Consultant is first in county to use new method for treating gallstones

4:00pm Tuesday 10th April 2012 in Bradford By Claire Lomax

a doctor in Bradford has become the first in Yorkshire to use a new technique to shatter gallstones in patients.

Gallstones are stones, usually made of cholesterol, that form in the gallbladder. In most cases they do not cause any symptoms. however, in a small number of cases, gallstones can become trapped in a duct, which leads to a range of symptoms, including a sudden intense pain in the abdomen, nausea and vomiting and jaundice.

Risk factors include obesity and age, with older people more likely to develop gallstones.

Women are also two to three times more likely to develop gallstones than men.

Traditionally, patients needing treatment for gallstones, many of them elderly, have faced major surgery and hospital stays of up to ten days, or frequent visits to hospital for treatment to put in stents.

Health bosses in Bradford have now invested £50,000 in new equipment called SpyGlass from a company called Boston Scientific.

it consists of a baby endoscope – a tiny flexible tube and eye piece to see inside the body – which can pass up a standard endoscope and into the bile duct to directly visualise abnormalities.

tiny forceps can then be used by the doctor to take a biopsy, to aid diagnosis and management of disease or a lithotripter – a device which emits electrohydraulic shock waves – can pass up the baby scope to shatter gallstones.

it will be used on patients who have stones which can’t be removed surgically or using standard endoscopic techniques.

Dr Conrad Beckett, a consultant gastroenterologist at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, was the first to use SpyGlass, making Bradford one of only eight other centres in the country carrying out the procedure.

Dr Beckett, who has 18 years experience, trained in the technique in Aintree, Liverpool.

He said: “It is a procedure which is lower risk for the patient and can be done as a day case. it takes about an hour-and-a-half for a big stone and because it is not comfortable for the patient it is done under general anaesthetic.

“The first procedure went very well and we crushed a big stone nicely. hopefully the patient won’t have to come back again.

“We are talking about doing a couple of cases a months and will start with the backlog of our own patients and will then be happy to take referrals from across Yorkshire.”

more Bradford stories

LONDON (Reuters) – the severity of Parkinson's disease symptoms could be monitored remotely by analyzing speech patterns, saving health authorities time and money and easing the burden on patients, scientists said Wednesday.

Researchers from Britain and the United States analyzed almost 6,000 speech recordings from 42 people with Parkinson's and developed algorithms using the data to estimate how bad the symptoms were.

The results, published in the Royal Society's journal Interface, showed the algorithms were close to assessments made by doctors.

"Currently, monitoring requires frequent visits to hospital where people with Parkinson's are physically examined by expert clinicians in order to assess their symptom severity, putting a strain on both patients and hospital resources," said Max little of Britain's Oxford University, who worked on the study.

The researchers said they believed the technique, which could be used with patients' speech recordings or over the telephone, could help ease the resource burden on health systems and make it possible to run large-scale trials of experimental treatments for Parkinson's.

Parkinson's is a fatal and incurable brain disease that affects between 1 percent and 2 percent of people over the age of 65. it often affects the patient's ability to speak clearly, and sufferers also have tremors, sluggish movement, muscle stiffness and difficulty with balance.

Little said the study provided good evidence that speech impairment and the average overall severity of other Parkinson's disease symptoms are very closely linked, suggesting that symptom severity can be measured just by analyzing speech.

"this sort of remote monitoring — or 'telemonitoring' — of people's health is particularly important for people with Parkinson's who may find it difficult to make frequent hospital visits," he said in statement.

"the hope is that our research could pave the way for very large clinical studies of new treatments for Parkinson's where the sort of frequent monitoring required would not otherwise be affordable."

The researchers compared estimates made using the new technique with assessments made by doctors and rated on a standard measure for Parkinson's severity called the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS).

They found that, based on around 140 speech samples from each of the 42 patients, the estimates made using the algorithms differed from doctors' UPDRS ratings by around 2 points.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Andrew Dobbie)