A weekly round-up of news affecting your health.
STROKES AND CHILDREN
Children who suffer a stroke require individualised care over a much longer period than adults who experience a stroke, a new study of 64 children by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Victoria has found.
Social and behavioural problems linked to long-term quality of life, mental health and academic success begin to emerge at six and 12 months after stroke, highlighting the importance of monitoring children long-term, MCRI research co-ordinator Mardee Greenham said.
The problems are also often not apparent in the early stages of recovery, so they may not be picked up by health professionals caring for these children, she says.
Three groups of children - neonates, pre-school and school age - were studied over a 12-month period and found child victims suffer motor, speech and cognitive impairments similar to elderly stoke victims.
But unlike adults, whose best rehabilitation from stroke is in the first three to six months, children change developmentally as they grow, leading to the finding they need to be monitored and assessed long-term.
Stroke is one of the top 10 killers of children - newborns are three times more likely to suffer a stroke than an adult smoker with high blood pressure and diabetes.
HEPATITIS C
GPs are being urged to use new direct anti-viral drugs (DAAs) to treat hepatitis C virus infections amid fears of a pending epidemic of liver failure and cancer.
The call by University of Queensland professor Mieke van Driel comes after he and a team of researchers found that 10 per cent of the estimated 230,500 Australians with chronic hepatitis C had been treated with the new drugs within six months of them being listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in March 2016.
However, Prof van Driel and his colleagues say those patients may represent the "low-hanging fruit of the HCV epidemic" as they were already listed by clinics as waiting for treatment, meaning thousands of others could potentially miss out.
"If Australia is to capitalise on the opportunities of universal access to DAA therapies, it will require the concerted efforts of general practitioners to improve rates of diagnosis, assessment, treatment and follow-up in the community," they wrote.
PROSTATE CANCER
A new nuclear medicine treatment for advanced prostate cancer is being trialled on 200 men across Australia and New Zealand.
Lead researcher Associate Professor Michael Hofman, from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, says delivering cancer-killing radioactive atoms directly to cells in areas of advanced prostate cancer will be a "game changer" in the treatment of the disease.
Despite recent advances in the treatment of prostate cancer, it remains incurable and is the leading cause of cancer-related death among men in developed countries.
GENETIC IMMUNE DEFICIENCY
A gene mutation making young children extremely vulnerable to common viruses may be a new type of immunodeficiency, a University of Queensland study has found.
Researchers studied genetic data from 100 Australian children with respiratory infections caused by common cold viruses who became critically ill and required life support.
The results showed a fault in the gene IFIH1 which plays a role in child's immune system's ability to recognise viruses and defend against the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the cause of many respiratory tract infections, and the rhinovirus, the most common cold virus.
"The experiments confirmed that if this gene is not working well, the cells struggle to mount a response and the virus could therefore expand much more quickly," Associate Professor Luregn Schlapbach, of the university's Mater Research Institute said.
BLOOD CANCER
Medical researchers believe they have found a way to identify faster whether people with a group of blood disorders will respond to treatment to stop them developing acute leukemia.
An international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of NSW studied samples of bone marrow of Australians with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and identified differences in the stem cells of those patients who didn't respond to treatment with the chemotherapy drug azacitidine (AZA).
About half of all MDS patients treated with AZA respond within six months, reducing their chances of developing leukemia. However doctors have so far been puzzled about why the other half of MDS patients don't respond.
Lead researcher Dr Ashwin Unnikrishnan, of the Lowy Cancer Research Centre, says identifying the markers in the stem cells could help identify early on which patients won't respond to AZA.
"These are early days but this could avoid what has really been a 'wait and see' approach with patients that sometimes results in them receiving futile treatment for six months," he said.
