News Releases - July 2014 Archives

ROCHESTER, Minn. – Mayo Clinic will expand primary care services in south Rochester. Mayo Clinic will lease clinical space currently under construction at 4544 Canal Place Southeast within the Shoppes on Maine development. Construction is expected to be completed by the end of 2014. Patients will be seen at the new site in early 2015. “The south Rochester location is an investment in our patients’ health and well-being, and will provide greater access to Mayo Clinic care within the community,” says David Agerter, M.D., medical director, Mayo Clinic Employee and Community Health. “It's also in response to feedback from our employees and patients who have requested Mayo Clinic primary care services in this part of the city. This is part of a broader effort to make more Mayo Clinic services, both face-to-face and non-visit care, accessible and convenient to the community.”

ROCHESTER, Minn. — The benefits of medical imaging far outweigh the risks when children receive The Right Exam, ordered The Right Way, with The Right Radiation Dose. However, overuse and misuse of imaging change the benefit-risk ratio and Mayo Clinic is leading a collaborative effort to ensure a national protocol is put into action. The commentary, published online in the Journal of Patient Safety, calls for the American College of Radiology, the Joint Commission, the Intersociety Accreditation Commission, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to require three safety practices for accreditation of all American hospitals and advanced diagnostic imaging facilities. “No hospital or medical imaging facility in the country should be granted the privilege of imaging children unless it first meets fundamental safe practice performance measures,” says Stephen Swensen, M.D., lead author and radiologist, Mayo Clinic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW4abZkdQzo Sound bites with Dr. Swensen are available in downloads.

Online video lectures for medical professionals from Mayo Clinic ROCHESTER, Minn. – Mayo Clinic is now making its video education medical grand rounds lectures and clinical presentations on recent innovations in patient care, education and research accessible to other medical professionals in the new online medical professional video center. These lectures contain new practice procedures, treatment options and research covering a wide variety of specialties.For example, a video lecture on Choline C-11 treatment for recurrent prostate cancer describes the benefits to patients as well as the production, imaging and processing facilities necessary to provide the treatment. Another, fecal microbiota transplant, provides step-by-step details of how the procedure is completed so providers and patients can see the process from beginning to end.

Watch now LIVE 10 am ET Energy & Commerce Committee Hearing.   Principal Investigator and Director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCaTS), Sundeep Khosla, M.D.,is testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health as part of the Committee’s 21st Century Cures Initiative Wed., July 9, 2014. Dr. Khosla will focus his testimony on the need and opportunity to modernize clinical trials. “I applaud the Committee’s 21st Century Cures Initiative and, in particular, the Health Subcommittee’s focus on the clinical trial process,” says Dr. Khosla. “It is imperative that we streamline and modernize clinical trials’ processes to accelerate the speed of discovery to delivery of more effective, innovative and personalized treatments for patients.” In addition, Dr. Khosla commends the Committee’s attention to the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program. He continues, “The work of the CTSA program and its 62 sites is very important and offers great opportunity to speed translation and implementation of high priority clinical trials.” Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream MEDIA CONTACT: To interview Dr. Khosla about modernizing the clinical trial system, please contact Colette Gallagher, Mayo Clinic Public Affairs, 507-284-5005, newsbureau@mayo.edu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5im7vNnaCM ROCHESTER, Minn. — Seventy-five years ago, on July 4th 1939, baseball legend Lou Gehrig delivered the famous speech bidding farewell to the ballpark and his fans. Two weeks before Gehrig had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Accompanied by his wife, Eleanor, Lou left Mayo Clinic with the devastating diagnosis on June 20th 1939, a day after his 36th birthday. He died in June two years later, not quite 38 years old, of the rare neurological disease that would come to bear his name. MULTIMEDIA ALERT: Journalists, the video package and addition b-roll are available in the downloads. To read the video script click here. ALS is a type of progressive motor neuron disease that typically strikes at middle to later life and causes nerve cells in spinal cord, brain stem and brain to gradually break down and die. These nerve cells are responsible for muscle function so eventually, ALS can affect

Rochester, Minn. -- A new study by radiation oncologists at Mayo Clinic comparing the world’s literature on outcomes of proton beam therapy in the treatment of a variety of advanced head and neck cancers of the skull base compared to intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) has found that proton beam therapy significantly improved disease free survival and tumor control when compared to IMRT. The results appear in the journal Lancet Oncology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WCtOW_KOxk “We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to compare the clinical outcomes of patients treated with proton therapy with patients receiving photon IMRT,” says senior author Robert Foote, M.D., a radiation oncologist at Mayo Clinic. “Our findings suggest that the theoretical advantages of proton beam therapy may in fact be real.”

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A genomic analysis of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), the most common form of kidney cancer, from 72 patients has uncovered 31 genes that are key to development, growth and spread of the cancer, say researchers from Mayo Clinic in Florida. Eight of these genes had not been previously linked to kidney cancer, and six other genes were never known to be involved in any form of cancer. http://youtu.be/vGxDshbW0LU   Their study, in the journal Oncotarget, is the most extensive analysis to date of gene expression’s role in ccRCC tumor growth and metastasis. The ccRCC subtype accounts for 80 percent of all kidney cancer cases.