Interesting med­ical item run­ning over at Military.com:

(UPI) Doctors at Brook Army Medical Center are test­ing a regen­er­a­tion pow­der that could help injured sol­diers regrow fin­gers and other body parts lost in battle.

The pow­der, nick­named ‘Pixie Dust’ after the fairy dust that enabled chil­dren to fly in Disney’s Peter Pan, is made from tis­sue extracted from pigs. It attracts stem cells and con­vinces them to grow into the tis­sue that used to be there, CNN reported May 27. Doctors at BAMC used the pow­der last week on a wounded Soldier to encour­age the regen­er­a­tion of a fin­ger in lost in Iraq.

“If it is next to the skin, it will start mak­ing skin. If it’s next to a ten­don, it will start mak­ing a ten­don, and so that’s the hope, at least in this par­tic­u­lar project, that we can grow a fin­ger,” Dr. Steven Wolf told CNN.

Doctors said they are watch­ing patients for unex­pected side effects, such as cancer.

(Tinker Bell image cour­tesy of the Walt Disney Company.)

– Ward

I have a buddy who lost an arm to a mine in Vietnam and now heads the VA’s pros­thet­ics pro­grams. While hunt­ing deer a cou­ple of years ago in West Virginia he explained to me that although the new body armor has saved many lives in Iraq and Afghanistan it has also caused a greater per­cent­age of ampu­ta­tions across the pop­u­la­tion of wounded than pre­vi­ous con­flicts because of the way the shock of an explo­sion is trans­ferred to the extremities.

Resultantly there is a great demand for pros­the­ses, and from demand comes inno­va­tion. Modern tech­nol­ogy has afforded wounded war­riors devices that are increas­ingly capa­ble of repli­cat­ing the per­for­mance of human limbs — a huge qual­ity of life issue for these heroes.

Otto Bock HealthCare, a com­pany that started out pro­vid­ing devices for German World War I vet­er­ans in 1919, has devel­oped a pros­thetic knee sys­tem that is an upgrade to its already pop­u­lar C-Leg. According to an Armed Forces Press Service release “the pros­the­sis is for above-the-knee amputees and uses a micro­proces­sor to con­trol the knee’s hydraulic func­tions and antic­i­pate the wearer’s actions and make changes in real time.”

The new sys­tem has more sen­sors, a faster hard drive, and more mem­ory. Engineers are also look­ing to improve bat­tery life to 50 hours per charge. The release states the leg will “improve tran­si­tions between move­ments like level-ground walk­ing, climb­ing stairs, and running.”

Barring any tech­ni­cal prob­lems, the new pros­the­sis should be avail­able to ser­vice­mem­bers in 2009.

– Ward

As any­one who’s ever read Guns, Germs, and Steel will tell you, bac­te­ria and viruses have long been a part of com­bat — some times, the nas­ti­est part. During the wan­ing days of World War I, the flu sent 70,000 American troops to the hos­pi­tal; one-third never recov­ered. In the Civil War, twice as many troops died from dis­ease as from gun­shots.
Today’s prob­lems aren’t nearly so severe, in com­par­i­son. Since th inva­sion of Iraq, “more than 700 US sol­diers have been infected or col­o­nized with [the bac­te­ria] Acinetobacter bau­man­nii,” Steve Silberman reports in the cur­rent Wired mag­a­zine. “The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has recorded seven deaths caused by the bac­te­ria in US hos­pi­tals along the evac­u­a­tion chain.”
But it’s the way that the American mil­i­tary offi­cials have dealt with the bug’s release that’s par­tic­u­larly dis­turb­ing. “For a long time, the DoD claimed that the bac­te­ria… was a nat­u­rally occur­ring organ­ism in the Iraqi soil that infected sol­diers when they were wounded by IEDs,” Silberman tels Defense Tech. “As you’ll see, this is not the case, and the DoD has known the true source of the infec­tions — the com­bat sup­port hos­pi­tals in Iraq them­selves — for over a year and a half.”
One marine’s mom was told her son died of “injuries as a result of enemy action.” Turned out, it was Acinetobacter, instead.
Now, this isn’t the first time the mil­i­tary has mis­lead fam­i­lies about how their kin were killed. Pat Tillman is prob­a­bly the most famous exam­ple of this in recent years. First, the Tillmans were told he died from enemy fire; then, from friendly; now, mur­der isn’t being ruled out. But there are many, many oth­ers. The ques­tion is: Why lie?
(Big ups: XJ)

It’s no secret that the military’s trauma units have saved the lives of thou­sands of injured ser­vice mem­bers and Iraqi civil­ians whose wounds would likely have killed them in ear­lier con­flicts.
But last night, 60 Minutes ran a pow­er­ful 13 minute piece on the doc­tors, nurses and medics who oper­ate in the­ater and on the field heli­copters. The Hueys UH-60 Blackhawks are sta­tioned around Iraq so that no casu­alty is more than 25 min­utes from a heli­copter, help­ing to ensure that injured sol­diers are treated in a hos­pi­tal within 60 min­utes, known as the “Golden Hour.”
The piece focuses on two American solid­ers, Kenny Lyon and Brad Fulks. Lyon was hit by a mor­tar while fix­ing his vehi­cle, and lost half his blood through three sev­ered arter­ies before arriv­ing the Air Force the­ater hos­pi­tal on the Balad Air Base north of Baghdad.
Fulks was hit by a road­side bomb, which burned the skin over half his body and destroyed one of his lungs.
The Balad Air Base trauma cen­ter sees 300 trauma cases a month, but sends many via C-17s trans­formed into air­borne med­ical cen­ters to Germany. In the Vietnam war, it took an aver­age of 40 days to get wounded sol­diers back to the States; in the Iraq war, it now aver­ages three days.
You can read a tran­script of the piece here, but I highly rec­om­mend watch­ing the video, even if you already know the extra­or­di­nary efforts of the military’s trauma teams.
- Ryan Singel

“In about two years’ time, Israel Defense Forces sol­diers may carry with them to the bat­tle­field pack­ets with their own pow­dered blood,” says Ha’Aretz.
“The idea is to take a soldier’s blood, freeze it in lab­o­ra­tory con­di­tions, take out the ice crys­tals leav­ing only the blood com­po­nents. It will look like freeze-dried cof­fee in a lit­tle bag,” said Lieutenant colonel Amir Blumenfeld, head of the IDF med­ical corps’ trauma unit.
Every sol­dier going to bat­tle will receive a packet with his own freeze-dried blood as part of his manda­tory per­sonal kit, much like the sta­ple per­sonal ban­dage.
When nec­es­sary, if the sol­dier is wounded in bat­tle and needs blood, a medic or doc­tor could take out the dried blood bag, mix it with phys­i­o­log­i­cal water and inject the sol­dier with a trans­fu­sion of his own blood.
Hey doc­tors: is this even pos­si­ble? Weigh in here…

Could some time in a computer-generated world while on a fear-fighting drug help troops deal with post-traumatic stress dis­or­der? Emory’s Dr. Barbara Rothbaum University of California’s Dr. Charles Marmar think so.
A tuber­cu­lo­sis drug called D-cycloserine, or DCS, could be the key, notes Army Times.

DCS affects what are called NMDA recep­tors, key parts of the brain mech­a­nism that con­trols mem­ory and learn­ing…
The inten­tion is to allow DCS to inhibit fear recep­tors in the brain so patients can deal with painful mem­o­ries in a con­struc­tive way and essen­tially “unlearn the fear response” when it comes to their war mem­o­ries…
Veterans par­tic­i­pat­ing in both exper­i­men­tal treat­ments will be given 50-milligram doses of DCS about half an hour before ther­apy, as well as expo­sure ther­apy…
At Emory, patients will undergo virtual-reality expo­sure ther­apy, in which a hel­met dis­play with sound effects will put them back in Iraq in one of three sce­nar­ios: a solo Humvee ride, a con­voy or urban war­fare…
Each Emory patient will go through five total ses­sions four with the DCS and vir­tual real­ity and one pre­lim­i­nary ther­apy ses­sion, she said. The study is expected to take five years and include about 150 patients, although the num­ber could expand, she said…
Rothbaum has already used the com­bi­na­tion of DCS and virtual-reality ther­apy on patients who have a fear of heights. She said patients in that study were “sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter” even three months later, when they were exposed to heights with­out DCS.
“That gave us a lot of hope,” she said. “So now were try­ing some­thing more complicated.”

A patrol from the 1st Cavalry Division is held up at an inter­sec­tion blocked by a wrecked car when a road­side bomb goes off, throw­ing civil­ians to the ground. Medics rush to treat the wounded while gun­ners engage insur­gents. One injured civil­ian squirts blood from a sev­ered limb. Another clutches his intestines spilling from a belly wound.
It’s just another day at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk in Louisiana. The blood and bombs are Hollywood spe­cial effects, the civil­ians are actors and the insur­gents are con­trac­tors. But the stress and hor­ror in the medics’ eyes are real.
“The bat­tle­field effects give you the look, feel and smell of com­bat,” says JRTC Col. Wayne Detwiler. “Though [the medics] are very well trained, they might have never seen trauma. You’ve got to get them over that.”
One male medic applies a tourni­quet to the sim­u­lated sev­ered limb (the actor is a Vietnam vet amputee) then moves on to the gut wound. Female Spec. Marin Van Camp fol­lows up behind him with a team, lift­ing the injured onto stretch­ers then load­ing them into a Humvee ambu­lance. She yells at her team to work faster. Her eyes are wide and her skin flush.
With the casu­al­ties all secured, the patrol moves out, speed­ing to a nearby land­ing zone. Two UH-60 Blackhawk heli­copters flare in to evac­u­ate the wounded.
Van Camp takes a breather. “As long as you know you’re going to see casu­al­ties … as long as you’re pre­pared, it’s easy.”
She’s lying. And soon after the chop­pers have dis­ap­peared over the hori­zon, the sol­diers mount up and con­tinue their patrol. Van Camp’s work isn’t fin­ished.
JRTC Command Sgt. Maj. Matthew Pelletera explains all the blood and guts. “You can repli­cate an amputee by hav­ing a guy hold his leg up, but the effect lasts only so long,” he says. “As a medic, you do so much prac­tice, it feels like it’s not real.”
Not so at JRTC. “Here we repli­cate live bat­tle­field trauma.”
Read more on the front page of today’s The Washington Times. Go to Flickr for pics. And check out my graphic novel WAR FIX for scenes of real bat­tle­field gore.
–David Axe

… is really all we are. And on the bat­tle­field, there are lots of hot pokey objects that can punc­ture our squishy sacks, let­ting out all the goo. To put this prob­lem in more clin­i­cal terms: blood loss is the first and most imme­di­ate dan­ger to injured troops. Therefore, find­ing ways of staunch­ing the flow of blood from bat­tered bod­ies is one of the mil­i­tary med­ical community’s major pri­or­i­ties.
There’s been a lot of advance­ments on this front in the past cou­ple years, much of it moti­vated by the high pro­por­tion of bleed­ing limb injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several advance­ments have been men­tioned on this site before. Here’s a com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey:
* One-handed tourni­quets that sol­diers can apply in sec­onds to wounded com­rades
“Approximately 200,000 of these tourni­quets have recently been ordered and shipped to the­ater,” says Colonel Robert Vandre from Army Medical Department (AMD). “It is start­ing to be used now and reports are com­ing in from our sur­geons that they are receiv­ing patients with these tourni­quets on dam­aged limbs.”
* A pair of new ban­dage designs — one based on des­ic­cants (like you find in the pock­ets of new coats) and another on crushed crus­taceans — that encour­age rapid clot­ting of wounds
Vandre again: “Since the begin­ning of the Afghanistan con­flict, the Department of Defense has fielded two new ban­dag­ing tech­nolo­gies for stop­ping bleed­ing: the Chitosan Bandage, [made by] Hemcon, and QuickClot, [made by] Z-Medica. The Chitosan ban­dage is made of shrimp shells and sticks to the wounded area, seal­ing it off much like a tire patch. The QuickClot is made up of des­ic­cant gran­ules that phys­i­cally adsorb the liq­uid from blood, thereby con­cen­trat­ing the clot­ting fac­tors and encour­ag­ing rapid clot­ting to stop the bleeding.”

(more…)

The Pentagon wants to know how its sol­diers are han­dling the tran­si­tion from wartime to reg­u­lar life. But get­ting them to see a coun­selor isn’t easy, even in the age of Oprah. So the Defense Department’s fringe sci­ence divi­sion is fund­ing devel­op­ment of wire­less sen­sors (scroll down) to tell whether a vet­eran is stressed or hit­ting the bot­tle too hard after com­ing home from deploy­ment.
AFrame Digital and Barron Associates, both based in Virginia, are focus­ing on vet­er­ans recov­er­ing from bat­tle­field injuries. They both are inves­ti­gat­ing a “low-cost, non­in­va­sive ‘trip-wire’ sys­tem [that] required that func­tions as a safety net, detect­ing when assis­tance or inter­ven­tion is needed and issu­ing advi­sories to health care providers con­cern­ing sig­nif­i­cant changes in impor­tant med­ical indi­ca­tors.” These mon­i­tors will “col­lect and ana­lyze real time data of vital signs, patient activ­ity, fall accel­er­a­tion and loca­tion para­me­ters to detect devi­a­tions.” AFrame already makes a ver­sion for seniors, that picks up “pulse, tem­per­a­ture, and mobil­ity” and comes with a “panic but­ton and fall detec­tion.”
Massachusetts’ Erallo Technologies is focus­ing on whether a vet falls down from drink or stress, instead. According to the Associated Press, one in eight return­ing troops has PTSD symp­toms. CNN puts it at one in five. Its “Intelligent, Wireless, Agent-based Health Monitoring Network for PTSD and Alcohol” will include “a wire­less trans­der­mal alco­hol sen­sor, heart rate mon­i­tor and accelerom­e­ter.”
Presumably, like AFrame, Erallo is expect­ing its sys­tem will incor­po­rate “socially accept­able form fac­tors, secure wire­less net­works, intel­li­gent analy­sis soft­ware, dis­plays for med­ical per­son­nel, and inter­faces to med­ical record sys­tems.”
But those form fac­tors bet­ter be pretty dammn small. Because if a sol­dier feels shy about pay­ing a pri­vate visit to a ther­a­pist, how eager is he going to be to walk around with some clunky armband?

We’ve all seen the pic­tures, at least: sol­diers and marines com­ing home with legs and arms gone. It’s a long shot, but maybe this could help: “A newly cre­ated form of pro­tein known as ‘elastin’ may one day be used to build replace­ment body parts,” accord­ing to National Defense mag­a­zine.

“This tech­nol­ogy would allow sur­geons to ‘build a per­son from the mol­e­c­u­lar level,’ says Kenton Gregory, chief car­di­ol­o­gist at the Oregon Medical Laser Center, in Portland, Ore. [He’s the guy who founded HemCon Inc., which makes a con­tro­ver­sial ban­dage for the Army designed to stop bleed­ing in a hurry. — ed.]
The U.S. Army Combat Casualty Care pro­gram so far has funded $20 mil­lion worth of research work at the med­ical laser cen­ter…
Elastin is being stud­ied as a pos­si­ble means to put injured sol­diers back together, Gregory explains. After nearly a decade worth of research, his lab has found the human gene for elastin, he says. Elastin is a durable, sta­ble pro­tein that makes up human tis­sue. The think­ing is that the body wont reject replace­ment parts that have the patients own DNA.
Based on nat­ural pro­tein, we devel­oped a whole series of tissue-repair parts for the stom­ach, esoph­a­gus, skin, arter­ies, Gregory says. We are devel­op­ing cell ther­apy pro­gram to help regen­er­ate tissue.