News Archive

ABC South Coast WA (Albany)

Professor Daniel Fatovich, Professor of Emergency Medicine, is QAS the findings of a study he conducted jointly with Royal Perth Hospital highlight the importance of the Royal Flying Doctor Service to rural and remote communities. The nine year study found that patients who suffer major trauma from car accidents have the same chance of survival whether they crash in the country or the city. Almost half of the major trauma cases in WA can be attributed to traffic accidents while 30% are due to falls.

Winthrop Professor Jon Emery, Head of the School of Primary, Aboriginal and Rural Health Care, is QAS studies have shown that rural people with cancer have a 20-30 per cent poorer survival rate than their metropolitan counterparts. He is heading a five-year study that will try to identify the major factors that underlie this disparity. Once the “bottlenecks” were identified, a multi faceted intervention would be introduced to reduce them, he said.

The West Australian:

Assistant Professor Kay Cox, of the School of Medicine and Pharmacology, is QAS a new study will target people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease who live at home and are willing to take part in a study to determine if 30 minutes of walking a day can delay memory loss. The participants will need to have a family member or friend also happy to take part. The Fitness for Ageing Brain Study is recruiting volunteers in Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane. They will be given cognitive and fitness tests over a 12-month period. Assistant Professor Cox said the participants would be asked to complete a 24-week home-based program of moderate walking for the equivalent of half an hour for five days a week. The study will also look at whether exercise improves the carer’s quality of life.

Assistant Professor Emma Glasson, of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, is QAS the trend suggesting an increasing rate of autism spectrum disorders in WA children appears to be related to changes in early detection and treatment rather than a real increase. She was co-author of a study which found that the rate had been rising by almost 17 per cent each year for years. It rose from almost two in 10,000 children diagnosed by the age of eight in 1983 to 53 children per 10,000 by 1997. Assistant Professor Glasson said the findings might reassure parents of children with autism who worried that the rise in cases was due largely to environmental factors. Instead, the increase appeared to mirror a community push since the late 1980s for improved early intervention services and changes to the diagnosis in the 1990s. “The increase we’ve seen over the last 20 years can’t be genetic over that period of time, so parents are asking what’s causing it and always looking for enviironmental factors, particularly when autism crops up without any family history,” she said.

Winthrop Professor David Ravine, of the Western Australian Institute of Medical Research, is QAS although deciphering the human genome has been a major milestone, what is important is finding what switches on or regulates genes. UWA researchers have helped discover the chemical “clothes” or “decorations” that switch some genes on or off. They are tiny biological markers known as methylates which attach to cytosine, one of the four chemical building blocks that pair up to form strands of DNA. “There’s a real practical aspect to it and already we’re seeing epigenetic drugs coming onto the market for conditions such as some blood cancers that were previously untreatable,” Professor Ravine said.