LOS ANGELES — A major study challenges the way diabetics and others with failing kidneys have been treated for half a century, finding that three-times-a-week dialysis to cleanse the blood of toxins may not be enough.
Deaths, heart attacks and hospitalizations were much higher on the day after the two-day interval between treatments each week than at other times, the federally funded study found.
The president of the National Kidney Foundation said she was “very troubled” by the results published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
“We could be doing a better job for our dialysis patients” and that might mean doing it more often, said Dr. Lynda Szczech, a Duke University kidney specialist who had no role in the study.
Kidneys rid the body of waste and fluids. Most of the 400,000 Americans with failing kidneys stay alive by getting their blood purified by a machine three days a week at dialysis clinics — usually on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. In both cases, there’s a two-day break between the last session of the week and the next one.
The three-day dialysis schedule has been around since the mid-1960s and gives patients a weekend break from the grueling hours of being hooked up to a machine.
However, doctors have suspected that the two-day hiatus between treatments was risky, and smaller studies have found more heart-related deaths on the day after the gap.
“All the fluids and toxins are built up to the highest extent on Monday morning right before dialysis,” said Dr. Anthony Bleyer of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina, who has done similar studies.
Experts: Pilot likely unconscious in Reno crash
RENO, Nev. — The veteran aviator whose plane slammed into a crowd of Nevada air race spectators at 400 mph had no chance to save his ill-fated flight after likely losing consciousness from acceleration more abrupt and extreme than even what most fighter pilots endure, flying experts said.
Jimmy Leeward’s aircraft shot skyward like a rocket Friday before plunging into spectators at what appeared to be full throttle. Federal investigators continue to look for a cause of the crash at the National Championship Air Races that killed 11 people, including Leeward, and injured dozens, but have yet to come to a conclusion, something that could take months.
They’re focused on a range of possibilities, including Leeward’s health and the structural soundness of the plane after a piece of the tail called the “elevator trim tab” that helps control the aircraft’s pitch appeared to break off before the crash.
While some have called the 74-year-old Leeward heroic for making a last-ditch maneuver around crowded stands, experts who have reviewed multiple amateur videos from the scene, photographs and witness accounts doubt that theory. They say it appears Leeward wasn’t controlling the plane during the fateful last few seconds.
“He’s not there. He’s unconscious,” said Ernie Christensen, a retired rear admiral and former Vietnam fighter pilot who commanded the Navy’s Top Gun fighter school for a time in the 1980s.
Dumping of 35 bodies seen as challenge to Zetas
VERACRUZ, Mexico — A gang known to be aligned with Mexico’s most-wanted drug lord appears to be making a violent challenge to the dominant Zetas Cartel in the Gulf state of Veracruz, dumping 35 bodies on a busy avenue in front of horrified motorists near where the nation’s top prosecutors were about to start a convention.
The cartel known as the New Generation unloaded the bound, seminude, tortured bodies during rush hour Tuesday as part of a several-month campaign to take the strategic port of Veracruz now controlled by the Zetas drug gang, an official in the Mexican armed forces told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
All 35 victims, who included 12 women and two minors, were linked to the Zetas cartel, said the official, who couldn’t be quoted by name for security reasons.
It was the first official acknowledgment of who may have carried out the attack after a banner left at the scene threatened the Zetas and bore the initials “G.N.”
A U.S. law enforcement official said the New Generation is believed to be linked to Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, widely considered the world’s wealthiest drug trafficker.
But the U.S. official, who also could not be quoted by name for security reasons, said it would be surprising to see heavy involvement in Veracruz by Guzman or his Sinaloa cartel, which is based in the Pacific coast state of the same name on the other side of Mexico.
“We don’t have anything that corroborates or disputes” that the body dumping was linked to Guzman, the U.S. official said, adding that other sources say the Gulf Cartel could have been responsible. “Sometimes these criminal groups blame the other guys.”
Typhoon passes Japan tsunami zone, heads north
TOKYO — A powerful typhoon that left at least 13 people dead or missing, paralyzed commuter trains and dumped rain on tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan was headed to the major northern island of Hokkaido on Thursday.
Typhoon Roke caused no immediate problems other than broken security cameras at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which had been in its path overnight. The plant had been sent into meltdown by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, and efforts are still under way to bring the reactors under control.
Hiroki Kawamata, spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., said several cameras set up to monitor the plant were damaged, but that there had been no further leaks of radioactive water or material into the environment.
“We are seeing no problems so far,” he said.
The storm passed just west of the plant on its way north late Wednesday. The typhoon brought new misery to the northeastern region, dumping up to 17 inches of rain in some areas.
Two people were rescued after they were found buried in a landslide in northern Iwate prefecture early Thursday, and one remained unconscious, Kyodo News agency reported.