, intact marriages where the spouses — most often the wife — and adult children will provide most of their care,” Sherman says.
“Sometimes remarried partners and adult stepchildren come to consider each other ‘family’ and sometimes they don’t,” she says. “Often you hear people talk about ‘my father’s wife’ or ‘my husband’s children,’ which can be a sign that a family hasn’t really blended. Ambivalent feelings among family members may carry over in all kinds of ways when a stepparent needs help providing care for an aging parent.”
— Diane Swanbrow, News Service
Stillbirths, infant deaths lead to guilt among obstetricians
Nearly one-in-10 obstetricians has considered giving up practice because of the emotional toll of stillbirths and infant deaths, a study finds.
Three-quarters of the 804 obstetricians who responded to a survey by researchers at the U-M Health System reported that the experience took a large emotional toll on them personally.
“Our survey reveals that perinatal death has a profound effect on obstetricians, and 8 percent had considered giving up obstetrics because of the emotional difficulty of caring for patients with perinatal death,” says lead author Dr. Katherine Gold, of the Department of Family Medicine and Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
“We know that stillbirth and infant death are traumatic events for families; this study suggests that they are also traumatic for the physician.”
The study appears in the July issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
“When a fetus or baby dies, we focus on the family’s needs, but obstetricians are often struggling with their own emotions too.”
The threat of lawsuits also weighs heavily on physicians. Stillbirths are the No. 2 reason for legal action against obstetricians in the United States, preceded by allegations involving births with adverse neurologic outcomes.
Improved physician training would help obstetricians, according to a majority of the study’s respondents. Physicians who said they’d had adequate bereavement training were less likely to report that they had considered giving up obstetric practice because of the emotional difficulty of perinatal death, the study states.
— Katie Vloet, UMHS Public Relations
Study raises prospects for tailoring treatments for patients with MS
Animal studies by U-M scientists suggest that people who experience the same clinical signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) may have different forms of the disease that require different kinds of treatment.
The results, if borne out in further studies, point to a time when doctors will be able to target specific inflammatory processes in the body and more effectively help MS patients, using available drugs and new ones in the pipeline.
Since the 1990s, the treatment picture has brightened for people with multiple sclerosis in its most common form, relapsing-remitting MS. Beta interferon drugs and glatiramer acetate (marketed as Copaxone) have proved effective at decreasing the attack rate and suppressing inflammatory plaque development in many patients with MS. Yet why the drugs help some patients, but not others, has remained a mystery.
The research team conducted the studies in mice that have a disease similar to MS: experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis or EAE. The team found that different inflammatory chemicals, whose activity is linked to two different types of immune system T cells, could bring on the same paralysis and other MS-like signs. They also showed that drugs that block one of the inflammation pathways were not effective at blocking the other.
“These two forms of disease differ in the specific anti-inflammatory agents that they are responsive to,” says Dr. Benjamin Segal, the study’s senior author and the director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at the U-M Health System.
The results appear in the July 7 issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
— Anne Rueter, UMHS Public Relations
