Health
LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Sutter Lakeside Hospital Volunteer Auxiliary is proud to announce the delivery of new “mommy rockers” and family daybeds, which arrived at the Family Birthing Center at Sutter Lakeside Hospital this summer.
“We wanted to make our Family Birth Center patients and their families as comfortable as possible during this very special time in their lives,” Auxiliary President Joan Taylor said.
The new daybeds provided by the auxiliary are couches during daylight hours and convert to beds for members of the patient’s support team at night.
Jackie Rad, R.N.C., clinical coordinator of the Family Birthing Center added, “We’d like to express our deep gratitude to the auxiliary for this donation. Our patients and their families love the new rockers and the daybeds. And our staff really appreciates the convenience of furniture that serves two purposes. The auxiliary’s generosity and commitment to Sutter Lakeside Hospital makes our birthing suites even more patient-centered and family-friendly.”
This $16,000 furniture donation to the Family Birth Center is the latest example of the auxiliary’s investment in Sutter Lakeside Hospital’s success.
In 2010, they donated $10,000 to the Stroke Telemedicine Program, and in 2011 the Auxiliary gave $20,000 to the campaign to build an Outdoor Mobility Park on campus.
Each year, they provide graduating Lake County high school seniors with $5,000 in scholarships.
“We are extremely proud of our ability to promote the comfort and care of our patients, and we particularly enjoy helping our students further their education in the medical field,” said Taylor.
The Sutter Lakeside Hospital Volunteer Auxiliary is currently accepting new volunteer applications. Interested parties can pick up an application in the auxiliary’s gift shop, located in the main lobby of the hospital between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday.
Proceeds from the gift shop enable the auxiliary to continue investing in the hospital and in the health care of the Lake County community.
If you have questions about volunteering, please contact Joan Taylor at 707-349-2342 or send an email to
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A research report published in the September 2012 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology offers a possible explanation of why some cancer vaccines are not as effective as hoped, while at the same time identifies a new therapeutic strategy for treating autoimmune problems.
In the report, scientists suggest that cancer, even in the very early stages, produces a negative immune response from dendritic cells, which prevent lymphocytes from working against the disease.
Although problematic for cancer treatment, these flawed dendritic cells could be valuable therapeutic tools for preventing the immune system from attacking what it should not, as is the case with autoimmune disorders and organ transplants.
“Immunotherapy of cancer has been an elusive research target that, though promising, never seems to ‘get there,’” said José Alexandre M. Barbuto, Ph.D., from the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology, Department of Immunology, Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the University of São Paulo, in São Paulo, Brazil.
“This study helps us to better understand the mechanisms by which tumors avoid immune recognition and rejection and may, therefore, teach us how to actually engage effectively the immune system in the fight against tumors, thus achieving much better clinical responses and, consequently, quality of life, in our therapeutic approaches,” Barbuto said.
To make this discovery, researchers obtained a small sample of blood from breast cancer patients, and from healthy volunteers. The blood cells were then separated and induced to become dendritic cells.
Researchers then used these laboratory-generated dendritic cells to induce responses from other immune system cells, namely lymphocytes.
While dendritic cells from the healthy donors induced vigorous lymphocytic responses, dendritic cells from cancer patients induced mainly the activation of a specific type of lymphocyte, a regulatory lymphocyte that works as a “brake” for other types of lymphocytes.
“Understanding why the immune system does not recognize and eliminate cancer is critical to developing effective immunotherapies to fight the disease,” said John Wherry, Ph.D., Deputy Editor of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. “Immunologists have been trying to unravel the answer to this question for decades and have realized that the problem is both on the immune system side, and because cancer cells appear to actively ‘fly under the radar’ avoiding immune system detection. This article offers insights into the underlying mechanisms regulating a key immune cell type, the dendritic cell, involved in initiating anti-tumor responses.”
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A new study has found that the number of drug-resistant tuberculosis cases is growing.
Most international recommendations for tuberculosis control have been developed for multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis prevalence of up to around 5 percent.
Yet now there is a prevalence up to 10 times higher in some places, where almost half of the patients with infectious disease are transmitting MDR strains, warns Sven Hoffner from the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control in a linked Comment.
“Drug-resistant TB is more difficult and costly to treat, and more often fatal. Internationally, it is particularly worrisome in areas with fewer resources and less access to effective therapies. As more individuals are diagnosed with, and treated for, drug-resistant TB, more resistance to second-line drugs is expected to emerge,” explained Tracy Dalton, the study’s lead author from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “So far, XDR TB has been reported in 77 countries worldwide, but exact prevalence remains unclear.”
In the Preserving Effective TB Treatment Study (PETTS), Dalton and colleagues used population-based data to quantify the extent of XDR TB and identify risk factors for being infected with a strain resistant to second-line drugs among people with MDR TB from Estonia, Latvia, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand.
Isolates from 1278 adults with MDR TB were shipped to the US CDC and tested for susceptibility to 11 first-line and second-line antituberculosis drugs.
The prevalence of resistance varied widely between countries. Overall, resistance to any second-line drug was detected in nearly 44 percent of patients, ranging from 33 percent in Thailand to 62 percent in Latvia.
In a fifth of cases resistance to at least one second-line injectable drug was identified, ranging from 2 percent in the Philippines to 47percent in Latvia.
The proportion of cases with resistance to a fluoroquinolone was almost 13 percent, with the lowest prevalence in the Philippines (7 percent) and the highest in South Korea (32 percent).
XDR TB was detected in 6.7 percent patients overall, with prevalence in South Korea (15.2 percent) and Russia (11.3 percent) more than twice the current WHO global estimate, at 5.4percent.
Among the study’s other key findings were that risk of XDR disease was more than quadrupled in previously treated patients, and previous treatment with second-line drugs was consistently the strongest risk factor for resistance to these drugs.
Further analysis also found unemployment, a history of imprisonment, alcohol abuse, and smoking as factors associated with resistance to second-line injectable drugs, suggesting that “social factors should be taken into account in the management of TB,” said Dalton.
According to Dalton, “our country-specific results can be extrapolated to guide in-country policy for laboratory capacity and for designing effective treatment recommendations for MDR TB.”
Commenting on the paper, Hoffner added, “These results show that XDR TB is increasingly a cause for concern, especially in areas where prevalence of MDR TB is high. Nevertheless, information remains insufficient to give a clear view of the worldwide distribution and true magnitude of XDR TB. Updated information on MDR TB and investigation of the trends are urgently needed … especially since the true scale of the burden of MDR and XDR tuberculosis might be underestimated and seem to be rapidly increasing.”
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A protein known as galectin-3 can identify people at higher risk of heart failure, according to new research supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health.
This research is based on work from the NHLBI’s Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948 and has been the leading source of research findings about heart disease risk factors.
“Galectin-3, a Marker of Cardiac Fibrosis, Predicts Incident Heart Failure in the Community,” was published online Aug. 29 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and in the Oct. 2 print issue.
Heart failure occurs when the heart cannot fill with enough blood and/or pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs.
Galactin-3 has recently been associated with cardiac fibrosis, a condition in which scar tissue replaces heart muscle, and cardiac fibrosis plays an important role in the development of heart failure.
Heart failure carries enormous risk for death or a lifetime of disability and often there are few warning signs of impending heart failure.
Measuring levels of galectin-3 in the blood may offer a way to identify high-risk individuals who could benefit from treatments to prevent debilitating heart failure and death.
Early identification of predisposed individuals would allow treatment to begin long before heart failure develops and could help people at high risk for heart failure to live longer, more active lives.
Galectin-3 levels were measured in 1996-1998 as part of a routine examination of 3,353 participants enrolled in the Offspring Cohort of the Framingham Heart Study. At the time of measurement the average age of the participants was 59 years old.
During an average follow-up of 11 years, 166 participants (5.1 percent) had a first heart failure event.
Among the 25 percent of people with the highest galectin-3 levels (ranging from 15.4 to 52.1 nanograms per milliliter) the annual rate of heart failure was 12 per 1,000 people compared with 3 per 1,000 people for the 25 percent of participants with the lowest galectin-3 levels (ranging from 3.9 to 12 nanograms per milliliter).
Fifty-three percent of participants were women.
Spironolactone and other related drugs believed to counteract cardiac fibrosis have been shown to improve outcomes in heart failure patients.
Future research will be needed to determine whether treatment with these or other drugs can benefit healthy patients with elevated galectin-3 levels.
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