Opera Music Improves Heart Transplant Survival

Sara Maines of The MaineStudio Not kidding... This research  was actually published in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 2012. I should add that the research was done in mice rather than humans and won the 2013 Ig Prize in Medicine. To quote from the abstract : "recipients of a B6 cardiac graft that were exposed to opera music and Mozart had significantly prolonged allograft [transplant] survival... whereas those exposed to a single sound frequency (100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10,…

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Fecal Transplantation Administered Through the NOSE!

Fecal transplant is nothing new as it has been around since the 1950's... It is used to treat multi-drug resistant clostridium dificile infection by replacing the "bad" gut bacteria with normal "good" bacteria. However, what is new is the fact that such fecal transplantation is being administered through the nose using a tube threaded into the small bowel. [Thanks to  @GuildfordENT who brought this to my attention!] Historically, such fecal transplantation (aka fec…

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Realistic Face Masks

With halloween coming up and more face transplants occurring to address severe facial disfigurement, it was only a matter of time when a commercial company can recreate a 3-dimensional replica of a person's face. Unlike medical facial transplants which creates a face that's a cross between the donor face and the patient's face prior to disfigurement, these faces are perfect replicas down to scars, blood vessels, skin pores, etc. Well, there's a Japanese company called Real-f…

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Beating Heart in a Box

With heart and lung transplants, the current standard is to transport the heart (or any other organ to be transplanted) inside an icebox cooler on ice. It's the same kind of icebox cooler you would use to take on a picnic. Think about it... You can buy a human organ transportation container off of Amazon.com for $39. In fact, I would not be surprised if some medical centers purchased such icebox coolers from Amazon.com . Well, a company called TransMedics is aiming to elevate organ tr…

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Woman Undergoes Successful Voicebox Transplant

USA Today published a story on January 20, 2011 about a courageous woman who underwent a voicebox transplant October 2010. The surgery took over 2 days and was led by a team of doctors at the University of California, Davis Medical Center and included experts from England and Sweden. The first voicebox transplant took place at Cleveland Clinic in 1998 on Timothy Heidler after a motorcycle accident and who now talks completely normally. Read more of the story here . Reference: Laryngea…

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