Gale Scott

A study by a Manhattan plastic surgeon found that while patients thought they looked much younger after a facelift, their self esteem tended to drop if had been relatively high before the surgery. It improved if self-esteem was low prior to surgery.

Animal studies have shown that young animals subjected to anesthesia show signs of neurological impairment as they grow. What about human infants? An Australia study offers new evidence that less than an hour of general anesthesia seems not to harm children.

A new analysis of 17 studies of dietary interventions to promote weight loss and a cardiac benefit found that low-carb diets "were 98 percent more likely to lower the risks of heart attack or stroke" in people who are overweight.

The US Preventive Services Task Force's updated recommendations on screening for diabetes type 2 have the American Medical Association's (AMA) president fuming.

AbbVie's hepatitis C antivirals now come with a warning. In a Q&A with MD Magazine, Barry Bernstein, MD, the company's vice president for infectious disease product development, discusses the ramifications. It's not just AbbVie, he says, more post-market reports on other companies drugs are likely coming.

Drug kills parasites but too late to prevent heart myopathy in Chagas Disease.

Age-standardized death rates are continuing to drop in the United States

A Pennsylvania hospital has set up a dedicated website and toll-free phone line to quell patients' fears after announcing four heart surgery patients were discovered to have died apparently from bacterially contaminated medical devices.

Younger women with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) were less likely to receive life-saving angioplasty and stenting than men, researchers reported today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. These female patients also had longer hospital stays and higher rates of in-hospital mortality.

Raised lesions of dysplatic Barrett's esophagus (BE) are treated with endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) before ablation. But the procedure causes bleeding in 10% of cases.Mayo Clinic researchers said they found a way to reduce those adverse events.

Treatment with angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI) and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARB) in patients with IBD is associated with more hospitalizations, operations, and corticosteroid use.

Patients with pancreatic cancer get surgery and other treatment at an earlier stage, but five-year survival has not improved.

Getting a liver transplant for primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) comes with an increased chance of getting inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) researchers reported at the American College of Gastroenterology Scientific Meeting in Honolulu, Oct. 16 to 21.

Could treating patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) be as simple as changing their diet?

Fecal micriobiota transplant has been moving into mainstream medicine even without any randomonized placebo controlled trials showing it works for treating recurrent C. difficile infection. Now a long-awaited trial confirms that it works.

Altered gut microbes are implicated in an increased susceptibility to C. difficile infection, researchers reported at the American College of Gastroenterology Scientific Meeting in Honolulu.

Some microbes are more associated with specific irritable bowel disease symptoms than others, researchers reporting at the American College of Gastroenterology Scientic Meeting reported.

Treatments for irritable bowel system are proliferating. In addition to new drugs, more drug candidates are entering the approval pipeline. Even as physicians await these new products, their patients are getting into the act by doing internet research and other reading-and tv watching-that has them trying unproven remedies with mixed results.

The American College of Gastroenterology is not optimistic that its staff's lobbying efforts to head off a reduction in the amount Medicare will reimburse physicians for performing a colonoscopy will succeed.

Maintenance of certification (MOC) is a touchy issue for the profession of gastroenterology. Outgoing president of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Stephen Hanauer, MD, has assured members that the organization is confident it has reached an agreement with the ABIM that will "put on hold some of the more burdensome aspects of the 'maintenance' process."

Pancreatic cancer is a difficult disease to treat successfully. For urban African Americans, that picture may be even worse, a Georgia researcher and colleagues found. Their report, subtitled "Too Young, Too Late" was presented today at the American College of Gastroenterology Scientific Meeting in Honolulu.

The numbers are in on studies of a new diagnostic called PancraGen's ability to distinguish pancreatic malignancies from other findings in pancreatic cysts.

The effective arsenal of antivirals for hepatitis C just keeps getting bigger and better. Speaking at the American College of Gastroenterology meeting in Honolulu, experts are anticipating new drugs that will work for all six hepatitis virus genotypes. Meanwhile, matching patients to drugs can be complicated.

Pennies, chicken bones, and dishwasher cleaning powders. Gastroenterologists who work at hospitals are likely to get called in when people either accidentally or purposefully swallow something they should not. At the American College of Gastroenterology Annual Scientific Meeting in Honolulu, a physician at NYU Langone Medical Center offered a treatment primer.

All physicians want to deliver quality care. But do the checklists required to measure quality really add up to giving patients the results they want? As the American College of Gastroenterology Annual Scientific Meeting gets underway in Honolulu, the question came up in the context of managing irritable bowel disease.

Pancreatic cancer is hard to cure and even diagnosing it is challenging. Among the eagerly awaiting research topics to be presented at the American College of Gastroenterology Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii are reports on new developments in detecting malignancies.

Just in time for flu season, a California study shows that physicians are all too willing to work while they themselves are ill.

Substrate-based ablation (in which all damaged areas of the lower heart muscle are treated) has advantages over ablation of clinical ventricular tachycardia (in which the origin of the abnormal rhythm is pinpointed, then the target tissue is scarred with electrical current). Researchers at Montefiore Einstein Center for Heart and Vascular Care report on a study.