In choosing where they get treatment, prostate cancer patients tend to opt for a major cancer center if they have severe disease, but stick closer to home for less complicated cases, even when offered a model of care that taps numerous experts. The findings by Duke Cancer Institute researchers, published in the January issue of the Journal of Urology, are the first large analysis of the so-called multidisciplinary care strategy that gives prostate cancer patients access to a surgeon, a medical oncologists and a radiation oncologist – all in a single visit. The care team then decides as a group what’s best for the patient, easing the bias for any one specialty.

Patients treated for acute heart attacks in the United States are readmitted within 30 days more often than in other countries, a finding explained in part by significantly shorter initial hospitalizations, according to an international study led by researchers at Duke University Medical Center. The study, published in the Jan. 4, 2012, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association , found that 60 percent of severe heart attack patients enrolled in the United States were discharged in three days or less, yet 14.5 percent of the U.S.

Tracking individual cells within the lung as they move around and multiply has given Duke University researchers new insights into the causes of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a disease which can only be treated now by lung transplantation . IPF fills the delicate gas exchange region of the lung with scar tissue, progressively restricting breathing. The Duke University Medical Center researchers have discovered that some commonly held ideas about the origins of the scar-forming (fibrotic) cells are oversimplified, if not wrong

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded three grants to the Duke University Medical Center for HIV projects in the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD) program. The total amount of all three grants is about $37.2 million. A 5-year, $24.6 million grant from the Gates Foundation will allow David Montefiori, Ph.D., professor of surgery and director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development in the Department of Surgery and his collaborators to continue their efforts

Surgery significantly improves short- and long-term outcomes in patients with heart failure caused by a bacterial infection known as endocarditis, according to Duke University Medical Center researchers. “About 60 percent of patients with heart failure in endocarditis undergo surgery during initial hospitalization,” says Duke cardiologist Andrew Wang, MD , senior author of the study which appears today in the Journal of the American Medical Association . He believes that percentage should be higher.

A commonly held theory says that flu virus persists in Southeast and Eastern Asia, making this region the source of seasonal flu epidemics in other parts of the world. However, researchers at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have found that influenza A virus doesn’t persist in those tropical regions as the only global source of annual epidemics.