(Scott Foresman/Wikimedia Commons)
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, first responders did whatever they could to help victims. For many of those injured, tourniquets proved to be the difference between saving and losing a limb—or a life.
“There’s no doubt that tourniquets played a key role in treating the bombing victims,” says Boston Children’s Hospital Trauma Center Director David Mooney, MD.
Two children who were later treated at Boston Children’s had tourniquets applied at the site of the tragedy. One arrived with extensive lacerations caused by one of the two detonated bombs. The other was in worse condition, having suffered blood vessel damage among other problems. Both children are doing better, although one will require further treatment.
Dating back to Roman times, a simple tourniquet, encircling a limb just above a wound, was the go-to method to stop bleeding. Since then, tourniquets have been used on the battlefield and in emergency rooms and operating rooms. However, had the bombings taken place 10 or 15 years ago, those wounded might not have been treated with tourniquets, Mooney believes. Full story »
In mice, boosting amounts of a microRNA family called miR-17-92 led to dramatic enlargements of embryonic and postnatal hearts, with thicker ventricle walls.
Challenging accepted wisdom about the heart, Boston Children’s Hospital cardiologist
Bernhard Kühn, MD, recently showed that infants, children and adolescents
are capable of generating new heart muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes. That work raised the possibility that scientists could stimulate regeneration to repair injured hearts.
Now, we have a potential therapeutic target to accomplish this: a family of microRNAs called miR-17-92 that regulates cardiomyocyte proliferation. In Circulation Research earlier this month, a team led by Kühn’s research colleague Da-Zhi Wang, PhD, demonstrates its potential. Full story »
How can ICU clinicians manage the data from all these monitors?
With the Internet’s meteoric rise in the last 20 years—to the point of being available 24/7 in your pocket—technology pundits, psychologists and sociologists have been sounding ever louder warnings about information overload: the constant onslaught of communication, information and media coming at us all the time, and in ever greater volume.
Now imagine you’re a doctor or nurse in an intensive care unit (ICU). For you, information overload isn’t just a daily reality—it’s a necessary one. To make the right decisions at the right time for each patient, you must keep tabs on numerous bedside monitors—in the ICUs at Boston Children’s Hospital, that’s 10 or more for each child.
Melvin C. Almodovar, MD, medical director of Boston Children’s Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU), and his colleagues wanted a better way to assess the patient’s physiologic state and catch crises before they happen. Full story »
A heart muscle cell from an 8-year-old beginning the process of mitosis: The cell nucleus is preparing to divide. (Courtesy Bernhard Kühn)
For more than 100 years, people have been debating whether human hearts can grow after birth by generating new contractile muscle cells, known as cardiomyocytes. Recently, Bernhard Kühn, MD, at Boston Children’s Hospital and his colleagues added fuel to the debate—and hope for regenerative therapies for diseased hearts—with their findings that infants, children and adolescents are indeed capable of generating new cardiomyocytes.
Research in the 1930s and 1940s suggested that cardiomyocyte division may continue after birth, and recent investigations in zebrafish and newborn mice presented the possibility that some young animals can regenerate heart muscle through muscle cell division. Still, for many years, the accepted dogma among physicians and researchers was that human hearts grow after birth only through existing cells growing larger.
“This is a very sticky subject in cardiology,” says Kühn. Not only do long-held scientific beliefs die hard, but the ability to directly study heart cell growth in humans has been limited. “Healthy human hearts are hard to come by,” he says. Full story »
