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wake forest university

Progesterone-type hormone therapy could help prevent pre-term births

Injections of a progesterone-type hormone may be able to prevent more than a third of pre-term births in women with a history of giving birth early, reported Paul J. Meis, M.D., of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, today (Feb. 6) at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in San Francisco. “The evidence of this treatment’s effectiveness was so dramatic, the research was stopped early,” said Meis, the national principal investigator and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Wake Forest. “This drug is readily available and can be used by doctors to improve outcomes for mothers and babies.”

New treatment may help survival in patients with abdominal cancer

Researchers report that surgery combined with inserting heated chemotherapy drugs directly into the abdomen can improve survival rates in patients with disseminated cancer of the abdominal cavity.
Patients participating in the research study had a median overall survival of 16 months. Traditionally, patients with this condition, known as peritoneal carcinomatosis, survive only 3-6 months without treatment. Peritoneal cancer is the most common cause of death in patients with intra-abdominal cancers. Surgery alone has proven to be ineffective, as have external beam radiation therapy, brachytherapy and systemic chemotherapy.

Study: Two-thirds of Americans have some physical or mental illness

The total package of good physical and mental health is elusive for most American adults, according to new research. Two-thirds of U.S. adults participating in a 1995 survey reported some degree of physical or mental infirmity that kept them from being completely healthy. The remaining third of the survey group was split into nearly equal percentages of completely healthy and completely unhealthy individuals, say the study’s authors.