Category Archives: Medicine

Medicine

What is preeclampsia?

Preeclampsia was mentioned during a talk I sat in on today. I had heard the term before, but either never knew or forgot what it meant. I just looked it up. According to Wikipedia,

Pre-eclampsia (previously called toxemia) is a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy. It is said to exist when a pregnant woman with gestational hypertension develops proteinuria. Originally, edema was considered part of the syndrome of pre-eclampsia, but presently the former two symptoms are sufficient for a diagnosis of pre-eclampsia.

And in case you’re wondering about proteinurea,

Proteinuria (from protein and urine) means the presence of an excess of serum proteins in the urine.

Edema basically means your tissue is full of (extra) water, and I trust the drug companies have made you aware of the meaning of hypertension.

Article Outline: Internal Cardiac Defibrillation Threshold: Effects of Acute Ischemia by Jones et al.

This was kind of interesting, but it doesn’t show very much. The main conclusion that I got from it was that large regions of coronary occlusion lead to death within 30 minutes, but I don’t think that’s really what they were trying to find or show.

The Cite-U-Like page is here. The rest is below the fold.

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Article Outline: Ischemic Ventricular Fibrillation: The Importance of Being Spontaneous by Ouyang et al.

I outline the bits of papers I find interesting for reference. I’m going to try posting some of these outlines in the hopes that someone finds them useful. It’s very easy for me to export them from FreeMind. The article is Ischemic Ventricular Fibrillation: The Importance of Being Spontaneous(Cite-U-Like) by Ouyang et al.

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Omega-3 Fatty Acids Linked to Improved Prisoner Behavior

The Guardian has an article up about studies involving omega-3 fatty acids and populations of alocholics and violent prisoners. Some of the scientists quoted in the article suspect that an increase in omega-6 fatty acids and decrease in omega-3 fatty acids in the diet has affected people’s brains over the last century.

The results are not entirely conclusive, and the article does note that, but I found it to be really interesting nonetheless.

What is a Harvard Respirator?

I was reading a paper today about a study on dogs, and it mentioned that the dogs were ventilated with a “Harvard Respirator”. It was pretty easy to find a few pictures on Google Images, but I couldn’t find much other information. Apparently it’s just a veterinary ventilator made by Harvard Apparatus. In case you ever need to know. I thought perhaps it was a particular type of device, like a “Holter Monitor”.

You will find a lot of mentions of Harvard respirators on Google, and they are mostly quotes from scientific papers stating that they used a Harvard respirator. Go figure.

ADDENDUM: The very same paper also mentions the pacing rate they used to stimulate the dog’s heart. They don’t mention the normal heart rate for a (mongrel) dog. I looked it up and found it here. It’s between 60-160 beats/min for average-sized adult dogs. That’s a pretty wide range. I’d like to see a plot of heart rate compared to size in dogs.