Home blood pressure-monitoring kits can save insurance companies money by improving healthcare quality and reducing healthcare costs, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Hypertension.
In the United States, more than 76 million adults have diagnosed high blood pressure, and many more are undiagnosed. Since high blood pressure typically has no symptoms, periodic testing is critical especially for people with the factors that put them at risk for the condition.
Bottom Line: Management of low-risk prostate cancer (which is unlikely to cause symptoms or affect survival if left untreated) varies widely among urologists and radiation oncologists, with patients whose diagnosis is made by a urologist that treats non-low-risk prostate cancer more likely to receive treatment vs. observation.
Author: Karen E. Hoffman, M.D., M.H.Sc., of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and colleagues.
Bottom Line: Eating foods high in ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) from vegetable and marine sources may help reduce the risk for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the fatal neurodegenerative disease commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease.
Author: Kathryn C. Fitzgerald, M.Sc., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues.
New research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center is shedding light on the important role a diagnosing urologist plays in whether older men with low-risk prostate cancer receive treatment for their disease, and if so, the type of treatment they receive as a result.
The findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, sought to examine why active surveillance, a management program for low-risk disease, which includes repeat PSAs, prostate exams and biopsies, is underused in this patient population.
Despite impressive medical strides, cancer remains a leading killer and overwhelming burden to healthcare systems, causing well over a half million fatalities per year with a projected cost of $174 billion by 2020, according to the National Cancer Institute. Reducing the human and economic toll will require diagnosis and intervention at early stages of illness, when the best prognosis for a cure exists.
If you consider your friends family, you may be on to something. A study from the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University finds that friends who are not biologically related still resemble each other genetically.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is coauthored by James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at UC San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis, professor of sociology, evolutionary biology, and medicine at Yale.
One of the riddles of mammal evolution explained: the strong conservation of the number of trunk vertebrae. Researchers of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the University of Utah show that this conservation is probably due to the essential role of speed and agility in survival of fast running mammals. They measured variation in vertebrae of 774 individual mammal skeletons of both fast and slow running species.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Sun Yat-sen University in China have shown that acute glaucoma in mice is largely an inflammatory disease and that high pressure in the eye causes vision loss by setting in motion an inflammatory response similar to that evoked by bacterial infections.
The study, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has immediate clinical relevance in treating the tens of millions of people worldwide from what is known as acute closed-angle glaucoma.
CRISPR, a system of genes that bacteria use to fend off viruses, is involved in promoting antibiotic resistance in Francisella novicida, a close relative of the bacterium that causes tularemia. The finding contrasts with previous observations in other bacteria that the CRISPR system hinders the spread of antibiotic resistance genes.
The results are scheduled for publication in PNAS Early Edition.
(PHILADELPHIA) – Pulmonary inflammation can cause shallow breathing and the lungs to become brittle in patients who experience multiple blood transfusions, sepsis, lung surgery and acute lung trauma. This complication can leave patients on ventilators, which can further traumatize the lungs, and often results in a mortality rate of 30 to 40 percent. To date, no medication has been successful at preventing or mitigating the damage caused by lung inflammation. Now, a multidisciplinary research team led by David Eckmann, MD, PhD, Horatio C.
ST. LOUIS – Children with developmental disabilities are at higher risk for abuse and neglect from parents than children developing at a typical rate. So far, there was little evidence of specific parental behaviors that were associated with the risk, but a SLU study finds inappropriate expectations and lack of empathy play a significant role in triggering the risk.
Getting more people to eat seafood because it's a healthier option will need careful planning to ensure that the expansion of the aquaculture sector does not pose a risk to the environment. Business leaders in the sector should not aim only for profits, but rather embrace the principles of the One Health model that sees the health of humans being interwoven with that of animals and the environment.
Buying keywords of a popular competitors' brand names on search engines such as Google and Bing can backfire according to a new study in the Articles in Advance section of Marketing Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Many animals exhibit segmental patterns that manifest themselves during development. One classical example is the sequential and rhythmic formation the segmental precursors of the backbone, a process that has been linked to the ticking of an oscillator in the embryo – the "segmentation clock".
Circulating tumor cells spread ovarian cancer through the bloodstream, homing in on a sheath of abdominal fatty tissue where it can grow and metastasize to other organs, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in Cancer Cell.
"This completely new way of thinking about ovarian cancer metastasis provides new potential avenues to predict and prevent recurrence or metastasis," said senior author Anil Sood, M.D., professor of Gynecologic Oncology and Reproductive Medicine and Cancer Biology.