Investigators at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine describe the basis for developing a biological interface that could link a patient’s nervous system to a thought-driven artificial limb. Their conceptual framework – which brings together years of spinal-cord injury research – is published in the January issue of Neurosurgery.

“We’re at a junction now of developing a new approach for a brain-machine interface,” says senior author Douglas H. Smith, MD, Professor of Neurosurgery and Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at Penn. “The nervous system will certainly rebel if you place hard or sharp electrodes into it to record signals. However, the nervous system can be tricked to accept an interface letting it do what it likes – assimilating new nerve cells into its own network”.

To develop the next generation of prosthetics the idea is to use regions of undamaged nervous tissue to provide command signals to drive a device, such as an artificial limb. The challenge is for a prosthesis to perform naturally, relaying two-way communication with the patient’s brain. For example, the patient’s thoughts could convert nerve signals into movements of a prosthetic, while sensory stimuli, such as temperature or pressure provides feedback to adapt the movements.

The central feature of the proposed interface is the ability to create transplantable living nervous tissue already coupled to electrodes. Like an extension cord, of sorts, the non-electrode end of the lab-grown nervous tissue could integrate with a patient’s nerve, relaying the signals to and from the electrode side, in turn connected to an electronic device.

This system may one day be able to return function to people who have been paralyzed by a spinal-cord injury, lost a limb, or in other ways. “Whether it is a prosthetic device or a disabled body function, the mind could regain control,” says Smith.

To create the interface, the team used a newly developed process of stretch growth of nerve fibers called axons, previously pioneered in Smith’s lab. Two adjacent plates of neurons are grown in a bioreactor. Axons sprout out to connect the neuron populations on each plate. The plates are then slowly pulled apart over a series of days, aided by a precise computer-controlled motor system, until they reached a desired length.

For the interface, one of the plates is an electrical microchip. Because Smith and his team have shown that stretch-grown axons can transmit active electrical signals, they propose that the nervous-tissue interface – through the microchip – could detect and record real-time signals conducted down the nerve and stimulate the sensory signals back through the axons.

In another study, Smith and colleagues showed that these stretch-grown axons could grow when transplanted into a rat model of spinal-cord damage. The team is now is the midst of studies measuring neuronal electrical activity across newly engineered nerve bridges and the restoration of motor activity in experimental animals.

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Co-authors are Niranjan Kameswaran, and Eric L. Zager, all from Penn and Bryan J. Pfister, New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, NJ), and Jason Huang at the University of Rochester, N.Y. This release and a related image can be viewed at pennhealth/news.

PENN Medicine is a $2.9 billion enterprise dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and high-quality patient care. PENN Medicine consists of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Penn’s School of Medicine is ranked #2 in the nation for receipt of NIH research funds; and ranked #3 in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s most recent ranking of top research-oriented medical schools. Supporting 1,400 fulltime faculty and 700 students, the School of Medicine is recognized worldwide for its superior education and training of the next generation of physician-scientists and leaders of academic medicine.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System includes three hospitals, all of which have received numerous national patient-care honors [Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital; and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center]; a faculty practice plan; a primary-care provider network; two multispecialty satellite facilities; and home care and hospice.

Contact: Karen Kreeger

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Continue reading →

Masters in Nursing is a Guide to accredited programs offering a Masters
Degree in Nursing. It was built because prospective students often have
questions about the various Graduate Degrees offered in Nursing.

Existing lists on the internet were not comprehensive, easy to find, and
many sites had outdated information and links. The newly completed site
is upgraded and changed on a consistent basis with information garnered
from Nursing Professors and Schools in the United States.

It is a one
page alphabetical site that is very easy to read and use. It lists every
accredited school that offers a Masters Degree in Nursing as well as a
short description for each school to help guide future students in their
search.

The website is expected to save time and be a benefit to future
nursing students. It is an individual effort, not official, and not
sponsored by any association or program.

Masters in Nursing Continue reading →

Why do some people get fat even when they eat relatively little? What creates that irresistible urge for a bag of potato chips or a hunk of chocolate cake, as opposed to a nice crisp apple? Can food urges be irresistible?

Physiologists are unraveling the role that your hormones and brain play in urging you to eat more than you should. Some people’s hormones may be signaling their brains to send messages like “Eat a lot now,” and “Go for the fat and sugar.”

Four physiologists will clarify the latest research on the brain’s role in obesity, during the symposium, “Obesity and the Central Nervous System.” The symposium will take place at the 120th annual meeting of The American Physiological Society (APS), which coincides with Experimental Biology 2007. The session will be held at 10:30 a.m., Monday, April 30 in Room 146B of the Washington Convention Center and is cosponsored by the London-based Journal of Physiology.

The body has a physiological predisposition to balance its energy needs with its desire for food. The hormones and brain communicate to determine when an individual is full, with the brain issuing the signal that says “Stop eating” with the help of information it receives from hormones. But prolonged food shortages, chronic stress, prenatal nutrition, early exercise patterns and other factors can affect how the brain orchestrates this balance. In places where food is scarce, the brain may encourage higher consumption, especially of high fat and sugary foods, even when the food supply becomes more abundant. That’s an adaptive response that helps the body weather periods of food shortages.

But the brain may also respond to stress in the same way, encouraging the intake of high fat and sugary foods – comfort foods – that can result in obesity that is nearly impossible to reverse.

“Why some of us get fat and what we can do it about it,” is the question Barry E. Levin, M.D., a professor at the New Jersey Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, East Orange, N.J., will address.

The hormones leptin and insulin inhibit the development of obesity when consumption of fat and calories increases. Some people respond very well to these hormones and they don’t gain weight during these bouts of overeating. But others are less responsive to leptin and insulin, which makes them more at risk to become obese. Why? It appears that the brain can be programmed to accept a higher body weight by early-life factors, including the environment of the womb in late pregnancy and the individual’s activity level in early life. These early factors may alter development of brain pathways which regulate energy homeostasis (balance). Once the tendency to obesity develops, it can be nearly impossible to reverse weight gains. However, these early factors can be manipulated to provide a more desirable outcome and may hold promise for prevention of obesity in human beings.

“Glucocorticoids and insulin both modulate caloric intake through actions on the brain,” is the topic for Mary F. Dallman, Ph.D., a professor at the University of California in San Francisco. Fat that develops in the abdomen to form a pot belly and thick waist has been associated with more negative health outcomes (heart disease, for example) than fat that accumulates in other areas of the body, such as the hips. Glucocorticoids, a group of steroid hormones that includes cortisol, activate a physiological process in the brain that matches the desire for food with physiological need. Under conditions of inadequate food or chronic stress, glucocorticoids prompt a craving for “comfort” foods – foods high in sugar or fat. Glucocorticoids and insulin act to create abdominal fat. That’s a good way to store energy during food shortages but it’s also a way to gain too much abdominal fat when food is readily available.

Gregory Morton, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at Harborview Medical Center at the University of Washington, Seattle will give a talk entitled “Hypothalamic leptin regulation of energy homeostasis and glucose metabolism.” Insulin and leptin are hormones that circulate in proportion to body fat stores. They interact with receptors in key areas of the brain, including in the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus, to regulate food intake and glucose metabolism. Morton and his colleagues have recently shown that leptin signaling selectively in this brain area is sufficient to reduce food intake and body weight and to improve insulin sensitivity. These findings indicate that leptin signaling in the arcuate nucleus is an important determinant of both energy homeostasis and glucose metabolism.

Steven B.Heymsfield, M.D., is the executive director of clinical research and metabolism at Merck & Co., Inc., in Rahway, New Jersey. In his talk, “Development of an NPY5 receptor antagonist for weight loss” he will review the development of MK-0557, a drug designed to decrease food intake. MK-0557 blocks the effects of neuropeptide Y 5 (NPY5), which is involved in food intake regulation. Merck launched an intensive program leading to discovery of MK-0557 and then took it through a series of investigations that supported safety and effectiveness. A short-term weight loss study led to a large long-term series of clinical trials. Many lessons in neurobiology and drug development were learned from this progression of studies, the topic of the lecture.

Physiology is the study of how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function to create health or disease. The American Physiological Society has been an integral part of this scientific discovery process since it was established in 1887.

The American Physiological Society (APS) has been an integral part of the scientific discovery process since it was established in 1887. Physiology is the study of how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function to create health or disease.

www.The-APS

The APS annual meeting is part of the Experimental Biology 2007 (EB ’07) gathering and is being held April 28 – May 2, 2007 at the Washington, DC Convention Center. Continue reading →

Women and girls in the United States consider and engage in suicidal behavior more often than men and boys, but die of suicide at lower rate – a gender paradox enabled by U.S. cultural norms of gender and suicidal behavior, according to a psychologist who spoke at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

“Everywhere, suicidal behavior is culturally scripted,” said Silvia S. Canetto, PhD, of Colorado State University. “Women and men adopt the self-destructive behaviors that are expected of them within their cultures.”

While the gender paradox of suicidal behavior is common, particularly in industrialized countries, it is not universal, she said. In China, for example, women die of suicide at higher rates than men. In Finland and Ireland, men and women engage in nonfatal suicidal behavior at similar rates. There are more exceptions to the gender paradox of suicidal behavior when one examines female/male patterns of suicidality by age or culture, she said.

In some cultures, particularly in industrialized countries, such as the United States and Canada, suicide is considered a masculine act and an “unnatural” behavior for women, Canetto said at a symposium entitled “New Perspectives on Suicide Theory, Research and Prevention.”

“In these countries, the dominant view is that `successful, completed’ suicide is the masculine way to do suicide. In the U.S., women who kill themselves are considered more deviant than men. By contrast, in other cultures, killing oneself is considered feminine behavior (and is more common in women),” she said, citing, among others, the Aguaruna people of Peru, who view suicide as an indication of a feminine inability to control strong emotions. Yet in other cultures, men’s and women’s suicidal behavior is similar. For example, in Sri Lanka, the same types of issues (problems with spouses, parents or in-laws) are typically associated with both women’s and men’s suicides.

“A broad cultural perspective shows that women and men do not consistently differ in terms of the kinds of suicidal behavior they engage in, or with regard to the circumstances or the motives of their suicidal behavior,” she said. “When women and men differ with regard to some dimensions of suicidal behavior, the meaning and salience of these differences vary from one social group to another, one culture to another, one historical period to another, depending on local scripts of gender and suicidal behavior.” The cultural variability in patterns and scripts of women’s and men’s suicidal behavior calls for “culturally situated suicidality research and prevention,” Canetto said.

At the same symposium, James L. Werth Jr., PhD, of Radford University, discussed reasons why the suicide rate in rural America is consistently higher than it is in urban areas. In addition to general suicide risk factors, such as mental illness, a family history of suicide and feelings of hopelessness, rural residents may be more isolated, be less willing to ask for help and have increased access to lethal means such as guns and pesticides, he said.

“County by county or state by state, the top areas in terms of suicide are rural,” Werth said. “The top five states are Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, Wyoming and Nevada, whereas D.C., New Jersey, New York Connecticut and Massachusetts have the lowest rates.”

Some of the possible contributing factors to the higher rates in rural America are more poverty, higher unemployment and lack of access to treatment resources, Werth said. “People are not going to drive five hours to visit a counselor,” he said.

In suggesting possible solutions to the rural suicide rate, Werth said greater access to broadband would help by increasing access to resources, as will integration of mental health practitioners into primary care.

“Even though people live farther apart, there may be stronger connections – they need to rely on one another,” he said. “There may be longstanding relationships among families and more religiosity …. we need to build on those existing qualities and strengths and beliefs.”

Notes:
Symposium: “New Perspectives on Suicide Theory, Research, and Prevention”
Session: 1219, Aug. 12, San Diego Convention Center, Mezzanine Level, Room 16A
Presentation: “Suicidal Behavior Around the World: Why Gender Matters,”
Silvia Sara Canetto, PhD, Colorado State University, USA
Presentation: “Suicide in Rural Areas,” James L. Werth, PhD, Radford University

Source:
Kim I. Mills
American Psychological Association Continue reading →

In the October15th issue of G&D, Dr. Fen-Biao Gao and colleagues at UCSF report that microRNA-9a (mir-9a) regulates neural development in the fruit fly, Drosophila. Using loss-of-function analysis, Dr. Gao and colleagues demonstrate that mir-9a is required for the precise production of sensory organ precursor cells in the Drosophila peripheral nervous system (PNS). mir-9a-mutant embryos form additional PNS neurons, and mutant adults wings display extra sensory bristles. The researchers show that mir-9a post-transcriptionally represses the transcription factor, Senseless, to regulate the precise number of neuronal precursor cells in Drosophila embryos and adults. “miR-9a is 100% conserved from flies to humans at the nucleotide sequence level and is highly expressed in fetal brains, suggesting that a similar mechanism may operate in mammalian neurogenesis as well,” explains Dr. Gao.

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Contact: Heather Cosel
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Continue reading →

The anatomy of migraine – a close look at the neurobiology of the disease- focuses on the thalamus, the area of the brain that is involved in sensory perception and regulation of motor functions, in one a major session of the 53rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Headache Society meeting here this week.

The session examines the role of the thalamus in regulating pain transmission in migraine, a new understanding of the anatomy of migraine. It will be at 3:15 pm, Thursday, June 3, and is chaired by Michael A. Moskowitz, MD, of the Neuroscience Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and R. Allan Purdy, MD, who is scientific chair of this year’s meeting

“Elegant basic science and clinical experiments have recently demonstrated that the thalamus acts as a sort of railway station and integration center for the transmission of migraine pain,” Dr. Purdy said. “An impulse comes into the ‘station’ and the thalamus regulates how it will be transmitted to the cortex, and the extent to which it is made worse by environmental stimuli, such as light.” We are beginning to understand that the thalamus may be a target for current and future migraine treatments

In a study of blind people, Rami Burstein, professor of anesthesia and critical care medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, looked at two groups of blind patients who suffer migraine headaches – the first group included patients totally blind due to eye diseases such as retinal cancer and glaucoma and the second group patients who were legally blind due to retinal degenerative diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa. Patients in the first group were unable to see images or to sense light and therefore could not maintain normal sleep-wake cycles. Patients in the second group described intensified pain when they were exposed to light, in particular to blue wavelengths.

“This suggested to us that the mechanism of photophobia must involve the optic nerve, because in totally blind individuals, the optic nerve does not carry light signals to the brain,” Dr. Burstein said.

Migraine scientists meeting this week are considering this subject, among others, at the annual scientific conference of the American Headache Society.

Source:
Jamie Evans

MBooth & Associates Continue reading →

Compassion. Self-understanding. Morality. Emotional stability. These words would seem to describe at least some of the universal traits attributed to wisdom, each of them broadly recognized and valued. In fact, there is no enduring, consistent definition of what it means exactly to be wise. It is a virtue widely treasured but essentially unexplained, a timeless subject only now attracting rigorous, scientific scrutiny.

In 2009, Dilip V. Jeste, MD, and Thomas W. Meeks, MD, both professors in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego and researchers at the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging, published a paper proposing that sagacity might have a neurobiological basis.

In other words, that wisdom is wired.

In the June issue of The Gerontologist and currently online, Jeste and Meeks go further, attempting to identify the central, unifying elements that define wisdom. With colleagues from four other universities, Jeste and Meeks asked a group of international experts to characterize the traits of wisdom, intelligence and spirituality – and measure how each trait is either similar to or different from the others.

“There are several major definitions of wisdom, but no single definition that is all-inclusive and embraces every important aspect of wisdom,” said Jeste, who is the Estelle and Edgar Levi Chair in Aging, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and chief of geriatric psychiatry at UC San Diego. “Intelligence and spirituality share features with wisdom, but they are not the same thing. One can be intelligent, yet lack practical knowledge. Spirituality is often associated with age, like wisdom, but most researchers tend to define wisdom in secular terms, not spiritual.”

The research consisted of a two-part survey and a questionnaire comprised of 53 statements related to the concepts of wisdom, intelligence and spirituality. Fifty-seven experts were identified and contacted by email; 30 responded.

Phase 1 of the survey revealed significant group differences among the concepts on 49 of 53 statements. Wisdom differed from intelligence on 46 of 49 items, and from spirituality on 31 items.

In Phase 2, the definition of wisdom was further refined by focusing upon 12 items from the Phase 1 results. Most of the experts, Jeste and Meeks said, agreed that wisdom could be characterized thus:
It is uniquely human.
It is a form of advanced cognitive and emotional development that is experience-driven.
It is a personal quality, albeit rare.
It can be learned, increases with age and can be measured.
It is probably not enhanced by taking medication.

The survey was conducted using the Delphi method, developed by the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and based on the principle that forecasts from a structured group of experts are more accurate than those from unstructured groups or individuals. The paper’s authors identified 60 recognized experts on wisdom in the world, focusing upon those outside their own institutions. The nominees were required to have at least two peer-reviewed publications on wisdom or spirituality, though the number of total publications was not the sole criterion for selection.

The survey asked participating experts to rate the relevance and importance of six statements (i.e. “The concept can be applied to human beings.”), based upon their knowledge of empirical evidence, to the concepts of intelligence, wisdom and spirituality. The rating scale ranged from 1 (definitely not) to 9 (definitely so). The experts were then asked to rate the importance of 47 components, such as altruism, practical life skills, sense of humor, realism, willingness to forgive others and self-esteem, to the concepts of wisdom, intelligence and spirituality.

“One survey, of course, cannot fully and completely define wisdom,” said Jeste. “The value here is that there was considerable agreement among experts that wisdom is indeed a distinct entity with a number of characteristic qualities. The data from our research should help in designing future empirical studies on wisdom.”

Co-authors of the paper, with Jeste and Meeks, were Monika Ardelt, PhD, of the department of sociology and criminology & law at the University of Florida, Gainesville; Dan Blazer, MD, PhD, MPH, of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University in Durham, N.C.; Helena C. Kraemer, PhD, of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Ca.; and George Vaillant, MD, of the department of psychiatry at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass.

Source:
University of California – San Diego

Continue reading →

Reacting to the Government decision to drop key amendments to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that would lead to the criminalisation of sex workers Dr Peter Carter, RCN General Secretary & Chief Executive said;

“We welcome the removal of these amendments, which would have further criminalised some of the most vulnerable, stigmatised and marginalised people in our society.

“Criminalisation would have driven underground those in need of properly funded and staffed healthcare support. We now hope this is the end of legislation that seeks to further criminalise sex workers. We now urge the Government to look at improving the healthcare and well-being of these workers and begin to provide pathways out for these men and women.”

Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is the voice of nursing across the UK and is the largest professional union of nursing staff in the world. The RCN promotes the interest of nurses and patients on a wide range of issues and helps shape healthcare policy by working closely with the UK Government and other national and international institutions, trade unions, professional bodies and voluntary organisations.

Royal College of Nursing Continue reading →

Despite hundreds of families being told their children have peanut allergies every year, many of the children may be able to eat peanuts safely, a study by researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Sydney Children’s Hospital has found.

Peanut allergies occur in one in 200 infants, according to the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy.

“This is a really important finding,” said Dr Brynn Wainstein, a Sydney Children’s Hospital immunologist and MD candidate at UNSW.

“Because peanut allergies are potentially serious, requiring all sorts of restrictions, families can become very anxious when in fact, some of these families may be worrying unnecessarily,” Dr Wainstein said.

The study, published in the journal Pediatric Allergy and Immunology, involved 84 children with a positive result to a peanut skin-prick-test.

If a child is potentially allergic to peanut, he or she will get a hive as a result of the peanut skin-prick-test. Allergists measure the size of the hive in millimetres.

In this study, a third of the children with a hive of eight millimetres – which has been found elsewhere to be predictive of having peanut allergy – were found not to be allergic to peanuts when they took a peanut challenge. A challenge involves eating peanuts in a hospital environment.

“Diagnostic tests for peanut allergy have poor sensitivity and specificity,” the paper concludes. “Previously described diagnostic cut-off levels do not have general applicability.”

Reasons for this may include variables such as the equipment used and the pressure administered by the practitioner during a skin prick test.

“There is a population of children who have never eaten peanuts – or worse, those that eat them everyday, then have a positive peanut skin test and are told not to eat them,” said Dr Wainstein.

Dr Wainstein said many children who have never eaten peanuts and are found to have a positive peanut skin test are probably NOT allergic to peanut and will need a peanut challenge to determine if they are allergic.

“If the child is able to tolerate normal amounts of peanut every day then the result of any peanut allergy test is irrelevant.”

Allergy practitioners may need to interpret results of allergy tests in the context of their own practices, the researchers found.

“If there is a positive result, people need to ask whether it might be worth a peanut challenge in a hospital environment, especially if their child has never had an allergic reaction to peanut before,” Dr Wainstein said.

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The co-authors of the report are Dr Anthony Yee, Donna Jelley and Mary Ziegler, all from the Sydney Children’s Hospital and Associate Professor John Ziegler, a UNSW conjoint academic in the School of Women’s and Children’s Health, at the Sydney Children’s Hospital.

Contact: Susi Hamilton

University of New South Wales Continue reading →

Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE: MDT) announced its schedule of activities for Cardiostim 2008 – 16th World Congress in Cardiac Electrophysiology and Cardiac Techniques, being held June 18-21, 2008. Media and physician attendees are invited to the following:

- A symposium on REVERSE (Resynchronization Reverses Remodeling in Systolic Left Ventricular Dysfunction), including the first look at 18-month European data, will be held from 2-3:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 18, in Room Athena at the Acropolis Convention Center. REVERSE is the first large-scale, global, randomized, double-blind trial to evaluate cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) in asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic heart failure patients (NYHA Class I, II). CRT is investigational in the United States for this patient population.

- ADVANCE CRT-D (ATP Delivery for Painless ICD Therapy) is an international, prospective, randomized, controlled, single-blind trial to compare the safety and efficacy of anti-tachycardia pacing simultaneously delivered from the right and left ventricles (lower chambers of the heart, also known as Bi-ventricular delivery) vs. conventional right ventricular delivery. Data on ADVANCE CRT-D will be presented at 11:20 a.m. Thursday, June 19, in Room Thalie 3.2.

- RELEVANT is a prospective, controlled, parallel, multicenter trial investigating the effectiveness and safety of simplified programming for biventricular defibrillators (CRT-D) in patients with non-ischemic heart failure and a primary prevention ICD indication. Data on RELEVANT will be presented at 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 18, in Room 1.4.

Further, Medtronic announces that enrollments in its Sense-HF (Sensitivity of the InSync Sentry OptiVol Feature for the Prediction of Heart Failure) trial will be completed by the end of June 2008. Sense-HF is a prospective, observational, multicenter, event-driven, international study to evaluate the sensitivity and positive predictive value of Medtronic’s proprietary OptiVol® Fluid Trend data in predicting heart failure-related hospitalizations and health care utilizations associated with the signs and symptoms of worsening heart failure.

Medtronic also is supporting the following Scientific Sessions:

Wednesday, June 18

- Product Performance: Tracking, Transparency and Truth, from 2-3:30 p.m. in Room 1.4, chaired by Dr. M. Santini and Dr. E. Prystowsky
- CareLink: Prime Time for Need-Based Care, from 4-5:30 p.m. in Room Calliope 3.5, chaired by Dr. J. Morgan and Dr. P. Geelen

Thursday, June 19

- The Future of Stimulation Therapy, from 9-10:30 a.m. in Room 1.2, chaired by Dr. A. Proclemer and Dr. L. Mont
- Innovative ICD Solutions for Primary Prevention Patients, from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in Room Thalie 3.2, chaired by Dr. D. Andresen and Dr. P. Mabo
- CRT Therapy: Getting the Best Outcome for Patients Through Optimization, from 4-5:30 p.m. in Room Iris 1.6, by Dr. M. Lunati and Dr. P. Delnoy

Friday, June 20

- Evidence in CRT: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?, from 9-10:30 a.m. in Room Iris 1.6, chaired by Dr. P. Ritter and Dr. A. Buxton

- Implantable Cardiac Monitors: Symptoms Do Not Tell the Full Story, from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in Room Calliope 3.5, chaired by Dr. H. Heidbuchel and Dr. R. Sutton

All presentation times are local to Nice, France.

In addition to attending these data presentations and other educational and scientific sessions, Cardiostim attendees are encouraged to visit the Medtronic exhibit, composed of a Therapy area (B20), a Diagnostics and Monitoring area (A8), CareLink Lounge (B7), and Medtronic Academia Village (Gallieni 29), featuring the company’s newest products, the Vision 3D™ portfolio of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy-defibrillators (CRT-Ds), which is making its European debut at Cardiostim after having received CE Mark in late spring 2008. The Medtronic Academia Village will offer the opportunity to meet leaders in medical technology education and training. It also includes state-of-the-art simulators for electrophysiology and device applications, as well as informative sessions from 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, June 18-20.

About Medtronic

Medtronic, Inc., headquartered in Minneapolis, is the global leader in medical technology – alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life for millions of people around the world.

medtronic Continue reading →