Recent News and Articles on the Keywords: lung + 12,900 + web  Related to the article below (Last Update: 8/5/2008)

4 ways to improve lung health and breathing Indianapolis Star, United States - It helps transport nitric oxide -- a very potent lung and blood vessel dilator in your nasal passages -- to your lungs. And it disrupts the messages that ... American Lung Association Offers Olympic Spectators Tips to Stay ... MarketWatch - Aug 4, 2008 It can also increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and even early death. Before spectators leave for Beijing, the American Lung ... Breathing and Lung Function WHOI, IL - The airway in the throat (the windpipe) leads into the bronchial tubes of the lungs. At the end of these tubes are groups of tiny sacs, called alveoli. ... Castro Valley 24-year-old runs in 5K a year after surviving double ... Alameda Times-Star, CA - One day short of a year earlier, Tegner underwent 10 hours of surgery at Stanford Hospital, receiving a double lung transplant after her battle with cystic ... Canton Repository (subscription) Elliana's life depends on double lung transplant Canton Repository (subscription), OH - They also performed a lung biopsy on Elliana. Two weeks later, the lab results revealed the problem. Elliana was born with a surfactant protein deficiency, ... Diffusion-weighted MRI "can help differentiate benign and ... Medicexchange, UK - "We recommend obtaining DW images using respiratory gating, especially if there is a nodule in the lower lung zone." [1] Can malignant and benign pulmonary ... Double-lung transplant teen back on the farm Irish Independent, Ireland - Paul has been in "great form" in the year since the operation in which he was provided with two new lungs, but he admits that the recovery has been gradual. ... Lung found in St. Petersburg ABC Action News, FL - Aug 4, 2008 PETERSBURG, FL -- Police in St. Petersburg say a man made a discovery that took his breath away, a lung in a canal behind his house. ... Police: Marine Biologist Believes Canal Discovery Is Lung Suncoast News, FL - Aug 4, 2008 The elder Unger could not say whether the lung belonged to a human or animal, Nave said. The Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner's Office took the object into ... Gene Test Leads To Targeted Cancer Treatment WCCO, MN - Lung cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer. When it's caught early it can be treated, but most patients are diagnosed in the later stages of the ...

Sucking Helium Reveals Hidden Lung Damage

Clowns and party-goers suck helium from balloons to make their voices squeaky, but soon seemingly healthy smokers could inhale it to explore such conditions as emphysema and asthma.

A new test devised by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists starts with smokers breathing in a liter of the harmless gas, mixed with nitrogen, through a straw and finishes with an MRI that can detect how far the gas has penetrated into the tiny air cavities of the lungs.

"Our technique is potentially more sensitive than established [imaging] techniques," Fain said. "This is the first time structural changes have been shown in the lungs of asymptomatic smokers."

Seeing deeper

The helium approach could help doctors see more deeply into the lungs of smokers, explore whether some patients may be genetically predisposed to lung damage and spot smoking-associated diseases much sooner to evaluate if treatments are working.

"Spotting lung change at an early stage allows us to evaluate the efficacy of lung therapies as well as better understand the mechanisms underlying the disease," medical physicist Sean Fain told LiveScience.

Fain is the lead author on an article on the helium approach recently published in the journal Radiology.

MRIs usually rely on tracking differences in water content, rather than helium, which produce high-contrast images of the body's soft tissues.

Fain and his colleagues used a machine called a gas polarizer to manipulate an isotope of helium with light so it shows up in MRIs.

The study was paid for by the company, GE Healthcare, that makes the gas polarizer, but Fain and his colleagues are not employees or consultants for the company and had full control of the data.

Why it matters

Smoking is the most common cause of emphysema, and cigarettes can contribute to the onset of asthma and bronchitis.

With emphysema, the lung's alveoli — the tiny sacs where oxygen goes into the blood stream and carbon dioxide comes out — break down.

Previous work using helium with MRIs showed that the gas moved more freely in the lungs of patients with emphysema.

Fain and his colleagues tested this technique on eight non-smokers and 11 healthy smokers with no obvious lung damage.

Their results indicate that the helium approach is more sensitive to lung damage than a CT scan, which is the common approach now used to image the lungs.

Also, CT scans expose patients to potentially harmful radiation if repeated, according to Eduard E. de Lange of the University of Virginia Health Sciences System, who wrote an article in the same issue of Radiology to accompany and support Fain's work.

The helium approach would avoid this risk.

"This approach will allow us to look at lung micro-structures that are on the scale of less than a millimeter," Fain said.

The approach could be useful for non-smokers too, as everyone's lung structure breaks down over time as a result of aging. But smoking and other environmental processes speed up the breakdown considerably.