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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