News Releases - April 2014 Archives

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Neuroscientists at Mayo Clinic in Florida have defined a subtype of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) that they say is neither well recognized nor treated appropriately. http://youtu.be/w4xQeNQVFoc The variant, called hippocampal sparing AD, made up 11 percent of the 1,821 AD-confirmed brains examined by Mayo Clinic researchers — suggesting this subtype is relatively widespread in the general population. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that 5.2 million Americans are living with AD. And with nearly half of hippocampal sparing AD patients being misdiagnosed, this could mean that well over 600,000 Americans make up this AD variant, researchers say.

ROCHESTER, Minn. ― In a crowded health and wellness marketplace, knowing what’s fact versus myth and effective versus ineffective can be a challenge. It also may be an obstacle for some people to find a sound and practical lifestyle program that they can maintain over time. To provide a comprehensive wellness program based on research, not the trend of the day, Mayo Clinic will launch the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program in summer of 2014 to help people adopt healthy behavioral changes in diet, exercise and stress management and improve their overall quality of life. Journalists: Sound bites with Dr. Hensrud discussing the Healthy Living Plan are available in the downloads.  This new program will be located within the Mayo Clinic Dan Abraham Healthy Living Center in Rochester. To achieve its vision, the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program is designed to help people break down barriers, dispel myths and give participants a comprehensive wellness experience tailored to their individual goals. What makes this program unique is that it doesn’t end once the person leaves the campus; it offers ongoing support long after the person returns home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_732QomrHk4 “Mayo has been dedicated to the health and wellness of individuals for 150 years, and this program continues that tradition by offering life-changing experiences to people seeking whole-person wellness who want to maximize their health,” says Donald Hensrud, M.D., medical director, Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic research into whether ultrasounds to detect breast cancer in underarm lymph nodes are less effective in obese women has produced a surprising finding. Fat didn’t obscure the images — and ultrasounds showing no suspicious lymph nodes actually proved more accurate in overweight and obese patients than in women with a normal body mass index, the study found. The research is among several Mayo studies presented at the American Society of Breast Surgeons annual meeting April 30-May 4 in Las Vegas. Researchers studied 1,331 breast cancer patients who received ultrasounds of their axillary lymph nodes, the lymph nodes in the armpits, to check for cancer before surgery. Of those patients, 36 percent were considered obese, with a body mass index of 30 or more. Body mass index is a formula that uses weight and height to estimate body fat. Of the other women studied, 33 percent were of normal weight and 31 percent were overweight but not obese.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic will open its state-of-the-art Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center expansion at the Dan Abraham Healthy Living Center on May 5. The new space includes multiple playing surfaces, such as hardwood for basketball and volleyball, artificial grass for turf sports, artificial ice for hockey, and specialized lifting platforms. “Whether you are an elite, professional athlete or a ‘weekend warrior,’ we are able to develop programs to fit all athletes’ needs,” says Edward Laskowski, M.D., co-director, Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center. “We have long had world-renowned experts in all areas of sports medicine, but through our expansion here in Rochester and our new facility being developed in downtown Minneapolis, we have the increased resources to meet growing demand.” The new space offers performance solution programs, including hockey, golf, running, baseball/softball, anterior cruciate ligament injury prevention and return-to-sport. The programs begin with individualized assessment and are then tailored to meet individual needs, regardless of age or level of athletic achievement. “Active children become active adults, so we take great pride in serving people of all ages to achieve their sports performance and fitness needs,” says Michael Stuart, M.D., co-director, Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center. “Our team of physicians, athletic trainers, physical therapists, and strength and conditioning specialists will help prevent injury, refine skills and speed recovery so people can spend more time doing what they love at the highest level possible.”

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Apathy and agitation among otherwise healthy senior citizens may be an early sign of a condition leading to dementia, according to a study from Mayo Clinic published this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Mayo researchers conducted a five-year prospective study to estimate the effect of initial neuropsychiatric symptoms to develop mild cognitive impairment. MCI is the intermediate stage between normal aging and dementia. People with MCI can develop dementia at a rate of 10 to 15 percent per year compared with 1 to 2 percent in the general population. Researchers looked at data from the Mayo Clinic Study on Aging conducted in the early 2000s to compare behavioral symptoms to physiology from more than 10,000 people age 70 and above. Researchers studied psychiatric symptoms — agitation, apathy, anxiety, irritability and depression — at the baseline of the study and then again after five years to see if there were signs of MCI. It was determined that these baseline psychiatric symptoms are better predictors of increasing the risk of incident mild cognitive impairment than even physiological biomarkers, says study author Yonas Geda, M.D., a professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. http://youtu.be/MizMgO9f-KE Journalists: Soundbites of Dr. Geda discussing the research are available in the downloads.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic earned No. 8 on the 2014 DiversityInc Top 10 Hospitals and Health Systems list for its continued commitment to diversity and inclusion. This is the third year that Mayo has earned a spot on the list. This year's rankings were announced at the annual DiversityInc Top 50 event in New York on April 22. Companies named to the DiversityInc Top 10 Hospital and Health Systems are measured in four key areas: CEO/Leadership Commitment Talent Pipeline Equitable Talent Development Supplier Diversity Of particular note, Mayo Clinic stood out in the rankings for its leadership involvement, specifically its CEO chairing Mayo Clinic’s diversity council, its strategic positioning of its employee resource groups to develop staff and improve patient care, as well as its national outreach to diverse communities and organizations.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — April 24, 2014 — Mayo Clinic researchers have uncovered a novel tumor suppressive role for p53, a cancer-critical gene that is mutated in more than half of all cancers found in humans. The researchers found that loss of p53 function caused overproduction of the kinase Aurora A, an enzyme involved in the process of cell division. That overproduction leads to mitotic spindle malformation and aberrant separation of duplicated chromosomes over daughter cells, a phenomenon that predicts tumor metastasis and poor patient outcomes. The findings appear in the journal Nature Cell Biology. Normal human cells have 46 chromosomes. It has long been recognized that developing cancer cells reshuffle their chromosomes and, more recently, that chromosome-number abnormalities help transform normal cells into cancerous cells that metastasize and resist treatment.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic research studying the relationship between death and the two types of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) suggests that people who have these conditions die at a higher rate than people without MCI. The research was released today and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 66th Annual Meeting  in Philadelphia, April 26 to May 3, 2014. For the study, 862 people with thinking problems and 1,292 with no thinking problems between the ages of 70 and 89 were followed for nearly six years. Over the course of the study, 331 of the group with MCI and 224 of the group without MCI died. Those who had either type of MCI had an 80 percent higher death rate during the study than those without MCI.  People with MCI with no memory loss had more than twice the death rate during the study than those without MCI, while people with MCI with memory loss had a 68 percent higher death rate during the study than those without MCI.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Here are highlights from the April issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter. You may cite this publication as often as you wish. Reprinting is allowed for a fee. Mayo Clinic Health Letter attribution is required. Include the following subscription information as your editorial policies permit: Visit www.HealthLetter.MayoClinic.com or call toll-free for subscription information, 1-800-333-9037, extension 9771. Full newsletter text: Mayo Clinic Health Letter April 2014 (for journalists only). How the placebo effect enhances healing Researchers are working to better understand the placebo effect, how it works and how it can be harnessed to improve therapies. The April issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter covers what’s known about this phenomenon and how it may work to improve health. The placebo effect is most evident in medical research. It’s a person’s belief that an inactive treatment is working just as well as the presumed active therapy being studied. Well-intentioned medical advances, when compared to the placebo treatment, sometimes derive most of their benefit from positive expectations rather than the therapy itself.

Presentations at Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology ROCHESTER, Minn. — April 23, 2014 — Mayo Clinic ophthalmology researchers have found a likely indicator of Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy. Following up on a genome-wide association study, Keith Baratz, M.D., and others discovered no single genomic variant that caused Fuchs, but found that a repeated noncoding trinucleotide sequence correlated with the condition in patients 68 percent of the time. The findings will be presented on the afternoon of May 4 at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology annual conference in Orlando, Fla. (Poster 1003-A0392)

In recognition of National Child Abuse Prevention Month and to celebrate the recent accreditation by the National Children’s Alliance, the new Mayo Clinic Child and ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Acute respiratory distress syndrome is a leading cause of respiratory failure after surgery. Patients who develop the lung disorder postoperatively are at higher risk of dying in the hospital, and those who survive the syndrome may still bear its physical effects  years later.  A Mayo Clinic-led study is helping physicians better identify patients most at risk, the first step toward preventing this dangerous and costly surgical complication.  They found nine independent risk factors, including sepsis, high-risk aortic vascular surgery, high-risk cardiac surgery, emergency surgery, cirrhosis of the liver, and admission to the hospital from a location other than home, such as a nursing home. The findings are published in the journal Anesthesiology. “This is a very common reason for needing an extended course of breathing support after surgery, and approximately 20 to 25 percent of patients who develop the syndrome will die from it,” says first author Daryl Kor, M.D., a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist.  “It’s well-documented that those who develop this syndrome stay in intensive care longer and in the hospital longer, and the impact of the syndrome can persist for many years.”