View syndicated health information from Mayo Clinic.
Here's a question for you: What's the most common joint injury people can get? It's an ankle sprain. And if you do twist your ankle, your chances of re-injuring it are very high unless you make an effort to strengthen it. Get the details from Mayo Clinic.
Resource: Sports Medicine
For this year, 2007, the National Cancer Institute estimates that more than 50,000 people will be diagnosed with kidney cancer. Many will have surgery to remove the tumors. But some people are not able to have an operation because of other medical problems. In that case doctors at Mayo Clinic offer another, less-invasive option. It's called cryoablation.
Resource: Treatment of Kidney Cancer
Memory loss, personality changes, a shrinking ability to do daily tasks. It's not easy to watch a loved one suffer from dementia. It's also not easy at times for doctors to know exactly what kind of dementia a person may have. That's because there's not been a test that can differentiate between, say, Alzheimer's disease and Lewy Body Dementia. Now, researchers at Mayo Clinic have developed a way to look at the living brain and more accurately tell what type of dementia a person has. And this may help get patients on the right treatment.
Resource: Frontotemporal Dementia
Every day, doctors use ultrasound, CT scans and MRIs to see inside the body without making an incision. Those tests are great at showing size and structure, but they don't show important physical properties such as tissue stiffness, which, for example, is a sign of fibrosis in the liver. But researchers at Mayo Clinic have developed technology that uses sound waves to see if a patient's liver is harder than it should be — if it's developing fibrosis. It's called Magnetic Resonance Elastography, and it offers a noninvasive alternative to liver biopsy.
Resource: Treatment of Liver Disease
Research has shown that for some cancers, screening for early detection most definitely saves lives. Examples are mammograms for breast cancer and colonoscopy for colon cancer. But not all cancers have screening tools that have been proven to work. Let's go to Mayo Clinic to learn more about screening for lung cancer.
Resource: Treatment of Lung Cancer
Colon cancer can be cured if it and pre-cancerous polyps are caught early. But doctors at Mayo Clinic say only half of all people at risk of colon cancer get screened for the disease. That's because some people don't know they should be screened and others simply don't want to undergo colonoscopy. But a new test developed at Mayo Clinic makes the screening process a whole lot easier. It's called virtual colonoscopy or CT colonography.
Resource: Virtual Colonoscopy