Quote:A Swiss watchmaker is hoping to raise a stink with an expensive timepiece that eschews the trade's standard gold, diamond or titanium fittings for a more earthy substance - dinosaur dung.

Vesenaz, Switzerland-based company Artya says the watch set in fossilized feces will sell for 12,000 ($11,290) and comes with a strap made with skin from an American cane toad.

Designer Yvan Arpa said Monday the coprolite came from a plant-eater that died about 100 million years ago in what is now the U.S.

Quote:For as many as 50 years, warfarin has been the most widely used oral anticoagulant in the United States. However, the use of the drug can be cumbersome because the anticoagulant effect of warfarin is influenced by vitamin K intake in the diet and numerous drug-drug interactions. Consequently, frequent monitoring of the international normalized ratio is necessary to ensure that a therapeutic level of anticoagulation has been achieved. Such monitoring is burdensome for patients and physicians.

Quote:Someone is spinning quite a yarn over one New Jersey shore town.

An unknown person dubbed The Midnight Knitter by West Cape May residents is covering tree branches and lamp poles with little sweaters under cover of darkness. Mayor Pam Kaithern says police are looking into the guerrilla needlework, which technically is against the law because it is being done on public property without permission.

The mayor and many residents admit they're enthralled by the rainbow of colours that has popped up.

Resident Susan Longacre takes a walk each morning in Wilbraham Park, where several tree branches and light poles have gotten the treatment. She thinks it's great.

Even those who aren't thrilled admit the yarn is better than spray-painted graffiti.

Quote:Although some renal units in hospitals have managed to implement some successful home haemodialysis programmes using standard equipment, these machines are complex, large and heavy.

This has left patients with limited options on where to install the system, a problem the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded Devices for Dignity (D4D) co-operative wanted to address.

The co-operative, led by clinical director Prof Wendy Tindale, has brought together experts from the hydraulics industry and the NHS to develop a new machine and formed a new company - Quanta Fluid Solutions which will market it.

The Quanta haemodialysis machine uses a cartridge to mix the water and salt solutions required to generate the fluid required for dialysis. Although it produces the fluid in small amounts, it is able to match the flow rates of a standard machine so that patients receive exactly the same treatment they would in a hospital. As the cartridge is disposable, the need for disinfecting the fluid pathways of the machine after each dialysis is eliminated.

The machine will be undergoing regulatory tests and trials later this year. If all goes well, staff and patients at the Sheffield Kidney Institute, Sheffield University’s Nephrology Unit and at Leeds Teaching Hospitals will be starting a clinical evaluation early next year.

It is anticipated that the system will be launched in the UK in late 2011, after which it will be made available to dialysis patients via their local renal units in the NHS Trusts that have home programmes.

Quote:The study involved patients with a particular kind of arthritis. While more research has to be done in patients with other illnesses to know for sure, "my guess would be that this is happening across a wide range of drugs," Dr. Yvonne Nestoriuc of Philipps-University Marburg in Germany, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health. "This is really something that happens in a lot of patient populations."

While most medication side effects are not life threatening or seriously harmful, she and her colleagues note in the journal Arthritis Care & Research, they can still be "frightening and distressing" to patients, and can also lead to patients not taking drugs as recommended.

People with a variety of illnesses who don't feel their medications are necessary and are concerned about their side effects are known to be less likely to take these drugs as directed, the researchers add.

To investigate whether these beliefs might be related to experiencing side effects as well, Nestoriuc and her team had 100 rheumatoid arthritis patients complete the Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire, which explores general and specific beliefs about the necessity and risks of medication. Patients also reported on any side effects related to their rheumatoid arthritis medication and on how much they were bothered by these symptoms.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease characterized by inflammation that leads to stiff, swollen and painful joints. It affects some 20 million people, according to the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society.

At the study's outset, 77 of the patients reported having been bothered by side effects. Eighty-seven of the original 100 study participants were followed up at six months; 45 of these patients, or 52 percent, reported being bothered by side effects at this point.

The patients who had concerns about their medications, for example agreeing with the statement that "having to take arthritis medications worries me," were more likely to have reported having side effects, both at the study's outset and if they started a new drug during the six-month study period. Side effects typically included rashes, gastrointestinal discomfort, and headaches.

These patients were also more likely to report these side effects to their doctors, take non-prescription medications to deal with them, and change their medication dosages on their own. The only other factor that influenced the likelihood of reporting side effects was age.

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis "who are especially concerned about their arthritis medications, or who expect side effects, are at greater risk of experiencing them," the researchers say.

"Starting a new drug is a specifically risky time because people tend to misattribute pre-existing bothersome but non-harmful symptoms as side effects of the new drug," Nestoriuc said.

Doctors may be able to help their patients avoid side effects by talking with them about their concerns before prescribing a new medication, she added, and helping them to get a more "realistic view about the drugs."

Quote:Recent data from Freedom trial, compared with the Medical Outcomes Study sleep survey and the International RLS Study Group Rating Scale, showed that overall sleep quality significantly improved during the first four months on the NxStage System One.

The study also showed improvements in four of the five sleep scale categories (sleep adequacy, drowsiness, sleep initiation and maintenance) and fewer respiratory disturbances.

And patients with restless leg syndrome benefited as well, with 36 percent fewer patients reporting any symptoms after four months.

Last year, news that NxStage's system caused patients to require significantly lower levels of anti-hypertensive drugs sent the company's stock soaring 5 percent. That data, also from the Freedom trial, compared how much blood pressure-controlling medicine patients were prescribed at dialysis centers with how much they needed after four months and a year of home dialysis.

The results showed a nearly 50 percent reduction in the average number of prescribed anti-hypertensive medications over 12 months. Nearly one-third of patients in the study stopped taking the drugs altogether and 56 percent experienced a 50 percent or greater decrease in the amount of medication they needed to control their blood pressure. The trial also indicated that home hemodialysis reduced expected mortality rates by 40 percent.

Quote:People who donate a kidney to a sick friend or relative live at least as long as others in the general population and may live somewhat longer because they tend to take better care of themselves after the procedure.

"We have intuitively felt this way, and hoped that this operation is safe, but this is the first time that we have been able to demonstrate it in a national representation of live donors," said Dr. Dorry L. Segev of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, lead author of the report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Live-donor transplants have become increasingly common in recent years because of the large number of people who need kidneys and the limited availability of cadaver organs.

There are 83,754 Americans waiting for a kidney transplant, 80% of the number of people waiting for any organ, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which helps allocate organs. In 2008, there were 5,968 living-donor kidney transplants.

Several small studies have suggested that donation is safe, but the low rate of risk has made accurate estimates difficult. To surmount that problem, Segev and his colleagues studied the 80,347 Americans who donated kidneys between April 1, 1994, and March 31, 2009. The team compared them with 9,364 participants in a large government survey the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey who met the criteria for kidney donation.

There were 25 deaths in the first 90 days after surgery among the donors, for a rate of 3.1 deaths per 10,000 subjects, compared with a rate of 0.4 per 10,000 in the control group. That suggests the procedure "has always been profoundly safe," Segev said.

Death rates in the first 90 days were slightly higher for men than for women and for blacks than for whites. The highest risk, 36.7 deaths per 10,000 donors, occurred among donors who had high blood pressure.

From the survey forms used in the study, it is not clear if the hypertension was controlled or uncontrolled, Segev said. But it "would probably be wise for hypertensive patients considering donation to be treated through a carefully maintained protocol," he added.

The results "confirm that this is a safe operation," he said. "But it also gives us more specific numbers that we can give patients who are considering doing this. This is a very personal decision with no medical benefit for the donor, so it requires very careful consideration of what the risks are."