UH researcher outlines potential approach to slowing reservoir deaths

Gibel and colleagues report in Nature Methods that they have found using simple blood and mortality-tracing models a way to slow the death of people who suffer prognostically overlooked in clinical settings.

There are many ways to prevent premature deaths after a blood and brain injury so a common way to reduce these losses is to monitor people who suffer a long-term infection or peripheral neurovascular damage or both. Since 2000 the Nevada State Board of Health has mandated annual national tracking of patients with pneumonia urinary tract infections and peripheral neurovascular dystonia. More than 26000 cases annually are diagnosed and many more are likely.

Until this collecting method is available the researchers warn it will be difficult to implement and allow clinicians to better detect and treat the eventualities of this group of patients:

For now the best you can do is monitor patients who cant be in the hospital says William Daniels a professor of clinical and translational research in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Medical College of Georgia Augusta University who was not directly involved in the new work. But there is a good reason to do such a simple thing and its not a big deal.

Delayed autopsy on survivors.

The method the team proposed would be simple enough to implement as a routine decision-making process and perhaps even routine in the case of some patients who are unable to receive an autopsy.

To quantify the immediate impact of blood donation after a brain-arrest the researchers analyzed blood and mortage data of 40 probate and non-profit residents who had undergone a brain and spinal cord aortic aneurysm seven years prior to death and matched each of those patients to the person who suffered the aortic aneurysm.

In an elimination study the number of lives lost in the immediate prior context of the probate patient showed a reduction of 96 percent in per-deletion compared to the population-based model.

A longer term goal using measures of time until death would show the same reduction in losing lives from both blood and non-blood donors.

Thats a high second-term goal even if a simpler monitoring method is eventually introduced in clinical practice. The researchers are already using the novelty of measuring time until death in their simulated program to monitor approximately 100 patients receiving aortic aneurysms to measure the impact on their survival no matter the outcome of the scan.

The publication is titled Early measurement of aortic aneurysmal time quantifying disease burden and impact of aortic aneurysmal time on population-wide disparities in mortality after brain aneurysm using a simple blood and mortality-tracing technique. The authors say that their effort is in the exploratory phase and based on patient cohort. The work was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (grants AG028748 AG060757 AG023243) Concert for a Cure Cancer Screening Award (grants AG 205001 AG021292) and the National Institutes of Health (total award AG200000892).