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Charla Nash received a full-face transplant after she was mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009.

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Charla Nash received a full-face transplant after she was mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009.

If there's a medical advance that seized the public imagination this year, we'd venture to say it was facial transplant surgery.

Three transplants gave severely injured patients completely new faces in 2011. Now the doctors involved have revealed details about the complex cases in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In March, Dr. Bohdan Pomahac and a team at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston performed the first full-face transplant in the U.S. Soon afterward, they did it two more times.

The first patient, Dallas Wiens, suffered extensive burns in 2008 when he brushed up against a high-tension power line while painting a church. The accident essentially erased all of the features on his face. The second patient also suffered burns from a power line after a car crash. The third patient was Charla Nash, who was mauled by a chimpanzee.

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Cancer-fighter Avastin just came up short as a treatment for ovarian tumors.

Two studies found that the drug, which blocks the formation of new blood vessels, didn't extend the lives of patients with ovarian cancer.

Avastin did slow the progression of the cancers a little bit. But the patients getting Avastin as part of treatment with several medicines had more side effects, including blood clots and high blood pressure, than the people who didn't get it.

Sound familiar? The Food and Drug Administration recently withdrew the approval for Avastin as a treatment for breast cancer concluding, in the words of Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, that "there is no benefit to breast cancer patients that would justify its risks."

As it happens, Roche's Genentech unit, maker of the Avastin, just got approval from European regulators for use of the drug in treating advanced ovarian cancer.

But after talking things over with the Food and Drug Administration Genentech isn't rushing to do the same in the U.S., the Associated Press reports. "We do not believe the data will support approval," a Genentech spokeswoman told the AP. Still, the company hasn't made a final decision.

Despite these setbacks, Avastin remains a stalwart in the treatment of colorectal and lung cancer. The drug, which can cost up $100,000 for a year of treatment, is also approved in the U.S. for brain and kidney cancers.

The studies, published in the latest New England Journal of Medicine, can be found here and here.

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A fatty diet may trigger inflammation of the hypothalamus, deep inside the brain, and hinder weight loss.

The standard advice for losing weight often comes up short for people who are obese.

If they switch to a healthful diet and exercise more, they might lose a bit. But the pounds have a way of creeping back on.

Now some provocative research suggests that a part of the problem might be that obesity could change the area of the brain that helps control appetite and body weight.

And those changes might start within a day of eating a high-fat meal, according to scientists who are trying to figure out why it's so hard to lose weight. They report seeing changes in the brain after just one day on a fatty diet.

"That was quite a shock," says Michael Schwartz, a professor and director of the Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence at the University of Washington. "This might reflect fundamental biological changes in how the brain works that help explain why it's so hard to keep weight off."

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Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney chat after finishing a GOP debate in Sioux City, Iowa, earlier this month.

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Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney chat after finishing a GOP debate in Sioux City, Iowa, earlier this month.

Opposition to the administration's overhaul of health care has almost become an article of faith with every Republican running for president.

Candidates promise to repeal the law and its less-than-popular requirement for most Americans to either have health insurance or to pay a penalty starting in 2014.

"It is wrong for health care. It's wrong for the American people. It's unconstitutional. And I'm absolutely adamantly opposed to ObamaCare," former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said at a debate in Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month.

"I am for the repeal of Obamacare," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich echoes in a video on his website. "And I'm against any effort to impose a federal mandate on anyone, because it is fundamentally wrong and I believe, unconstitutional."

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Eric Goosby, United States Global AIDS coordinator, says field testing is necessary and urgent to determine if HIV testing-and-treating services are feasible.

Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

Eric Goosby, United States Global AIDS coordinator, says field testing is necessary and urgent to determine if HIV testing-and-treating services are feasible.

2011 has been a momentous year in the 30-year-old AIDS pandemic.

The big breakthrough was the discovery that antiviral drugs can prevent someone who's infected with HIV from passing the virus to others. It's nearly 100 percent effective. That led President Obama to declare earlier this month that the U.S. will expand HIV treatment in hard-hit countries by 50 percent.

As recently as last year, many of those experts were saying that just giving more people with HIV more drugs would never work. "For every one person that was put on antiretroviral therapy or treatment, we would have two to three new infections identified," Dr. Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS coordinator, says.

It looked like a losing game, but not anymore.

The new research shows that antiviral drugs not only save the lives of infected people, they also stop people from spreading the virus and causing new infections, if the drugs can be given early enough after someone gets infected. The new strategy is called "treatment as prevention."

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Tablets are easy to find at the local coffee shop but are still scarce at hospitals.

iStockphoto.com

Tablets are easy to find at the local coffee shop but are still scarce at hospitals.

Hospitals are often eager to embrace the latest medical technology, but the road to deploying tablet computers has been a little bumpy.

iPads have been available since April 2010, but less than 1 percent of hospitals have fully functional tablet systems, according to Jonathan Mack. He's director of clinical research and development at the West Wireless Health Institute, a San Diego-based nonprofit focused on lowering the cost of health care through new technology.

"We're really lagging behind in the U.S. in using electronic medical records on mobile devices like iPads," Mack says.

The federal government is giving hospitals financial incentives to implement electronic medical records, but the most popular systems don't yet make apps that allow doctors to use the records on a tablet the way they would on a desktop or laptop. To use a mobile device effectively requires a complete redesign of the way information is presented, Mack says.