Amazing Medical Advances
— Arthur C. Clarke
If a person born anywhere on Earth in 1899 were to be transported into the future, to right now, into a modern city, they would find a lot to recognize but they would also be mesmerized by the miraculous pocket computers most people carry with them and the contrails of giant flying ships miles above. Said person might even experience a mild cardiac infarction upon seeing evidence that we’ve landed on the moon and are beaming pictures back directly from the surface of Mars (and they might be somewhat disappointed that Mars wasn’t teeming with jungle life).
Though the powerful advances of the Computer Age have enabled so much, perhaps no single area has had quite as much impact on society and our bodies as the steady march forward of medical technology.
Medical tech continues to amaze with new possibilities every year. While the pace of change may seem slow to patients who are suffering through conditions, more advances are being made on a regular basis than at any other time in history. What follows are a few of the most recent innovations that will really start to spread over this year and next. (I personally can’t wait to hear about advancements in cryogenic technology, but that, I know, is a long way off…)
22 millions people are affected by sleep apnea, a sometimes deadly condition in which breathing is disrupted, often hundreds of times in a single night, resulting in oxygen deprivation. Patients with sleep apnea have much higher risk of strokes, heart disease and higher blood pressure. Right now, noisy CPAP machines help these patients sleep, and breath, properly. But neuromodulation will be a vast improvement for many. This will come in the form of an implant that monitors and stimulates airways to keep them open, leading to a quiet night’s rest for the patient and her or his partner.
2016 saw the use of a drone to take medicine to a remote part of Rwanda. This will become more commonplace and will be a great boon to the treatment of medical conditions in isolated parts of the world.
Approved by the FDA, the treatment called Luxturna is made by Spark Therapeutics, and uses hijacked viruses to deliver healthy copies of the RPE65 gene, which is defective in patients who have problems (or completely lack) light receptors in their eyes. This FDA approval is also a big deal for gene therapies at large, as it opens the door for more trials of cancer therapies. Ultimately, the technology will save millions of lives.
The 1.25 million (and growing) people in the U.S. who are living with Type I diabetes have a ray of hope in the form of a new artificial organ that is an implanted blood sugar monitoring and insulin delivery device. Eventually this device will also be available for the other 28 million people in the U.S. who have Type II (adult onset) diabetes, and over 200 million diabetic people worldwide.
In a study by Juno Therapeutics, 24 out of 27 patients with refractive acute lymphoblastic leukemia entered remission after receiving treatments to engineer their T-cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. Six of those patients were still cancer-free after one year.
In combination with statins, these drugs are showing they can drastically reduce bad cholesterol numbers, or low-density lipoproteins (LDLs).
Up to 80% of alarms that current patient monitoring equipment deliver are considered unnecessary and generally only serve to contribute to hospital chaos and wasting nurses’ time. These systems have needed an upgrade for a long time, and they will be getting one in the form of software that will properly triage these warnings. As an added bonus, machine learning algorithms will allow the systems to eventually predict when a patient may be headed for trouble, giving doctors advanced warning that they’ve never had in the history of medicine.
Patients suffering from full-body paralysis, with functioning minds who are unable to physically speak — much like the late Dr. Stephen Hawking who lived with ALS and communicated via a keyboard text-to-speech system — will be able to eventually think what they want and have those thoughts become words. Another win for deep learning and AI!
If you know anyone who may benefit from these advancements in medicine, please let them know. Hope has always been some of the best medicine.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
Amazing Medical Advances
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