JHM HEALTH NEWS
An e-news service from Johns Hopkins Medicine
March 2008
NOTE TO EDITORS/REPORTERS: Welcome to the March 2008 edition of JHM Health News. As always, Hopkins welcomes comments and suggestions for improving this means of sending you monthly health and medicine story ideas for your direct use or follow up. Contact John Lazarou at mednews@jhmi.edu to set up interviews, to localize a story with patients in your area, and to arrange for photographs or other services.
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IN THIS ISSUE:
- JOHNS HOPKINS EXPERT CAN DISCUSS DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HGH AND ANABOLIC STEROIDS
- HOMING IN ON ARVD
- A RARE DISORDER, RIPE FOR RESEARCH
- DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION FOR MOVEMENT DISORDERS—AND MORE
- TAKING ON THE FRONTAL SINUSES
- THE TUMOR KILLER
- Can an athlete who uses anabolic steroids and/or HGH improve his athletic performance?
- What do most clinical studies suggest about HGH?
- Is it right to put a ballplayer who used HGH in the same category as one who used anabolic steroids?
- The other key difference is that while steroids cause many nasty side effects, what are the side effects of HGH and is it bad for you?
- If HGH doesn't help with athletic performance, why are athletes breaking league rules to get it?
HOMING IN ON ARVD
In their quarter-century campaign to accurately diagnose one of the most mysterious causes of sudden cardiac death, scientists are closing in on their quarry with the aid of improved genetic screening. “In many cases,” says cardiologist Hugh Calkins, “we can now pin it down.”
A RARE DISORDER, RIPE FOR RESEARCH
Clinicians and investigators join forces and take on transverse myelitis. Its symptoms seem to know no bounds: Pain in the lower back, chest or neck. Legs that are numb. Hands that tingle. Headache. Fever. Loss of appetite. A general malaise. They can develop over a period of several weeks, hours—or, as one young woman, Cody Unser, recalls, even minutes.
DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION FOR MOVEMENT DISORDERS—AND MORE
Parkinson’s disease is caused by a deficiency of dopamine, a chemical that transmits signals between nerve cells. In 1988, when a Hopkins team discovered that the deficiency led certain brain cells to be over-stimulated, not under-stimulated as was previously believed, it became clear that overactive cells could be addressed surgically. In 1997, deep brain stimulation, or DBS, a procedure that had almost disappeared after the introduction of the drug L-dopa around 1965, was approved in the United States for movement disorders.
TAKING ON THE FRONTAL SINUSES
She’d had three sinus surgeries, and yet pressure and pain in her forehead persisted. When a CT scan showed her frontal sinuses were still blocked, Doug Reh took this patient to surgery. Using angled scopes—curved instruments specially designed for the frontal sinus—he opened up the frontal recess and took down the sinus cells blocking the pathway, thereby allowing the frontal sinuses to adequately drain.
THE TUMOR KILLER
Guided by imaging technologies such as computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound, specialists in Hopkins’ vascular and interventional radiology division can now surgically burn or freeze cancerous tumors—on an outpatient basis—using a technique called percutaneous ablation. Hopkins On Call sat down with interventional radiologist Christos Georgiades to learn more.
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