News
CMAJ drops paywall
Starting today, all new Canadian Medical Association Journal content is now freely available online, with older material becoming available on March 1, 2020. Previously, CMAJ research articles, editorials and news stories were freely available, and other content including commentaries and practice articles were only fully available after one year.
6 Tips for Process Improvement in Your Lab
Process improvement is about discovering and applying best practices—and then continuously tweaking them to make them just a little better. It's a habit that every organization should have. Process improvement itself has best practices.
VADA program opens door to growing career possibilities in health data translation
Vast quantities of health data have been collected over the past several decades, and can be utilized to improve population health, for example, by detecting infectious disease outbreaks or predicting health outcomes for patients with chronic conditions.
Siemens Healthineers Adds Fentanyl Assay to its Menu to Help Laboratories Address Greater Demand for Opioid Testing
Siemens Healthineers is now distributing the ARKTM Fentanyl Assay1, providing laboratories with a greater window to screen for fentanyl to more effectively triage patients who have been exposed to the dangerous opioid. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes fentanyl as a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.2
Having Your Pathology and Eating It Too
They say you are what you eat. A couch potato. A meathead. A breadwinner. Just as our vernacular has embraced the language of food to describe people, so too has the medical community used such language to describe disease.
'Virtual biopsy': Thunder Bay researcher helps develop new PET-scan technique to find breast cancer
A researcher at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., has received a national award for his work on creating a breast imaging alternative to traditional mammograms. Sasha Bubon is part of the team that has developed a way to use positron emission tomography (PET) to deliver high-resolution images at a much lower dose of radiation.
PerkinElmer Provides Newborn Screening Assay for DMD
PerkinElmer, Inc., a global leader committed to innovating for a healthier world, announced that it is providing the newborn screening assay for Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy’s (PPMD’s) Newborn Screening Pilot for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (Duchenne).
Can we afford to cure the incurable?
Gene therapy is a promising new therapy that is being investigated to treat or prevent disease using genes, rather than drugs or therapy. Numerous approaches are being investigated, such as replacing a mutated gene that causes disease with a healthy copy of the gene; inactivating or removing a mutated gene that isn’t functioning; or introducing a new gene into the body to help fight disease.
Research defines meaningful activity for people with Alzheimer’s disease
Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease prefer taking part in familiar activities that are emotionally meaningful over strictly task-oriented activities, new research shows. University of Alberta researchers conducted a study published in Aging and Mental Health in which, for the first time, people with Alzheimer’s disease were directly asked what they preferred to do.