You have probably already heard about the advantages of eating soy beans and their association with the lower risk of developing certain types of cancer.  This theory stemmed in the 1930s from the fact that females of Asian decent have lower chances of developing breast cancer. During the National Cancer Institute’s environmental and lifestyle experiments on animals & humans, their scientists theorized that diets higher in soy, and similar foods containing isoflavones can lead to lower chances of developing specific types of cancer.

Isoflavones

Isoflavones mimic the effect of estrogen that is produced in humans and animals and this effect is what helps avoid the cells from turning cancerous.  The antioxidant properties help fight against free radicals, which can cause damage to cells through oxidation. The specific isoflavones (phytoestrogens) that contribute to this “cancer-preventing” effect are genistein, daidzein, and glycitein. This is not a point-blank theory - it revolves around the age that isoflavones are consumed and results have only been identified for certain types of cancer.

Cancers

The biggest reason that it’s been especially challenging to discover a cure for cancer is that all cancers are different - they all develop, grow, advance, and attack neighboring cells differently. This is also why the “Soy Theory” does not pertain to all types of cancer. Laboratory studies have found the most substantial evidence pertaining to isoflavones aiding in the prevention of the development of breast and prostate cancers, however this is still just a theory and not enough evidence has been found to make this a fact. Colon and endometrial cancer research are also underway, but have less evidence pertaining to their prevention.

The bottom line is that this research is still underway and the theories are strongly supported - but if anything soy is still high in protein and helps lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Stick to consuming these healthy items and living a healthy lifestyle to help reduce your risk of developing cancer.

Learn more from The American Cancer Society, About Breast Cancer, and Cornell University.

HALO received national attention The Doctors TV show with a segment on HALO. “One Life to Live” soap star Crystal Hunt (“Stacy”) was shown having the HALO procedure and was presented her results in front of the live audience. Show host Dr. Lisa Masterson gives an enthusiastic overview of what HALO is all about.

Breast health is important to everyone! Do you know that 75% of breast cancer occurs in women with no risk factors? This means they have no family history, or have not had a biopsy with atypical cells. Their only identifiable risk factor is having breasts! But all is not lost. Knowing these facts you can take proactive steps to reduce your risks.

…To learn the Top 5 Things Every Woman Should Know About Breast Cancer, visit http://knowyourbreastcancerrisk.com/the-top-5-things-every-woman-should-know-about-breast-cancer/

Know your breast cancer risk! So many women don’t know the facts, here are some resources to keep you in tune with breast cancer. The first step to prevention is education…

Know Your Breast Cancer Risk is a blog maintained by a breast cancer medical device company with articles by doctors, so you know you’re reading pertainent information. Learn from a doctor for free from this great community blog sponsored by Neomatrix, LLC.

This Facebook fan page is constantly updated with breast cancer facts and figures, along with breakthroughs in the industry. Become and fan and keep up to date with breast cancer information.

Heart failure (HF) is a condition in which the heart’s ability to fill or pump a adequate amount of blood is impaired. It can be caused by a number of factors including hypertension (high blood pressure), valve failure, coronary artery disease, and many more things. In the figure below, heart failure is shown to be caused by thickened myocardium (myocarditis), which may be a direct result of a viral infection that can cause the muscle to become inflamed. Almost 2% of the American population has heart failure and even with the best therapy, HF still has an annual mortality of 10%.

Treatment of HF depends on the stage of the disease’s progression and is rated on a scale from case I to case IV. The five year survival rate of patients in stage IV is only 20%, therefore this is considered severe heart failure. There are several minimally invasive devices used in HF treatment. The most common treatment device is an artificial pacemaker (shown below), which successfully prevents about 50% of all heart failures from re-occurring. Another treatment option for HF that is extreme is a heart transplant. This is called the “Gold Standard” treatment because it is the best to use, however the availability of donors is slowly declining while the number of patients who need a transplant is steadily rising. Only about 2200 heart transplants are preformed every year.

The ideal solution would be an artificial heart…In 1985, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), the first artificial heart was implanted. Five years later, UPMC was the first medical institution to release a patient with a ventricular-assist device (VAD) (shown below). Today, VADs called positive displacement pumps are the leading treatment therapy for HF patients. Dr. Marc Simon presented the idea of positive displacement pumps at the BMES Conference and spoke of future improvement for these devices. He announced that second and third generation prototypes are currently underway in many institutions and will be ready for release soon. Dr. Simon discussed that there is an ideal period during HF in which it is ideal to implant there devices into the patient in order to maximize recovery success. There is a certain point in HF in which an acute, catastrophic event leads to sudden progression of the disease, eventually leading the patient to death. The closer researchers are able to pinpoint the time immediately prior to this turn of events to implant the device, the greater the patient’s chances are for survival.

-Amy

What is Atherosclerosis?
Atherosclerosis is a disease where lipoproteins, which are plasma proteins that carry triglycerides and cholesterol, collect on the inner wall of arterial blood vessels. It is a chronic inflammatory response in the walls in which the lipoproteins harden and form plaque within the arteries. There are three different types of atheromatous plaque. One type is simple cholesterol crystals that build up along the wall and narrow the diameter of the artery. The second type is called an atheroma, which is a nodular accumulation of flaky, yellow material (which is composed mostly of macrophages) in the center of large plaques at the lumen of the artery. The last type of atheromatous plaque is calcification of the outer base of more advanced lesions.

Atherosclerosis is caused by many factors, some of which can be controlled by the patient. Hypertension, obesity, smoking, diabetes, high cholesterol, and congenital heart disease can all be individual or combined causes of atherosclerosis in a patient. Depending on where in the body plaque builds up, symptoms may include angina, heart attack, severe pain, stroke, and/or dizziness.

Significance of Atherosclerosis
Atherosclerosis progresses slowly and is cumulative over time, beginning with macrophage infiltration into the artery. A fatty streak results and a lesion advances to eventually create an atheroma, as shown in the figure below. This continues to advances to create a larger, more complicated lesion. Over time, if the lesion is not treated, the plaque will suddenly rupture and form a thrombus that severely slows down, or even stops blood flow. This can lead to an infarction, which is death of the tissues feeding off of the artery within five minutes if it is not tended to immediately.

In the United States alone, atherosclerosis leads to the death of almost 15,000 people every year. It is also the cause of hospitalization for 20,000 patients per year and over 730,000 physician office visits per year.

Current Treatments
Current treatments include improvements in diet, cholesterol reduction medication, anticoagulate medication, blood pressure medication, surgical procedures and sometimes even gene therapy. Our medical device plans to make improvements upon the current surgical procedures, which are endarterectomy, angioplasty, bypass surgery, and thrombolytic therapy.

In my previous article, The Basics of Heart Failure, it was mentioned that a ventricular-assist device (VAD) is the primary treatment for heart failure. Dr. William Wagner (who also contributed to the positive displacement pump technology previously mentioned) believes that there is much room for improvement in the biocompatibility of VADs. he spoke at the BMES conference of infection and thrombosis (blood clotting) problems upon implantation of VADs into patients.

Infection due to VADs can be caused by the biomaterial used, poor sterile technique, device failure, and percutaneous line design. Shear forces caused by excessive bleeding upon implantation of the device can also cause infection, and infection leads to tissue necrosis.

Thrombosis and thromboembolism are problems that all devices face when coming into contact with blood. To avoid this issue, surgeons use drugs like Heparin or Coumadin to avoid coagulation when devices come into direct contact with the blood.

Many scientists believe that nothing can be solved unless it can be quantified. Infection and thrombosis (believe it or not) can be crudely measured through microembolic signals (MES). Dr. Wagner suggested that scientists should get more out of animal models by analyzing MES, explants, and gross neurological health more thoroughly to minimize plately aggregation and avoid thrombosis. An example of a thoroughly tested device that has been underway for 30 years is the Heartmate II, which is implanted in the chest to aid the heart in pumping (shown in the figure above). This device can be used as a treatment method for patients with severe heart failure, or as a bridge until a transplant is available. When tested in calves, this device showed a spike in platelet aggregation (which is expected and normal) and then a steady decrease in aggregation due o microaggregates leaving the implant site. In previous VADs, the platelet aggregation spiked and then didn’t decline at a steady enough rate for thrombosis to cease. Another research project underway by EvaHeart to improve the downfalls of VADs is to replace bovine (cow) with ovine (sheep) products due to this superior configuration of ovine tissue (methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine).

-Amy

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Creating Your Perfect Day

When preforming surgeries, an obstacle that has to be dealt with is making sure that the patient;s blood doesn’t coagulate (or thicken) when it comes into contact with metal intruments. This is currently dealt with by a drug called heparin, which thins the blood so that it doesn’t have an adverse reaction to the touch of an instrument. Heparin is widely used and is successful…most of the time. It creates negative reactions in three to ten per cent of all patients in which the blood will coagulate and clot up all around an instrument as soon as direct contact is made. The image below shows that when Heparin fails, coagulation occurs and the device used in surgery is covered with blood clots:

At Brigham Young University, BYU, an alternative solution has been found. Dr. Kenneth Solen and Jared Parker, biomedical engineers who have dedicated much time to this problem, believe that a different type of precaution needs to be taken. They suggested that rather than adding something to the blood that may induce an immune reaction, they would like to remove something. There exist specific proteins in the blood that carry a strong electrical charge in order to cause coagulation. One could conclude that to remove these proteins, something with a negative charge must be utilized. Therefore, the research team used a negatively-charged gel to attract and remove these coagulation proteins, while leaving the rest of the neutral and negatively-charged proteins in the blood. In the lab, this was proven to be successful, however human testing has not been conducted yet. Dr. Solen continues to pursue the perfection of this innovation at W.L. Gore.

After Dr. Solen’s anticoagulation method, the device used in surgery remains clear of blood clotting:

I would like to thank Blake Ferguson for sharing this article with me.

-Amy

Coronary Artery Disease and Coronary Bypass Grafting

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States. The process of atherosclerosis is the hardening of an artery due to a lipid build up, resulting in functional loss. Fatty deposits, or plaques, may accumulate inside the arterial wall and cause stenosis, or an abnormal narrowing the artery wall. This causes the flow of blood to be reduced or completely stop and the vessel wall to lose its flexibility and ability to handle pulsatile flow. There are several forms of treatment available for CAD depending on the severity of the disease, including lifestyle changes, medicines, angioplasty, and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG).

CABG is the preferred treatment for patients with multiple areas of coronary artery narrowing or blockage and also for patients with higher percentages of stenosis, this relation can be seen in figure 1 above. Patients typically have 1 to 5 bypasses within one surgical procedure. This form of treatment is the most common type of surgery in the United States, with about 500,000 surgeries per year. Typically, the patient’s saphenous vein from the leg, internal mammary artery (IMA), or the radial artery from the arm is used. Figure 2 shows the location of the saphenous vein and IMA. These vessels are removed and grafted onto the hardened artery to revascularize the affected area.

Figure 2

Advantages and Disadvantages of the Current Gold Standard

The current gold standard for the CABG procedure is the use of autologous (from self) saphenous vein and IMA because of their resemblance to the native coronary artery and their relatively high patency rates. It was not until recently that the radial artery has been widely studied as another source for this procedure. The five and ten year artery patency rates for these have all shown to be greater than 70% and 50%, respectively. These rates vary depending on the blood vessel used for the procedure.

Even with the success this procedure has had, there are several disadvantages that may lead to complications. Removing an autologous vein for the procedure may cause donor site morbidity, which can lead to problems such as groin infection near the site of the saphenous vein removal. In addition, there is only a limited supply of donor vessels for this procedure. Up to 30% of patients undergoing lower limb bypass do not have a suitable vein. This can be problematic for patients who need multiple CABGs or have had previous procedures. There is also a greater risk with the use of multiple vessels. For example, there are more incidents of deep sternal wound infection when both IMAs are used for this procedure, especially for patients with obesity and diabetes.

Existing Vascular Grafts and Improvements

Although living autologous vessels seem to be the ideal conduits for CABG, there are several factors, as discussed above, which have prompted efforts to develop a more suitable donor vessel. The ideal blood vessel substitute should mimic the characteristics of a native blood vessel, including its composition, structure, function, and mechanical properties. It should be durable enough to endure the mechanical stresses, as well as the threat of biodegradation and infection within the body after implantation. The vessel should be made up of materials that promote cell-specific interactions and needs to be able to have similar viscoelastic properties as a normal artery to avoid a compliance mismatch. It should be flexible in order to maintain its contour, yet rigid enough to prevent kinking. The materials used, especially on its luminal surface, must be nonthrombogenic to prevent blood clotting in the vascular graft. It is favorable that the vessel is easily and quickly manufactured, and should be readily available in multiple lengths and sizes.

However, no existing conduit possesses all the properties and qualities of the ideal arterial vascular graft listed above. Current alternatives to autologous vascular grafts are prosthetic conduits based on expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) and polyethylene terephthalate (Dacron ®). Their patency at 5 years is 40% to 50%, which is acceptable but relatively low. Tissue engineering has proven to be successful in wound management, burns, and cartilage repair; therefore their has been a growing interest in designing biological blood vessels as an alternative to autologous vascular grafts and current prosthetic conduits. However, previously proposed and designed tissue engineered vascular grafts were not durable, were prone to early thrombosis, and had poor patency rates. This means that a new vascular graft with all the above mentioned qualities is yet to be manufactured, but is a hopeful potential cure for the future.