johns hopkins medical institutions

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) Monitoring Internet search traffic about influenza may prove to be a better way for hospital emergency rooms to prepare for a surge in sick patients compared to waiting for outdated government flu case reports.

A report on the value of the Internet search tool for emergency departments, studied by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine over a 21-month period, is published in the Jan. 9 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) An advisory from two leading allergists, Robert Wood of the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and Scott Sicherer of Mt.

Sinai Hospital in New York, urges clinicians to use caution when ordering allergy tests and to avoid making a diagnosis based solely on test results.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) Collaborations between Johns Hopkins and National Taiwan University researchers have successfully manipulated the life span of common, single-celled yeast organisms by figuring out how to remove and restore protein functions related to yeast aging.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) Working with lab cultures and mice, Johns Hopkins scientists have found that a strain of the common gut pathogen Bacteroides fragilis causes colon inflammation and increases activity of a gene called spermine oxidase in the intestine.

The effect is to expose the gut to hydrogen peroxide -- the caustic, germ-fighting substance found in many medicine cabinets -- and cause DNA damage, contributing to the formation of colon tumors, say the scientists.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) A Johns Hopkins Children's Center study of young people with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, has found that some children have a higher risk of invasive disease than adults.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) Researchers at Johns Hopkins have modified HIV in a way that makes it no longer able to suppress the immune system.

Their work, they say in a report published online Sept. 19 in the journal Blood, could remove a major hurdle in HIV vaccine development and lead to new treatments.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) In a study of complication rates following prostate biopsy among Medicare beneficiaries, Johns Hopkins researchers have found a significant rise in serious complications requiring hospitalization.

The researchers found that this common outpatient procedure, used to diagnose prostate cancer, was associated with a 6.9 percent rate of hospitalization within 30 days of biopsy compared to a 2.9 percent hospitalization rate among a control group of men who did not have a prostate biopsy.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) Johns Hopkins researchers say they have developed a formula to predict which heart transplant patients are at greatest risk of death in the year following their surgeries, information that could help medical teams figure out who would benefit most from the small number of available organs.

(Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions) An estimated $25 billion is spent annually on treating chronic wounds on patients in the United States.

These chronic wounds deeply affect the quality of life of more than six million people who have them. The most common types of chronic skin wounds and skin ulcers are related to venous disease (conditions related to or caused by veins that become diseased or abnormal).