LAKEPORT, Calif. – Sutter Lakeside Hospital’s Family Birth Center announces the 2013 Childbirth Preparation Series.
Each series includes four courses. The schedule follows below:
These free classes are all held on Tuesdays from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Family Birth Center on the Sutter Lakeside Hospital campus located at 5176 Hill Road East in Lakeport.
Classes include information about pregnancy, preparing for labor and delivery, the post-partum period, newborn care and infant safety, including when to call the doctor, car seat safety and infant CPR.
Participants can expect to hear oral presentations, watch videos, participate in discussions, and practice various coping and comfort techniques.
Registration is recommended, but not required, and birthing partners are encouraged to attend.
Please contact the Family Birth Center at 707-262-5085 to reserve your spot today.
With new research funding from the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier Alzheimer’s disease study network will undertake four major studies aimed at finding new treatments for the disease.
The award supports the latest projects of the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS) External Web Site Policy, a national consortium of academic medical centers and clinics set up by NIH in 1991 to collaborate on the development of Alzheimer’s treatments and diagnostic tools.
In this round of studies, the ADCS will test drug and exercise interventions in people in the early stages of the disease, examine a medication to reduce agitation in people with Alzheimer’s dementia, and test a cutting-edge approach to speed testing of drugs in clinical trials.
The National Institute on Aging (NIA), the lead institute within NIH for Alzheimer’s research, announced the award on Jan. 14, 2013.
The ADCS will receive $11 million in fiscal year 2013, and the effort could total as much as $55 million over the five years of the project.
The consortium, coordinated by the University of California, San Diego and led by Paul Aisen, M.D., is made up of more than 70 research sites External Web Site Policy in the United States and Canada with a focus on advancing studies of interventions that might not otherwise be tested by industry.
“The ADCS is a key initiative in the federal program to discover, develop and test new Alzheimer’s treatments and diagnostic tools. Over the years, it has proved invaluable in advancing our understanding about the disease and how to conduct research in this challenging area,” said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. “I am particularly excited that this round of studies will use what we have learned by testing interventions pre-symptomatically, as early as we can in the development of the disease, where we now think the best hope lies for keeping Alzheimer’s at bay.”
The ADCS and this latest round of studies, Hodes noted, are critical to accomplishing the research goals set forth in the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease External Web Site Policy announced by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in May 2012.
The plan was developed under the National Alzheimer’s Project Act [PDF] External Web Site Policy, which calls for a coordinated and concentrated effort in research, care and services for Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Its primary research goal is to prevent and effectively treat Alzheimer’s disease by 2025.
“The ADCS has long benefited the wider research community by emphasizing the importance of collaboration and data-sharing and by focusing on trial design and instrument standardization,” said Laurie Ryan, Ph.D., NIA Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials program director. “With this newly funded work, the goal is to expand the range of individuals participating in ADCS clinical trials from those at risk for the disorder to those with Alzheimer’s dementia, so that the full spectrum of the disease is represented.”
The NIA launched the ADCS in 1991 under a cooperative agreement, in which NIH participates in the management of the studies. Over the past two decades, the ADCS has built an infrastructure emphasizing collaboration and data sharing. It focuses on evaluating interventions that will benefit Alzheimer’s patients across the disease spectrum.
This includes testing agents that lack patent protection; agents under patent protection that are already marketed for other uses but which might prove useful in treating Alzheimer’s; and novel compounds developed by individuals, academia, pharmaceutical companies and small biotech companies.
In addition to testing new therapies, the ADCS mission includes the design of new instruments for use in clinical studies and the development of novel and innovative approaches to Alzheimer’s disease clinical trial design and analysis. The ADCS also strives to enhance the recruitment of minority groups into Alzheimer’s studies. To date, the ADCS has conducted 30 studies (23 drug studies and seven instrument development protocols).
The NIA leads the federal government effort conducting and supporting research on aging and the health and well-being of older people. It provides information on age-related cognitive change and neurodegenerative disease specifically at its Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral (ADEAR) Center at http://www.nia.nih.gov/Alzheimers .
For expanded information on Alzheimer’s care and resources, please visit the federal government’s portal website http://www.alzheimers.gov .
Information on health and on aging generally can be found at http://www.nia.nih.gov .
“Although mortality from many cancers has been steadily falling, particularly those of the blood [I.e., leukemias], the more important statistic may be that so many epithelial cancers (carcinomas) and effectively all mesenchymal cancers (sarcomas) remain largely incurable.”
With these words as preface, Nobel laureate James D. Watson, Ph.D., in a newly published paper that he regards “among my most important work since the double helix,” sets forth a novel hypothesis regarding the role of oxidants and antioxidants in cancers that are currently incurable, notably in late-stage metastatic cancers.
At the heart of his thesis are the group of molecules that scientists call reactive oxygen species, or ROS. Noting their fundamental two-sidedness, Watson calls ROS “a positive force for life” because of their role in apoptosis – an internal program that highly stressed cells use to commit suicide.
It’s one of the key mechanisms that have arisen through eons of evolution to weed out biological dysfunction that poses a threat to the survival of organisms.
On the other hand, ROS are also well understood – indeed are notorious – “for their ability to irreversibly damage key proteins and nucleic acid molecules [e.g., DNA and RNA].”
When they’re not needed to curb wayward or out of control cells, which is to say under normal circumstances, ROS are constantly being neutralized by anti-oxidative proteins.
We are often urged to eat foods rich in antioxidants such as blueberries; but, if Watson is correct about the role of ROS and antioxidants in late-stage cancer, as he writes in his new paper, “blueberries best be eaten because they taste good, not because their consumption will lead to less cancer.”
Understanding why this might be so – why antioxidants can in late-stage cancers actually promote cancer progression – is central to Watson’s paper, which appears online January 9 in Open Biology, a journal of Great Britain’s Royal Society.
He proposes that the cell-killing ability of currently used anti-cancer therapies – toxic chemotherapeutic agents such as Taxol as well as radiation treatment – is mainly due to the action of ROS to induce apoptosis, or programmed cell death.
This would explain “why cancers that become resistant to chemotherapeutic control become equally resistant to radiotherapy.” The common feature would be their common dependence upon a ROS-mediated cell-killing mechanism.
Watson, who is Chancellor Emeritus of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, then takes up the case of cancer cells largely driven by mutant proteins such as RAS and MYC.
These, he notes, are often hardest to get to respond to treatment. He suggests this could be due to their high levels of ROS-destroying antioxidants.
He cites recent research showing up-regulation of a gene transcription factor called Nrf2 when cells proliferate as well as when oncogenes such as RAS, MYC and RAF are active. Nrf2 controls the synthesis of antioxidants, and “this makes sense because we want antioxidants present when DNA functions to make more of itself,” Watson writes.
In calling for “a much faster timetable for developing anti-metastatic drugs,” the Nobel laureate wants those reading his new paper to consider a proposition he considers grossly underexplored: “Unless we can find ways of reducing antioxidant levels, late-stage cancer 10 years from now will be as incurable as it is today.”
Doctors and health care providers have formed 106 new Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) in Medicare, ensuring as many as 4 million Medicare beneficiaries now have access to high-quality, coordinated care across the United States, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced.
Doctors and health care providers can establish ACOs in order to work together to provide higher-quality care to their patients.
Since passage of the Affordable Care Act, more than 250 Accountable Care Organizations have been established.
Beneficiaries using ACOs always have the freedom to choose doctors inside or outside of the ACO. ACOs share with Medicare any savings generated from lowering the growth in health care costs, while meeting standards for quality of care.
“Accountable Care Organizations save money for Medicare and deliver higher-quality care to people with Medicare,” Secretary Sebelius said. “Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, more doctors and hospitals are working together to give people with Medicare the high-quality care they expect and deserve.”
ACOs must meet quality standards to ensure that savings are achieved through improving care coordination and providing care that is appropriate, safe, and timely.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has established 33 quality measures on care coordination and patient safety, appropriate use of preventive health services, improved care for at-risk populations, and patient and caregiver experience of care. Federal savings from this initiative could be up to $940 million over four years.
The new ACOs include a diverse cross-section of physician practices across the country. Roughly half of all ACOs are physician-led organizations that serve fewer than 10,000 beneficiaries.
Approximately 20 percent of ACOs include community health centers, rural health centers and critical access hospitals that serve low-income and rural communities.
The group announced also includes 15 Advance Payment Model ACOs, physician-based or rural providers who would benefit from greater access to capital to invest in staff, electronic health record systems, or other infrastructure required to improve care coordination. Medicare will recoup advance payments over time through future shared savings.
In addition to these ACOs, last year CMS launched the Pioneer ACO program for large provider groups able to take greater financial responsibility for the costs and care of their patients over time. In total, Medicare’s ACO partners will serve more than 4 million beneficiaries nationwide.
Also HHS issued a new report showing Affordable Care Act provisions are already having a substantial effect on reducing the growth rate of Medicare spending.
Growth in Medicare spending per beneficiary hit historic lows during the 2010 to 2012 period, according to the report.
Projections by both the Office of the Actuary at CMS and by the Congressional Budget Office estimate that Medicare spending per beneficiary will grow at approximately the rate of growth of the economy for the next decade, breaking a decades-old pattern of spending growth outstripping economic growth.