Smart drug implant has batteries included

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 1 week (www.newscientist.com)

Implants that deliver a drug to just the right place in the body could become "biobatteries" that release the drug at exactly the right rate.

At present, it is difficult to control how quickly implants release their payload. The biobattery produces a current of a known strength, and it is this that controls the drug's release.

The smart implant is based on magnesium alloy stents that are being developed for surgeons to use as temporary splints to keep damaged blood vessels in shape while they heal

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Medicare will not cover stents for neck arteries

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.nytimes.com)

Heart stents made the news recently, but this article discusses stents that are placed in neck arteries to prevent stroke. The issue isn't whether or not they work but who will pay for them.

Dr. Barry T. Katzen, director of the Baptist Cardiac and Vascular Institute in Miami, says that this will actually help research: By linking their willingness to pay to the efficacy of clinical trials, he says, they will influence doctors to be more stringent with those trials.

He sure sounds as though he's making the best of it. Thoughts?

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Targeted stent use in clinical practice based on evidence from the BAsel Stent Cost Effectiveness Trial

amanda submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org)

"Patients with angioplasty of small vessels or bypass grafts seem to benefit from DES use, in long-term outcome, in contrast to patients with large native vessel stenting where there might even be late harm. Still, this hypothesis needs to be tested prospectively. "

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Outcomes of stenting after uncomplicated ureteroscopy: systematic review and meta-analysis

amber submitted, created time 1 year 10 months (www.bmj.com)

To investigate the potential beneficial and adverse effects of routine ureteric stent placement after ureteroscopy. All randomised are included controlled trials that reported various outcomes with or without stenting after ureteroscopy. Two reviewers independently extracted data and assessed quality. Meta-analyses used both fixed and random effects models with dichotomous data reported as relative risk and continuous data as a weighted mean difference with 95% confidence intervals

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