Gale Scott

It's been nearly 3 years since Eduardo Rodriguez, MD, performed the most comprehensive face transplant ever done, a procedure that gave a Virginia man a new face, jaws, teeth, and tongue. Now NYU Langone Medical Center's chair of the Department of Plastic Surgery and Director of the Institute of Plastic Surgery and Helen L. Kimmel professor of reconstructive plastic surgery, Rodriguez is poised to do New York's first face transplant. He's just waiting for the phone to ring with news that a donor has been found.

By 2050, the US Census Bureau predicts half the US population will be people of color. For dermatologist Nada Elbuluk, assistant professor at NYU Langone's Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology that's great news.

Treating acute pulmonary embolism patients with surgery to remove the clot fell out of favor in the 1950s because of high mortality rates. But safety seems to have improved dramatically-at least at one health care system. In a study published in the Texas Heart Institute Journal Alan Hartman, MD chair of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery at the North Shore-LIJ health system report on a retrospective review of 96 patients at the NY system.

Genetics may hold the key to a disfiguring and disabling --but surgically treatable-set of birth anomalies, a condition known as craniosynostosis. The chief of pediatric plastic surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, David Staffenberg, MD said craniosynostosis, a problem in which the bones of a newborn's skull fuse prematurely, appears to usually be related to a spontaneous mutation. The condition occurs in 1 of every 2,000 births, he sai

Studying the possible causes of inherited arrythmias is difficult using genetically altered mice or cultured human cells. But in a research breakthrough, doctors at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan have come up with a genetically engineered pig. Since pig hearts function much like those of humans, that has made their work much more effective, says David S. Park, MD, PhD an assistant professor of cardiology at NYU Langone.

Fears about toxic mold have spawned unqualified and useless testing, both of buildings and people, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. In a case history of an incident last year, Melody Kawamoto and Elena Page MD describe a costly case that yielded no proof of mold.

More than 13,000 US residents froze to death from 2003 to 2013, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC.) The CDC has a name for that, environmental hypothermia.In an attempt to determine just how common that is in the US, CDC researcher Jon Meiman, MD and colleagues looked at such deaths. The team also did a more focused study on environmental hypothermia deaths in Wisconsin in 2014, after a period of record low temperatures there from Jan. 1 to April 1, 2014.

Bronx researchers believe they may have solved part of the mystery of why older mothers have a higher risk of having Down syndrome babies.

The Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery plans to issue new guidelines for treatment of ischemic stroke, its president-elect said. Donald Frei, MD, a Denver-based neurosurgeon, said that based on the overwhelmingly positive results of 3 studies, intravascular thrombectomy is the best treatment for many patients with major ischemic strokes.

Patients who got twice as much rehabilitative care after a stroke did no better than peers who got usual therapy, a multi-center trial called ICARE found.

In the MR CLEAN trials, physicians were to decide whether patients should be immobilized with general anesthesia or given local anesthesia. Presenting another look-back at MR CLEAN trial data at the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference in Nashville, Tenn. on Feb. 13, Olvert Berkhemer, MD and colleagues said their center's strong preference is for local anesthesia.

The midnight hour has come and gone for 2015 Affordable Care Act (ACA) signup. But due to technical problems with its website HealthCare.gov, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the US Health and Human Services Department (HHS) today announced a week-long extension for enrollment. Most states have also issued extensions on their state-run signup sites, citing both extreme weather and high traffic volume on their websites.

Dehydrated stroke patients tend to do worse than those who are hydrated, a Johns Hopkins team found. The next question is whether all such ischemic stroke patients should get fluids when they arrive at the hospital, contrary to current recommendations.

Patients who have strokes during their sleep pose a treatment conundrum. Since it is hard to assess when the stroke happened, physicians may not know whether to administer clot-busting tPA. The drug is thought to have a therapeutic window of 3 hours. A Texas study suggests tPA is safe for these patients even if the 3-hr window has closed.

In a new presentation on the game-changing trial of neurological interventions for stroke patients, a MR CLEAN researcher crunched the numbers on time-to-reperfusion and patient outcomes.

It may be common sense that parents of children who have a stroke are likely to be upset and worried, but a new study from Boston Children's Hospital shows that parental stress often rises to the level of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The implication for clinicians is that these parents need treatment too-and that their PTSD anxiety may cause them to avoid having more to do with the medical profession, which could have a negative impact on kids' care.

Stroke, particularly in younger people, could be a sign of undetected cancer, a Minnesota research team reports.

Countering the argument that hypertension is being overtreated, a University of Miami-Columbia University study found that changing the definition of high blood pressure would be a bad idea.

It's too soon to say whether Vitamin D is a player or just a bystander in the assault on the brain during a stroke, but low levels of the supplement are associated with greater tissue damage in stroke patients, a University of Massachusetts Medical School team found. Reporting at the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference in Nashville, Tenn., Nils Henninger, MD said low vitamin D level predicts more severe strokes and poorer health afterwards.

Surviving a stroke but driving a month afterwards could mean a higher chance of causing a motor vehicle accident, two small Canadian studies have found. In research presented at the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference in Nashville, Tenn, two graduate students reported on serious driving errors patients made post-stroke. They were tested on driving simulators.

Quickly removing clots inside the arteries of patients who have suffered ischemic strokes works far better than simply trying to dissolve the obstructions with drugs like tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) a 22-center study of 316 such patients found. The trial was called ESCAPE, which stands for Endovascular treatment for Small Core and Anterior circulation Proximal occlusion with Emphasis on minimizing CT to recanalization time

Interventional neurology is having a good run at the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference. In addition to the favorable results of the trial known as ESCAPE, in which adding clot removal (endovascular thrombectomy) to clot dissolving therapy showed dramatic outcomes, a related study called EXTEND-IA also showed benefits for stroke patients. A third study known as SWIFT PRIME reached similar conclusions.

Reports of measles cases in a suburban Illinois infant care center have added to concerns the preventable but highly contagious illness is spreading.

Making good on a promise to come up with a Republican version of a healthcare reform plan, three prominent Republicans have released their version of the Affordable Care Act, which they are calling the Patient Choice Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment Act. It would allow people to refuse to purchase coverage.

Mentally competent patients with terminal illnesses have the right to physician assistance in ending their lives, Canada's top court has ruled. The justices overruled a lower court's decision in case known as Carter v. Canada, upholding Canada's ban on the practice. One of the plaintiffs in that case was a terminally ill woman who did not live to see the successful appeal. She died after traveling to Switzerland at age 89 to get physician help in ending her life.

Legal restrictions on how long patients must wait to resume driving a motor vehicle after they have had an epileptic seizure are all over the map. In the US some states have no laws, some set 3 months, others 2 years. UK researchers present post-seizure data that could be used to offer a more rational approach.

A law outlawing hand-written and phoned-in prescriptions is due to take effect in NY March 17. The American Medical Association's president today wrote NY officials saying he agreed with the Medical Society of the State of New York that the measure should be delayed.

Epilepsy patients who are not responding to anti-epileptic drugs and who have antibodies binding neural antigens may benefit from immunotherapy. Reporting in the European Journal of Immunology Raffaele Iorio and colleagues at the Institute of Neurology, Catholic University in Rome, Italy detailed their findings.

Physicians treating patients with fever, aching joints, and other viral symptoms might want to ask about patients' travel history. If these patients have been to the Caribbean or other places with hot climates they could be infected with Chikungunya virus, known also as CHIK-V. The disease has been reported in all but 3 US states.

Five cases of measles in a suburban Illinois infant care center have added to concerns the preventable but highly contagious illness is spreading. The children, all under 12 months old, are too young to be vaccinated, but they appear to have contracted the illness from an unvaccinated adult. Meanwhile, bucking a trend, a New York legislator wants to make philosophical objections to mandatory vaccination legal in that state.