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Ever Shorter Hospital Stays After Orthopaedic Operations Present A Major Challenge To Rehabilitation - Pre-operative Training Can Improve Results
"Rehabilitation medicine is facing a major challenge today," says Dr. Karsten Dreinh̦fer (Head of Department for Orthopaedics and Orthopaedic Surgery, Medical Park Berlin Humboldtm̿hle, Germany) speaking at the EFORT Congress in Vienna. "Not only in Germany but in many other European countries too, the trend is towards the shortest possible stay in an acute hospital after orthopaedic or trauma-related surgery. This means patient care is shifting increasingly to the rehabilitation sector, which must then be appropriately equipped and trained." But demographic developments are also presenting a significant challenge to orthopaedic rehabilitation: with modern surgical procedures, surgery such as joint replacement operations can be carried out on more and more patients, including the elderly and the very elderly, who then require special care and mobilization assistance, says Dr. Dreinh̦fer, who has been appointed to the professorship for musculoskeletal rehabilitation, prevention and health care research at the Charit̩ in Berlin. Broad interdisciplinary cooperation is also necessary, he says. "Multimodal concepts have proven to be especially effective in numerous diseases of the musculoskeletal system," says Dr. Dreinh̦fer, speaking of a further important trend. "This involves orthopaedics working together with other disciplines, such as physiotherapy, psychotherapy and sports sciences, to be able to help effectively such common complaints as back pain." He says it is also important to cooperate across various health sectors. "It is increasingly important to optimise, via treatment pathways, the transition from the pre-inpatient sector, to acute care and to rehabilitation."
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Chocolate Milk's 'Natural' Muscle Recovery Benefits Match Or May Even Surpass A Specially Designed Carbohydrate Sports Drink
Soccer players and exercise enthusiasts now have another reason to reach for lowfat chocolate milk after a hard workout, suggests a new study from James Madison University presented at the American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting. Post-exercise consumption of lowfat chocolate milk was found to provide equal or possibly superior muscle recovery compared to a high-carbohydrate recovery beverage with the same amount of calories.
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Measurements Fail To Identify TB Patients Who Could Benefit From Shorter Treatment Course

Tuberculosis (TB) is a difficult infection to treat and requires six months of multiple antibiotics to cure it. To combat the TB pandemic, a shorter and simpler drug treatment would be a huge advance since most TB occurs in re-limited settings with poor public health infrastructures. Testing whether two simple clinical measurements might help identify which TB patients could benefit from shorter treatment, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center report that these measurements failed to work in a study published online by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The two measurements were absence of a cavity (an abscess caused by TB) in the lungs (detected by chest X-ray) and failure to grow TB bacteria from the sputum once drug treatment was started (sputum culture conversion). The Phase III clinical trial involved TB patients in Uganda (Africa), Brazil (S. America) and the Philippines (Asia) and was conducted by the Tuberculosis Research Unit (TBRU) at Case Western Reserve University and UH Case Medical Center in Cleveland, the only National Institutes of Health supported TB unit in the U.S. "We found that combining these two clinical measurements failed to select TB patients who could benefit from shorter drug treatment. TB patients receiving four months of TB treatment had their disease come back much more often than those who got six months of drug treatment," said W. Henry Boom, M.D., an infectious disease expert with Case Western Reserve University and UH Case Medical Center and Director of the TBRU. "This study points out the limitations of current clinical measures to identify the relatively small group of TB patients who respond poorly to standard drug treatment." "To better identify risk factors for why treatment fails in a subset of TB patients will require novel approaches and further research so that we can determine quickly (not having to wait for two years after completing six months of drug treatment to measure relapses) not only the effectiveness of new TB drugs or regimens but also who will benefit most from these shortened and simplified TB treatment regimens," added John L. Johnson, MD, first author of the study and an infectious disease expert with Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and UH Case Medical Center. The TBRU is a clinical research contract funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Contact: Alicia Reale University Hospitals Case Medical Center


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