Health

Low sensitivity to pain due to gene mutation

by

A research team from UCL has identified a rare mutation that causes members of one family to have low sensitivity to pain. The researchers hope that the results could be used to identify new treatments for chronic pain. One in ten people experience moderate to severe disabling chronic pain. Understanding congenital analgesia, a rare inherited condition that reduces the capacity to feel physical pain, could lead to new pain relief therapies. Two mutations causing congenital analgesia are being explored by researchers working with pharmaceutical firms, but no breakthrough drugs have been developed. The researchers studied an Italian family, the Marsilis, which has six people with a distinctive pain response unique to them. The members of this family can burn themselves without feeling any pain. The family has normal intraepidermal nerve fibre density which means they are not missing any nerves. … Read more

Providing Dental Care for Adults with Mental Health Disorders: Can Increased Interaction with Therapists Help?

by

An interesting article titled “Providing oral care for adults with mental health disorders: Dental professionals’ perceptions and experiences in Perth, Western Australia” written by Clair Scrine, Angela Durey, and Linda Slack-Smith, appears in Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology (pp. 1–7, 2018). The article sought out to explore dental professionals’ perceptions and experiences of providing oral health care for adults with mild to moderate mental health disorders in Perth, Western Australia. The article suggests that people with mental health disorders have poorer oral health outcomes and are even less likely to receive dental care. In Australia those with several mental health disorders are more likely to have decayed, missing or filled teeth than the general population. It is believed that access to care and affordability in Australia limit those with mental health disorders from receiving dental care. Most of the dental care (~85%) in Australia is through the private sector. The authors … Read more

Delivering Dentistry and Counseling to Patients using Telemedicine

by

Nowadays it is possible to receive dental care, healthcare, and even counseling from the comfort of your own home. Teledentistry is defined as using electronic information including interactive audio, video, and data communications to provide and support dental care including consultation, diagnosis, and treatment where the care occurs virtually from where the oral health professional is licensed. Such care is essentially delivered online like many other aspects of life is increasingly becoming such as buying clothes and paying bills. Teledentistry includes the use of a live, two-way interaction between a patient and a dentist using interactive audiovisual telecommunications technology. Teledentistry includes the transmission of recorded health information such as radiographs through a secure electronic communications system to a dentist, who uses the information to evaluate or diagnose the patient’s condition or provide a service. Teledentistry includes personal health and medical data collection from an … Read more

Creating 3-D Mini Brains

by

Researchers at the Houston Methodist Research Institute are making 3-D mini brains from human stem cells. They hope that such models can help with research on repairing the nervous system after injury or disease of the brain. The researchers have developed a way to reduce the time required to grow these brain models which will allow for faster testing of drugs and study of disease-causing mutations. For the first time when the researchers put the cells together, they dramatically changed their morphological complexity, size, and shape. They believe they look like cells you would see in the human brain. Cells traditionally grown in lab cultures are put on a flat petri dish where they are often manipulated and thus their interactions are disturbed. The form, structure, and developmental growth of the brain’s cells are thus not able to be reproduced … Read more

Informed Consent in Dentistry: Can Change Impact Personal Injury Cases?

by

An excellent article appears in the Spring 2017 edition of the The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (vol. 45, pp. 77-94) written by Kevin I. Reid titled “Informed Consent in Dentistry.” The article discusses how informed consent is respecting the ethical right of an individual to make decisions about one’s body and only have actions undertaken on their body with authorization without undue influence. In order for informed consent to be considered valid in dentistry the following must occur: (1) the patient is competent and has the ability and capacity to understand and decide, (2) the dentist discloses material information, (3) the patient understands, (4) the patient is voluntarily entering the arrangement, and (5) the patient provides authorization to go ahead. Every patient however comes to a different degree of understanding to authorize treatment based on their prior dental experiences, education, motivation, attention, … Read more