Health headlines: Hepatitis C treatment

Hepatitis C treatment isn't pretty, but the dark days of weekly injections, rough side effects and no guarantee of full recovery from the liver-damaging disease may soon be over, researchers report.

Two studies, both published in the Jan. 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, involved giving various combinations of antiviral pill cocktails to patients with hepatitis C. Some had failed to respond to standard treatments, and some had not received treatment yet. Yet, the cocktails cleared the virus in both studies for between 93 percent and 98 percent of the patients.

These cocktails are game-changers for the illness, said Andrew Muir, director of gastroenterology and hepatology research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute.

"This has made me change the way I'm talking with patients. These regimens are essentially going to cure everybody," said Muir, who has conducted related research but did not participate in these studies. "I had a patient in my office this morning who said, 'If I get cured,' and I said to him, 'When you get cured.'"

Traumatic spinal cord injuries

The number of serious traumatic spinal cord injuries is on the rise in the United States, and the leading cause no longer appears to be motor vehicle crashes, but falls, new Johns Hopkins research suggests.

The same research shows, moreover, that rates of these injuries whose symptoms range from temporary numbness to full-blown paralysis are rising fastest among older people, suggesting that efforts to prevent falls in the elderly could significantly curb the number of spinal injuries.

We have demonstrated how costly traumatic spinal cord injury is and how lethal and disabling it can be among older people, says Shalini Selvarajah, M.D., M.P.H., a postdoctoral surgical research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of the study published online in the Journal of Neurotrauma. Its an area that is ripe for prevention.

For their study, the Johns Hopkins researchers analyzed a nationally representative sample of 43,137 adults treated in hospital emergency rooms for spinal cord injury in the United States between 2007 and 2009. While the incidence among those aged 18 to 64 ranged from 52.3 per million in 2007 to 49.9 per million in 2009, the incidence per million in those 65 and older increased from 79.4 in 2007 to 87.7 in 2009.

Falls were the leading cause of traumatic spinal cord injury over the three-year study period (41.5 percent), followed by motor vehicle crashes (35.5 percent). Fall-related spinal cord injuries increased during the study period overall. Among the elderly, they increased from 23.6 percent to 30 percent of injuries.

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Health headlines: Hepatitis C treatment