daVinci Surgical System
Kaleida Health is proud to be a leader and innovator when it comes to your health. That is why we continue to invest in programs and services that give you choices for medical care and treatments. The expansion project at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital has provided Western New Yorkers with one of the most modern and technologically advanced medical centers anywhere. A soon-to-be-constructed skilled nursing facility will reinforce our commitment to the area’s aging population, and the consolidation of Millard Fillmore Gates Circle and Buffalo General Hospitals will assure a vibrant medical campus anchored by a world-class Global Heart and Vascular Institute, and that’s not all.
Millard Fillmore Suburban will be the very first Kaleida Health facility to offer the future in surgical procedures - the daVinci Surgical Robotics System. Imagine the possibilities for young and old alike when formerly life-altering surgeries one day become less complex with shortened hospital stays, reduced pain, and a rapid return to everyday life. That is what you can expect with a sophisticated daVinci System, when we bring together the technological ingenuity of robotics and our highly skilled surgeons to treat illness and disease in gynecology, kidney, prostate and heart. Thousands of procedures are being performed safely world-wide already, and Kaleida Health is proud to bring you another first in medical care right here in our facilities.
A Link Between MS and Blockages in Veins that Drain the Brain?
Dr. Robert Zivadinov
Researchers are studying the possibility that Multiple Sclerosis could be caused by blockages in veins that drain the brain. If this new theory is correct, it could alter the way of diagnosing and treating an incurable disease that attacks the nervous system.
Proponents theorize that angioplasty could repair blockages similar to a procedure to open clogged arteries around the heart. Dr. Robert Zivadinov, Director of the Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center is the principal investigator of this study. The Neuroimaging Analysis Center is part of the Jacobs Neurological Institute located in Buffalo General Hospital. “The idea looks encouraging, but if it turns out to be right, people need to remember that miracles don’t happen overnight. We have to prove it first. We are two to four years away from being able to say whether this can be recommended as a treatment and understanding its value,” said Dr. Zivadinov.
Multiple Sclerosis can be difficult to diagnose and is different in each person. It’s still a mystery why cells in the immune system that would normally fight bacteria, instead damage nerve cells and a fatty substance shielding nerve fibers. Scars created by multiple sclerosis disrupt the messages between the brain and other parts of the body that control muscle movement.
Dr. Zivadinov plans to recruit 1,100 patients with all kinds of MS, 300 healthy volunteers and 350 people with other neurological diseases in a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard of medical research. In another part of the study, patients will have an MRI exam of their brain to measure iron deposits which may be associated with the location of MS lesions and impaired drainage.
There is no cure for MS but there are several medications that slow progress of the disease. If the theory is correct, it could mean new hope for the 500,000 people in the United States and 2.5 million worldwide with MS.
