Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center announced this morning that it will eliminate 950 positions by June 30 of next year.

About half the reductions will be achieved by eliminating vacant positions, attrition, retirements as well as by eliminating temporary and contract worker jobs.

About 475 of the 950 positions are currently filled with full-time employees. Those employees account for about 3.5 percent of Wake Forest Baptist's total workforce.

The Winston-Salem medical center laid off 76 workers this week.

Women who suffer from migraines during pregnancy are 15 times more likely to have a stroke than women who do not have the condition, researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill report today.

In addition to an increased risk of stroke, pregnant women who have migraines are two times more likely to have heart disease and more than three times more likely to have blood clots and other vascular problems during pregnancy.

The study appears in this months' issue of the British Medical Journal.

"Women with persistent and severe migraine during pregnancy should be aware of their risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, history of blood clots, heart disease and prior stroke,” Dr. Cheryl Bushnell, a neurologist at Wake Forest Baptist and lead investigator of the study said in a prepared statement. “There also seems to be a relationship between migraines and preeclampsia, one of the most common and dangerous complications of pregnancy.”

The study also found that women who were 35 or older when they delivered were more likely to have migraines during pregnancy.

"While some women experience relief from migraine headaches while pregnant, others have migraines that are more frequent and severe,” Bushnell said. “The reasons these severe migraines are associated with stroke and vascular disease is not clear but it may be that some women do not compensate as well for the increased vascular stresses of pregnancy, such as increased blood volume, stroke volume and heart rate. Regardless of the cause, active migraine during pregnancy should be viewed as a potential marker of vascular disease.”

An early study indicates that a common drug used for high blood pressure could improve the mental function of patients who undergo radiation for brain tumors.

The findings, released today by scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, were conducted on rats, and need further study in humans.

But the results show promise for a hypertenion treatment called losartan, which Merck & Co. sells as Cozaar. Given to rats in their water, the drug improved their cognative abilities after radiation.

Scientist believe the drug blocks protein components from being over produced during radiation. The components, called peptides, impair brain function.

“Sometimes the patient realizes that their short-term memory is fading or that they’ve lost the ability to multi-task," said Mike E. Robbins, a professor in the department of radiation oncology and one of the study's authors. "They just can’t keep thoughts in their brain. Sometimes it’s a friend or partner that realizes the impairment, but once it is noticed, it is not going to improve. Cognitive decline resulting from radiation is not stable. It is a chronic, progressive condition.”

If the findings bear out in human studies, the drug could improve the quality of life for many of the estimated 350,000 people in the United States battling brain tumors.

Here's another reason people with type 2 diabetes should strive to manage blood sugar levels: Higher glucose levels are associated with lower mental agility.

Those findings are published today in the journal Diabetes Care by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and others study sites participating in a large national study of diabetes.

Researchers found that a prolonged elevation in blood sugars over three or four months led to lower scores on tests that measure thinking skills, including memory. The investigators found no correlation between a one-day spike and thinking skills.

“One of the little known complications of type 2 diabetes is memory decline leading to dementia, particularly Alzheimer's dementia,” Dr. Jeff Williamson, principal investigator for the study at the Wake Forest clinical site. “This study adds to the growing evidence that poorer blood glucose control is strongly associated with poorer memory function and that these associations can be detected well before a person develops severe memory loss."