Katie Eder

Sports medicine clinicians from the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), in New York City, report that platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections improve joint pain and function in patients with osteoarthritis, a leading cause of disability that affects more than 47 million people in the United States.

Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have deemed a new injectable hydrogel safe and effective for repairing tissue damage caused by myocardial infarction, providing a platform to bring the gel to clinical trials within the next year.

After finding abnormal elevations of cardiac inflammation in patients with depressive illness (DI), a psychiatrist at Loyola University Medical Center, in Maywood, Ill., has proposed a new subspecialty to diagnose and treat patients with both depression and cardiovascular disease (CVD).

Though original results of the five-year Spine Patient Outcomes Research Trial (SPORT) determined surgically-treated spinal stenosis (SpS) patients showed significant advantage in body pain and physical function after two years than their nonsurgically-treated counterparts, a subgroup analysis published in the Feb. 15 issue of Spine found patients who received epidural steroid injections (ESI) in the SPORT study exhibited a worse outcome through four years' follow-up, regardless of surgical or nonsurgical treatment.