Ultrasound

HARRISBURG - The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House says he doesn't plan to schedule a vote on a bill to mandate ultrasounds for women seeking abortions while members address questions that have arisen about it. A spokesman for Majority Leader Mike Turzai told the Associated Press on Wednesday that concerns about the bill in the medical community would also be fully vetted before the bill would be advanced. Sponsors of the Pennsylvania bill say it would require an ultrasound, but a woman wouldn't have to look at the printout.

It probably was inevitable that someone would start making and marketing keepsake ultrasound videos of fetuses in the womb, carefully edited with music, fancy graphics and even subtitles for showing-and-telling by expectant parents. But this is one idea the Food and Drug Administration vigorously has been trying to stifle. The FDA has sent warning letters to several companies, threatening to seize ultrasound equipment if the practices don't cease. The equipment is used to produce a picture of the fetus, then the images are put on videotape.

EVEN HEIRLOOMS are appraised before owners decide whether or not to part with them. Surely the heirs to parents' genes should warrant the same consideration - but not according to abortion-rights advocates. The ever-enunciating president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, Kate Michelman, promptly protested recently proposed legislation that would help non-profit health clinics pay the price of ultrasound equipment for use among women with unplanned pregnancies.

A study to determine which diagnostic test is best at evaluating the extent of prostate cancer in men found that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is more accurate than ultrasound, a distinction that could be important to the more than 100,000 American men who are diagnosed each year with the disease. The study, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, involved patients at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and four other medical centers nationwide, and found that MRI was accurate 69 percent of the time in assessing how widespread a patient's prostate cancer was, compared with an accuracy rate of 58 percent for ultrasound.

HARRISBURG - Dozens of sign-waving protesters took to the Capitol on Monday to protest a bill that would require ultrasounds for women seeking an abortion, and one candidate for attorney general said that he wouldn't enforce it if it becomes law. Democratic attorney-general candidate Patrick Murphy told protesters that he didn't think such a law would be constitutional. The bill has been sidelined at least temporarily because of what House Republican leaders said are questions raised by the medical community.

When MTV debuted 17 years ago, it offered nothing more than kinetic deejays and 'round-the-clock videos. Now the channel boasts a variety of shows that have become embedded in pop culture - everything from "Beavis and Butt-head" to "Road Rules.' In some recent retooling, the channel's programmers decided the focus had strayed too far from music and dumped buff but superficial deejays Simon Rex and Idalis. A new video-intensive show, "12 Angry Viewers" was born, on which disaffected viewers make their own video picks, and "MTV Live" debuted, featuring deejays with less beauty but more musical knowledge.

My daughter turned 6 months old last week. Veronica loves to roll across the living room, and drink from her sippy cup, and splash in the bathtub, and laugh at Daddy's fish lip faces, and yank really, really hard on Mommy's hair. She kicks and squeals and wails and gurgles and bounces and greets us each morning with a smile that could melt Antarctica. Looking back at photographs from the past half-year, we are astounded at how fast she has grown. First week home, first nap in her crib, first Halloween, first solid food, first Christmas - the Kodak moments seem to multiply exponentially.

Hali Satalof, sister of the late Philadelphia songwriter Linda Creed, walked into an operating room one day last week, joked with the surgeons who located and removed a possibly cancerous mass from her right breast, and walked out of the operating room a half-hour later. Fifteen minutes after that, she breathed a sigh of relief as the results of the biopsy came back from the lab: The lump was benign. A new application of ultrasound technology added to the speed and ease of the operation.

In a medical advance that could end painful finger pricks for the seven million diabetics who do them every day, researchers have extracted blood sugar right through the skin, without needles. The technique uses ultrasound to open microscopic spaces in the skin through which a tiny bit of fluid can escape. The fluid is then analyzed to determine glucose, or sugar, levels in the blood. The method, which was successfully tested on seven diabetics, is reported in the current issue of the journal Nature Medicine.

Through a fog of sedation and painkillers, Alina Columbus heard a voice say, "We're going to start another treatment. " She lay on her stomach in the magnetic resonance imaging machine, hearing a rumbling and feeling heat build up deep inside her. High-intensity ultrasound waves were passing through her abdomen, reaching a fibrous tumor in her uterus, and raising the temperature ...

One year ago, Penrith Corp. was a small maker of medical devices in Plymouth Meeting trying to get its wireless ultrasound system through the regulatory approval process after six years in development. Today, now part of the giant Siemens Healthcare , the operation is preparing to launch what is called the Acuson Freestyle from a 12,000-square-foot facility in a commercial office park near I-476. Siemens Healthcare CEO Gregory Sorensen , a former professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, said a wireless handheld device should appeal to doctors who use systems in which the transducer is connected by a cord and can be "cumbersome and difficult to use. " But Sorensen emphasized that when the first Acuson Freestyle units are shipped from Plymouth Meeting shortly, Siemens will pay a 2.3 percent excise tax on each, thanks to regulations that took effect related to the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Through Oct. 17, The Inquirer will mark Breast Cancer Awareness Month by publishing a profile a day of transformative moments reported by patients. The series will culminate in a special Inquirer section Thursday, and can be viewed at www.philly.com/breastcancer . "2012 was supposed to be my year!" says Amy Kuhnel of Kettering, Ohio. "I recently got engaged to the man of my dreams. We bought our first house together, and I got my dream job. I also turned 40, so I went in February to get my first mammogram.

A Philadelphia court of common pleas jury on Friday awarded $78.5 million to a woman whose 3-year-old son suffers from cerebral palsy because of what the jury found were faulty diagnostic procedures by Pottstown Memorial Medical Center, where the child was delivered. Lawyers for the woman, 34-year-old Victoria Upsey, said she arrived at the hospital in August 2008 with signs of complications that caused her unborn child to be deprived of oxygen. Their experts contended during the trial that a prompt delivery could have averted the problem, but that the physician handling the case initially concluded that the baby already had died after performing an ultrasound.

THE TWO Democrats competing in the April 24 primary election for attorney general spent Thursday bashing each other over pending state legislation both oppose. We have a theory about why. With 18 days to go until the primary, Pennsylvania finally has a Republican presidential primary worth paying attention to. And five guys are fighting for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate race in the fall. So, former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy of Bucks County and former Lackawanna County Assistant D. A. Kathleen Kane are looking for ways to motivate Democratic voters to support them for attorney general.

OKLAHOMA CITY - An Oklahoma judge on Wednesday struck down a state law that required women seeking abortions to have an ultrasound image placed in front of them and to listen to a detailed description of the fetus before the procedure. District Judge Bryan Dixon ruled that the 2010 statute passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature was an unconstitutional special law because it addressed only patients, physicians, and sonographers dealing with abortions and did not address them concerning other medical care.

NOT TO SHOCK anyone, but is Gov. Corbett, despite falling poll numbers, doing a balanced job of governing at a time of extreme divisiveness? I raise the question after a close look at a recent poll of Corbett's performance in office, and after noting complaints about him from both the left and the right. First, the complaints. The left, if you haven't noticed, rails about what it calls Corbett's draconian cuts in social services and education, especially higher education, and his support of legislation requiring women seeking abortions to undergo ultrasounds.

HARRISBURG - Dozens of sign-waving protesters took to the Capitol on Monday to protest a bill that would require ultrasounds for women seeking an abortion, and one candidate for attorney general said that he wouldn't enforce it if it becomes law. Democratic attorney-general candidate Patrick Murphy told protesters that he didn't think such a law would be constitutional. The bill has been sidelined at least temporarily because of what House Republican leaders said are questions raised by the medical community.

Scott W. Gaylord and Thomas J. Molony?are both professors at the Elon University School of Law in Greensboro, N.C. The next wave of abortion regulation has arrived. Pennsylvania currently is considering whether to join 23 states that already have laws regulating - and in some cases requiring - the use of ultrasounds in connection with abortion procedures. Similar legislation is pending in nine other states, and the trend shows no sign of stopping. The ultrasound laws are being hotly debated in state capitals and roundly criticized on editorial pages.

MAYBE IT started on "Jerry Springer" - that is, women cursing, clawing, and punching one another as bemused-looking men try to pull them apart. Snooki and the "Jersey Shore" crew have cemented images of crude behavior by women in the minds of young TV viewers. These televised fisticuffs seem to go unpunished; so many, especially young people, may mistakenly believe there are no consequences and that somehow after the fight is over that they are going to gain respect. A little closer to home it is reported that two women, one the president of the Chester Upland school board, and the other a Chester High School teacher, allegedly were involved in a physical confrontation in plain view of students at the school.

WILLIAM F. Buckley, a man who made love to the English language, would have raised his patrician eyebrows at people who call mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds "rape. " It's not that I think he'd agree with laws that force women to undergo the procedure. No, it's the deliberate manipulation/mutilation of words for partisan purposes that would have disturbed the Great Right Hope. "Rape" conjures up images of violence, blood, bruising and shattered lives, (or, for that matter, frat boys about as drunk as their passed-out "dates")