Dr Penna

CMS updates - collaborative media application. This software powers famous political group blog dailykos.

Scoop is a “collaborative media application”. It falls somewhere between a content management system, a web bulletin board system, and a weblog. Scoop is designed to enable your website to become a community. It empowers your visitors to be the producers of the site, contributing news and discussion, and making sure that the signal remains high.

I have started writing about medical wikis and started with wikipedia medical portal here.  The next wiki I am going to write about is Ganfyd. This is started by group of enthusiastic medical doctors using Doctorns.net.uk website. You can join the editorial team if you are a qualified doctor registered with the General Medical Council (UK) or the equivalent bodies in Canada, the Republic of Ireland, Australia or New Zealand.   The content in this website is licenced under ganfyd Attribution NonCommercial RegisteredMedical ShareAlike 1.0. licence.  GANFYD stands for Get A Note From Your Doctor. This website uses opensource wiki software mediawiki.

The free medical knowledge base that anyone can read and any registered medical practitioner may edit. Ganfyd is a collaborative medical reference by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts. The site is based around the wiki format, enabling true sharing of knowledge. Please join and help us to create a great source of information and experience!

What is ganfyd

GANFYD stands for Get A Note From Your Doctor, and is a slang abbreviation used by British General Practitioners to describe the situation where a member of the public has been forced to consult their doctor in order to get a letter to say that they can do something which common sense says they can. Usually GANFYDs occur when employers, schools or public bodies are involved. They are as frustrating for patients as they are for doctors.

Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have created a new probe that can be used to monitor immune system and its response to therapies. They achieved this by altering molecular structure of Gemcytabine and adding radiolabel for this molecule. The uses of this probe include monitoring immune system in cancer patients, and also monitoring immune response during conventional or novel cancer treatment modalities like tumor vaccines.

 
 Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have modified a common chemotherapy drug to create a new probe for positron emission tomography (PET), an advance that will allow them to model and measure the immune system in action and monitor its response to new therapies….

…Researchers created a small molecule, called FAC, by slightly altering the molecular structure of one of the most commonly used chemotherapy drugs, gemcitabine. They then added a radiolabel so the cells that take in the probe can be seen during PET scanning….

….”Dynamic probes like the one developed by UCLA scientists will allow researchers to learn more about the role of the immune response in cancer, how current treatments affect immune cells, and will allow them to quantitatively monitor responses to new modalities such as tumor vaccines,” Shannon said. “Probes of this type may also help oncologists more rapidly identify tumors that will respond to certain drugs so treatments can be made more patient-specific.”….

While searching to play online chess game I found this great site for chess players. This site site allows you to play with other players in realt time mode and also in correspondence mode. It has forums and also blogs for the users. One can organise the chess tournaments and be involved in other peoples tournaments. As a free member you are entitled to play 5 games in 24 hours and one challenge at a time. Its a quite an interesting site for chess lovers.

There have been lot of media attention about vaccine for Glioblastoma Multiforme (Yahoo, Gaurdian, Reuters etc). This even caused lot of enthusiasm in finacial world.

But what is this Vaccine… CDX-110

The vaccine is designed to treat a certain subtype of glioblastoma that is present in 25% to 40% of cases. Tumors of this sub-type have a mutant protein known as EGFRvIII studded on the surface of many of their cells — a twisted variant of a normal protein called EGFR. The normal EGFR is widely distributed on cells in the body and will stimulate division of the cell when it receives the correct hormone signal.

The mutant protein EGFRvIII, however, has an altered structure that sticks it in the “on” position permanently — relentlessly triggering cell division, causing out-of-control, cancerous growth. Glioblastoma patients testing positive for EGFRvIII have a bleaker prognosis than those who don’t. Virtually no EGFRvIII-positive patient survives two years, versus about 15% of those who are negative.

But there’s an upside. The very uniqueness of the EGFRvIII protein has allowed scientists, in theory, to design a vaccine against tumor cells and only tumor cells.

Latest data shows that this vaccine appears efficient in prolonging life

Co-administration of TMZ with the EGFRvIII vaccine (CDX-110) results in strong sustained immune responses to EGFRvIII in 100% (95%CI: 0.72, 1.00) of evaluated patients. Median PFS was 16.6 months (95%CI: 9.1, 22.7).
The survival of the vaccinated patients is better than a matched historical control group (14.3 months; 95%CI: 13.0, 16.2) (p<0.0001; log-rank) and a subgroup treated with TMZ (15.2; 95%CI: 13.9, 20.5) (p=0.0078) and is also equivalent to the results seen in patients vaccinated without simultaneous temozolomide (p=0.4108; log-rank).

Are there any other vaccines? yes there are loads. Pubmed search for “Vaccine and Glioblstoma Multiforme” shows 98 results. Some include Wilms tumor 1 peptide, Autologous glioma cell vaccin, Dendritic Cell vaccinations and so on.

During my basic surgical rotation I worked for 12 months in Neurosurgery as SHO. During this time I felt uneasy especially during breaking bad news to patients newly diagnosed with GBM, especially when telling about outcome, survival figures and management options.

This news about development of vaccine to GBM management brings hope to all those sufferers.

I am writing this post after having met one of my patient who is recently been operated for malunion of Ulna in forearm. Patient had complex both bone fractures in the past and was operated to fix them at multiple location. But when the rehabilitation phase started, the problems were more apparent, patient lost most of supination, but with some pronation.

This is is tricky because when you lose supination your upper limb cannont compensate because your body comes in way and prevent you to do all activities that require supination like doing clock wise motion of your hand(like putting a screws) and so on. If the loss of supination in forearm is acompinied by loss of flexion and extension at wrist, you have more disability. On the other hand if you loose your pronation, you can easily compensate by doning trick movements like abducting your shoulder instead of moving at forearm. People can cope really well folllowing loss of pronation compared to those people who lost supination.

Also do you know what muscle is strong supinator - it is famour Biceps. Biceps is famous in lay people mind as bulk arm muscle doing flexion. But it is more important as supinator, than as flexor of the elbow.

Web 2.0 is a phenomenon and YouTube is the perfect symbol of Web 2.0 applications. It has become wildly popular - one of the most popular, most-visited sites on the internet. No matter how pften you visit it, you always come back. Below, we present to you the best applications for dealing with Youtube.

makeuseof.com

collected from digg

Nice video from youtube with good captions by Ankur

Video Showing 5678 Steps