Monthly Archives: February 2020

How can we sustain family carers’ capacity to care? What carers need and how technology can help provide it

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Much of the work of caring for the growing population of older adults is done by family members who often find themselves in the proverbial “club sandwich” generation, struggling to juggle the competing demands of employment, raising a family, and providing unpaid care. Caregiving is often stressful and burdensome, in part due to the lack of support for family carers. In this blog post, the authors of a new qualitative study in BMC Geriatrics discuss what they learned about carers’ goals and how technology could help them.

Health

Human Pancreas Organoids: A step closer to understanding biology & treating disease

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Authors of this recent paper published in BMC Developmental Biology, present a new way of studying what goes on within the pancreas by generating “human pancreas organoids”. Using cells taken from a human pancreas, the authors create self-assembled tissue-like structures that mimic the human pancreas at a much simpler level, helping us understand the development, form and function of the organ.

In this study, they are not only able to generate these “mini” pancreas organoids, but go further in being able to propagate them over long periods of time with sustained genetic stability. They hope that this cell-derived technology will help breakdown the cellular and tissue-level processes that occur over time, to deepen our understanding towards better therapeutic interventions, tackling problems at grassroots of pancreas-driven disease like diabetes, pancreatic cancer and much more. These and similar cell-derived technologies will take us towards a deeper understanding and better treatments of disease.

Health Medicine Technology

Highlights of the BMC Series: January 2020

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With another month of cutting edge, high impact research, we look back on just a few highlights from articles published across the BMC Series in January.
Men’s grief following pregnancy loss and neonatal loss • Spontaneous embryo resorption in the mouse • Post-traumatic stress disorder among US military • How people living with dementia achieve and maintain independence at home • Impacts of a novel integrated extracorporeal-CPR workflow.

Biology Health Medicine

“I was very upset to be diagnosed”: The psychosocial impact of a diagnosis of gestational diabetes

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While the harms of gestational diabetes are well-known, along with the physical benefits of diagnosing and treating it early, the psychosocial harms of a diagnosis are less well-understood. In light of controversial changes to the diagnostic criteria for gestational diabetes, the authors of a new systematic review of qualitative studies, published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, discuss balancing these benefits and harms and how their research should be used to inform future updates to the criteria.

Medical Evidence

London Global Cancer Week 2019 – New Solutions to evolving challenges

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BMC Cancer recently attended the 4th Meeting on ‘Cancer control in low and middle income countries’ as part of the London Global Cancer Week at the Royal Society of Medicine on 25th November 2019. This year’s meeting aimed to increase awareness of successful global cancer collaborations and provide an inspiring forum to discuss future strategies to jointly improve cancer control worldwide. Here we touch upon some highlights of the meeting.

Developing World Health Medicine Open Access