How Prehab Boosts Recovery After Surgery

…and other items from this week’s health science news:

Don’t wait until later!

Recovery from surgery can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be so bad: a randomized trial involving 164 patients aged 75 and older found that a four-week prehabilitation program before spinal fusion surgery reduced postoperative complications and improved recovery outcomes compared with standard care alone.

What this prehabilitation included: patients received a combination of strength training, balance exercises, flexibility work, cardiovascular conditioning, nutritional guidance focused on adequate calories and protein, and support for sleep, pain management, medication use, and psychological wellbeing.

To put the results in numbers, only about 75% of patients who completed prehab experienced at least one complication within three months of surgery, compared with more than 91% of patients who received only standard postoperative care, representing an 18% lower risk. Additionally, patients in the prehab group stayed in hospital for a shorter time after surgery, averaging 12 days compared with 14 days for those receiving standard care. Further, 68 of 79 prehab patients were able to get out of bed within 24 hours of surgery, compared with 55 of 80 patients in the standard-care group.

So, it’s not a magical panacea, but that’s still a relevant difference (imagine what you’d do for an 18% lower risk while you’re recovering!)

Read in full: Prehab can boost seniors’ recuperation from spinal fusion surgery, trial finds

Related: What To Eat, Take, & Do Before & After A Surgery

They can rebuild you; they have the technology

This one’s about SensoExo, a wearable system that combines a robotic hand exoskeleton with electrical nerve and muscle stimulation to help people with neurological hand impairments.

How the system works: a custom-fitted sleeve on the forearm delivers electrical stimulation to nerves and muscles through the skin, while sensors on the fingers detect touch and grip force and convert that information into stimulation patterns that provide artificial tactile feedback.

Why it matters: hand function depends not only on movement and strength, but also on touch sensation. After spinal cord injuries or brain injuries, people often lose both motor control and sensory feedback, making everyday tasks such as eating, dressing, and personal hygiene difficult.

This therefore means that the system can help users open and close their fingers through functional electrical stimulation, while also giving them information about how firmly they are gripping an object, something that is often lost after neurological injury, and something that has been a challenge for roboticists for decades, let alone cyberneticists doing enhancement tech for human bodies.

Read in full: Scientists develop wearable robotic system to restore hand function

Related: When a Hearing Aid Isn’t Enough ← we haven’t written much about cybernetic enhancements, so do pardon the more tenuous connection here as we didn’t have many to choose from, but cochlear implants are interesting too!

What’s going on with bird flu in cows

Birds and cows are not very alike. And it’s especially strange that the bird flu is being found in the cows’ milk, bearing in mind that birds are famously not mammals, and thus do not have breasts as we do (or udders, which are the same thing with a different name in non-human mammals such as cows) or produce milk.

So, what’s going on? In few words, researchers (Dr. Santhamani Ramasamy et al.) found that H5N1 preferentially binds to a glycan receptor subtype called N-linked sialic acid receptors. And, you guessed it, these receptors are abundant in the mammary glands of cows but (unusually for mammals) are largely absent from their airways, making the udder tissue highly susceptible while making the respiratory tract unusually resistant, unlike in humans.

Unfortunately, that is no help whatsoever to humans who drink raw milk, and promptly get the virus in their respiratory tract that does have the receptors that the virus binds to:

Read in full: Scientists find mechanism behind bird flu infections in dairy cattle

Related: Just How Infectious Is The Bird Flu In Cows’ Milk Anyway?

Take care!