Super-sized needles
I suppose there are stories about obesity every day, but this one caught my attention after just posting about watching "Supersize Me:"
23 out of 25 women?? That seems too high.
I have a love/hate relationship with stories like this. Love 'em because I enjoy reading about any new findings, but hate 'em because, since this apparently was just a conference abstract, I can't comment further on the methods. Was this some kind of population that was more likely to be obese anyway? Even if you figure that 65% of the population is overweight or obese, they found that 92% of the women in their population had too much ass fat to be able to use a regular needle. It could very well be simply a sample size effect--25 ain't much of a population to generalize from. But still, it's baffling to think that only 8% of those patients received the correct dosage of drug. Shouldn't this have been noticed before?
Fatter rear ends are causing many drug injections to miss their mark, requiring longer needles to reach buttock muscle, researchers said on Monday.
Standard-sized needles failed to reach the buttock muscle in 23 out of 25 women whose rears were examined after what was supposed to be an intramuscular injection of a drug.
Two-thirds of the 50 patients in the study did not receive the full dosage of the drug, which instead lodged in the fat tissue of their buttocks, researchers from The Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin said in a presentation to the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
Besides patients receiving less than the correct drug dosage, medications that remain lodged in fat can cause infection or irritation, researchers Victoria Chan said.
23 out of 25 women?? That seems too high.
I have a love/hate relationship with stories like this. Love 'em because I enjoy reading about any new findings, but hate 'em because, since this apparently was just a conference abstract, I can't comment further on the methods. Was this some kind of population that was more likely to be obese anyway? Even if you figure that 65% of the population is overweight or obese, they found that 92% of the women in their population had too much ass fat to be able to use a regular needle. It could very well be simply a sample size effect--25 ain't much of a population to generalize from. But still, it's baffling to think that only 8% of those patients received the correct dosage of drug. Shouldn't this have been noticed before?
