INTRAOCULAR PRESSURE - CONTINOUS MONITORING

Pharma pulse by Linu mohan

INTRAOCULAR PRESSURE - CONTINOUS MONITORING

Intraocular pressure (IOP) is the fluid pressureinside the eye.Normal eye pressure ranges from 12-22 mm Hg, and eye pressure of greater than 22 mm Hg is considered higher than normal.

There are some patients with certain eye conditions, especially glaucoma, need regular testing of their intraocular pressure (IOP). For this they have to visit an outpatient department where a specialist takes the reading with tonometer.

The intraocular pressure may vary significantly throughout the day, and similar to blood pressure, events far outside the normal range can be frequently missed.This may lead to certain complications including vision loss. So a system is introduced in to the medical field for continuous monitoring of intraocular pressure even the patient is at home. The product consists of a sensor that is implanted into the eye as part of a surgery for cataracts, glaucoma, or corneal problems, and a handheld unit that can wirelessly power the implant and download its readings.

The information gathered from the sensor can be easily shared with the doctor, avoiding any trips to outpatient department. Physicians can assign their patients a testing regimen, which can help identify events that are otherwise difficult to spot, and therefore aid in tuning medication prescriptions.

NEW DETECTION METHOD CHANGES TUBERCULOSIS LANDSCAPE

Tuberculosis is responsible for eighty percentages of deaths among people with HIV.The success of tuberculosis treatment depends on its diagnosis, resistant pattern of the strain etc; in proper time. Sputum smear microscopy is a method developed long back, which is still used for tuberculosis diagnosis. One of the main drawback of sputum smear microscopy is ,it has poor sensitivity in HIV positive people, and sputum culture, which takes three to six weeks to yield basic results and even longer to yield the results of drug susceptibility tests. As a result in the past, many patients were lost the follow up and HIV positive patients died while waiting for their test results.

Now the scientist has developed a new diagnostic test revolutionizing the diagnosis of tuberculosis, particularly in countries where tuberculosis is a common cause of death among people with HIV infection. This is a rapid, fully automated nucleic acid amplification test and the new test also detects Mycobacterium tuberculosis and resistance to rifampicin, in less than two hours.

To take the new test, patients produce a sputum specimen just as they do for microscopy and culture diagnostic methods. The specimen is mixed with a reagent and the mixture is put into the cartridge which is inserted into a module in the machine. The results are called up on a computer screen.

Drug resistant tuberculosis is a major challenge, because patients need to be treated with expensive second line drugs, which have more severe side effects than first line drugs.When these patients also have HIV infection their chances of survival are poor.Tuberculosis patients with unknown resistance to rifampicin often used to be treated with conventional firstline drugs, which are much less effective when rifampicin resistance is present and whose use may lead to further resistance.

This new test narrows down such possibilities, and can detect the patients with drug susceptible tuberculosis, so that the health care professionals can treat them appropriately.