The benefits of participating in sports are numerous: sports promote physical activity and prevent obesity, sports promote both physical and emotional strength, and youth sports promote academic achievement. The most obvious downside to playing sports, of course, is the risk of injury.

Professional baseball pitchers know that abusing pitching their arm can ruin their career. That's why pitch counts are important, especially for young players, pitchers recovering from injury or who have a history of pitching injuries.

It's been called the invisible epidemic because sports-related concussions are often profound but not readily apparent to the public. Invisible or not, the statistics are alarming researchers estimate that 90% of sports head injuries go undetected and the industry is responding. Some states have even responded by creating new laws directing the response to a suspected brain injury.

A catheter system designed to enable more stable delivery of stem cells to heart tissue is showing promise, having demonstrated the safety of transendocardial stem cell injection (TESI) of autologus two different kinds of bone marrow cell therapies in a Phase II trial. BioCardia (San Carlos, California) reported positive 12-month results for the randomized Transendocardial Autologous Cells in Ischemic Heart Failure Trial (TAC-HFT) that used its Helical Infusion Catheter System in the treatment of chronic ischemic cardiomyopathy (ICM).

Compared to the huge technological strides that other sectors of the medical industry have seen in recent years, many hospitals and surgical centers in the U.S. still rely on a fairly archaic process of fluid disposal during operations. Skyline Medical (Minneapolis) has developed a technology that its CEO says is in a "league of its own" compared to competing systems.

America is the fattest country in the world. The obesity epidemic is one of the largest problems facing the healthcare system, both from a clinical and an economic perspective. Pardon the pun. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7%) are obese. Because obesity is associated with so many other health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes, the topic has drawn a great deal of attention at industry gatherings, including the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit last month where the clinical focus was on obesity, diabetes, and the metabolic crisis. But...