Health & Wellness - March 2012 Archives

Hip Replacement Can Be Reasonable Option Even for Older Adults March 30, 2012 Dear Mayo Clinic: I am an 84-year-old woman with a ...

Desert soil may harbor a potentially invasive fungus. The fungal infection of the gastrointestinal tract which mimics cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, appears to be emerging in the Southwestern United States ...

Spring has only just arrived, but tick season is well under way. Physicians are seeing new cases of tick-borne illness several weeks earlier than usual, likely because a mild winter in much of the country made life easier for ticks and their offspring. That means it’s time for gardeners, hikers, pet owners and others who spend time outdoors to take steps to protect themselves -- and to watch for symptoms of tick-borne illness if they do come in contact with the tiny bloodsuckers. “We’ve already started getting positives for tick-borne disease such as Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and babesiosis,” says Bobbi Pritt, M.D., a Mayo Clinic microbiologist and director of the Clinical Parasitology and Virology Laboratories. That is a month or two earlier than normal for Minnesota and other states with unusually warm weather in recent months are likely seeing the same.

Organ transplantation has seen tremendous improvements over the years.  For example, kidney transplants are very successful operations today...but unless a patient gets an organ from an identical ...

How to predict outcomes for common heart procedures is the focus of a Mayo Clinic study presented this week at the annual meeting of the American College of ...

A recent Mayo Clinic study might change the way we assess obesity in individuals with heart disease. The researchers found individuals who were “skinny” according to BMI, ...

Stem cells derived from heart failure patients’ own bone marrow and injected into their hearts improved the function of the left ventricle, the heart’s pumping ...

Several Species of Human Intestinal Tapeworms Exist March 23, 2012 Dear Mayo Clinic: How is tapeworm infection contracted and treated? Is it very ...

This year tobacco-related illness will kill nearly 6-million people worldwide. That's more people than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Just this week in Singapore, at a ...

Could blocking a testosterone receptor lead to a new way of treating an aggressive form of breast cancer?  Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Arizona and The Translational ...

March 23, 2012 Dear Mayo Clinic: How do cortisone shots work to relieve pain? It appears that they only provide temporary relief and are often given multiple ...

Kidney stones in fruit flies may hold the key to a treatment for humans.  A research team from Mayo Clinic and the University of Glasgow  recently presented their findings at ...