Briefs

Med Center offers midwife-assisted delivery

The Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UCLA Medical
Center has created UCLA Maternity Associates ““ a Midwifery
and Obstetrical Partnership.

Although the use of a certified nurse midwife is generally
associated with a home birth, the American College of Nurse
Midwives reports that 96 percent of births attended by a midwife
occur in hospitals.

Maternity Associates was created to meet the increasing number
of women who want to work with a midwife, yet also want the
security of being in a hospital during delivery.

Certified nurse midwives have been delivering at the Medical
Center since 1996. UCLA has the only hospital on the Westside of
Los Angeles which offers women the option of delivering with a
midwife.

An unmedicated delivery with a midwife often results in a faster
recovery for the mom, and is more cost efficient for hospitals.

New ocean science center to open

UCLA and the University of Southern California received a $2.5
million grant from the National Science Foundation to form the
Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence-West.

The two universities will each get $250,000 a year for five
years, and work with other institutions to improve K-12
marine-science education in Los Angeles through the new ocean
science center, one of seven such centers located throughout the
United States.

The goal is to train teachers in the L.A. Unified School
District and other L.A. County school districts to teach ocean
science, and to encourage K-12 students to pursue careers in ocean
sciences.

The grant money will also go toward developing a public lecture
series, and a Web site which will act as a free resource for
students and teachers.

The lectures will focus on themes as diverse as extreme
environments to open ocean habitats.

The Web site will include real-time links to weather and
monitoring stations, and will have educational downloadable
materials.

Researchers link sleep apnea to brain
damage

UCLA researchers found that people who suffer from sleep apnea
have gray matter loss in brain areas which regulate their breathing
and speech.

Sleep apnea causes loud snoring at night and extreme sleepiness
during the day. The disorder causes makes it hard for patients to
breathe while they sleep, because their throat and mouth relaxes
and their airway collapses.

Dr. Ronald Harper, the lead investigator and professor of
neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, led a
team which compared the brain structures of men who had sleep apnea
to those who didn’t. Then they compared their findings
against normal brain structures found in men.

The results showed dramatic gray matter loss in the brains of
men with sleep apnea. The matter loss occurred primarily in regions
of the brain that control speech production, movement and
emotion.

“The repeated oxygen loss from sleep apnea may damage
other brain structures that regulate memory and thinking,”
Harper said in a statement.

Harper’s team will now focus on examining the brain
structures of children who have sleep apnea, but may not have had
the disease long enough to develop brain damage.

Laptop burns man’s penis

A scientist in London burned his penis after an hour of using
his laptop.

Even though the man had been wearing trousers and underpants,
the hot lap top had given him a blister 2 centimeters in diameter
and infected wounds on his scrotal skin.

After about a week the unidentified scientist was “healing
quite rapidly.”

Briefs compiled from Daily Bruin wire reports and Daily Bruin
staff.

Briefs compiled from Daily Bruin wire reports and Daily Bruin
staff