Word: ultrasound
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SPARE THE SCALPEL Parents aren't alone in having trouble figuring out if their kid's bellyache is really appendicitis. In up to 20% of cases, doctors operate only to find a perfectly healthy appendix. Now a study shows that examining the abdomen with ultrasound or a CAT scan is 94% accurate in diagnosing whether a sick child does or does not require surgery. One drawback: a nonradioactive dye must be administered through the child's rectum before a CAT scan can be performed...
...published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which researchers developed a computer program that can collate the results of two non-invasive procedures carried out a month apart to more accurately establish the presence of Down's syndrome. Although neither a first trimester blood test and ultrasound nor a second trimester blood test offers a definitive answer, a team of British researchers found that by correlating the results with their program they were able to identify 85 percent of Down's syndrome cases with only a 1 percent false positive rate. Amniocentesis provides a definitive answer...
...begins with a noise you can't hear. Your doctor places a stethoscope over your chest and detects a faint murmur or a distinctive clicking sound whenever your heart contracts. "There may be something wrong with one of your valves," he says. "I'd like you to get some ultrasound tests." Seven days and several hundred dollars later, you learn you have mitral-valve prolapse, a condition in which the tiny flaps of tissue that keep blood from flowing backward between the chambers on the left side of the heart don't close completely. Even though you feel fine, your...
...make you sick," says Dr. Robert Levine, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a co-author of both of last week's reports. Because the mitral valve is shaped like a saddle when the heart is beating--something that Levine discovered 10 years ago--an ultrasound scan can indicate a bulging of the valve where none actually exists. Since then he has determined that the front-to-back view is more reliable than the side-to-side one. (Both views are standard on ultrasound exams of the heart...
...been told you have mitral-valve prolapse, it makes sense to ask your doctor to check again, particularly if it was diagnosed several years ago. That may be as simple as reviewing the tapes of your last ultrasound exam. If you do have mitral-valve prolapse but no thickening of the valves or backflow of blood into the left atrium, you probably don't need to take antibiotics before most dental procedures, according to the latest guidelines. Still, be sure to alert your doctor if you experience shortness of breath, a racing heartbeat or light-headedness...