Extending Medicare to include private hospitals could lower Australians' reliance on private health insurance and reduce waiting lists, a health economics expert says.
Professor Jim Butler, Director of the Australian Centre for Economic Research on Health (ACERH) based at ANU, says that opening up private hospitals to more patients will have a double benefit: reducing queues for public hospitals, and making public and private hospitals more competitive.
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A new drug therapy may represent a tremendous step forward in the treatment of some 70,000 cystic fibrosis (CF) patients worldwide, Dr David Sheppard from the University of Bristol will tell an audience at the BA Festival of Science in Liverpool tomorrow [9 September].
Speaking ahead of the conference, Dr Sheppard said:
'The early results with VX-770 suggest that drug therapies which target defects at the root of the disease have the potential to improve greatly the quality of life of CF patients.'
San Diego, September 9, 2008 – With over 60 million Americans diagnosed with prediabetes, putting them at increased risk for diabetes, cardiovascular events and other obesity-related ailments, finding ways to help large populations avoid these complications is an important initiative. In an article published in the October 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine report that organizations such as the YMCA can be an effective vehicle for diabetes-prevention education.
Washington, DC — Widespread use of nanoscale silver will challenge regulatory agencies to balance important potential benefits against the possibility of significant environmental risk, highlighting the need to identify research priorities concerning this emerging technology, according to a new report released today by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN).
Death rates from lung cancer are higher among men who have never smoked than women who have never smoked, says new research published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The research also reports that among lifelong nonsmokers, African Americans and Asians living in Asia (but not in the USA) have higher death rates from lung cancer than people of European descent.
There is an urgent need to develop systems to assess the safety of antimalarials in early pregnancy, says a new essay in this week's PLoS Medicine.
Feiko ter Kuile (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool, UK) and colleagues report that the anti-malarial drugs artemisinins are effective and commonly used, but they have been shown to be toxic to embryos in animal models. Their safety in early human pregnancies remains uncertain, despite up to 10% of embryos being exposed to anti-malarial drugs in malaria endemic countries.
UK children's physical activity levels have been greatly overestimated, with true levels likely to be around six times lower than national data suggest, finds research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood .
Annual health survey data are used to inform UK public health policy and practice, and the figures indicate that the UK population takes a lot of exercise, and that children have been increasingly physically active over the past few years.
Children who are bilingual before the age of 5 are significantly more likely to stutter and to find it harder to lose their impediment, than children who speak only one language before this age, suggests research published ahead of print in Archives of Disease in Childhood.
The researchers base their findings on 317 children, who were referred for stutter when aged between 8 and 10.
All the children lived in Greater London, and all had started school in the UK at the age of 4 or 5.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. However, many people with cardiovascular disease have none of the common risk factors such as smoking, obesity and high cholesterol. Now, researchers have discovered a new link between gum disease and heart disease that may help find ways to save lives, scientists heard today (Tuesday 9 September 2008) at the Society for General Microbiology's Autumn meeting being held this week at Trinity College, Dublin.
UPTON, NY -- If your experiment doesn't go the way you expect, take a closer look -- something even more interesting may have happened. That strategy has led scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory to discover a fundamental shift in an enzyme's function that could help expand the toolbox for engineering biofuels and other plant-based oil products. The results will be published online the week of September 8, 2008, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Baltimore, Md. – September 08, 2008 – Infantile spasms are a severe and potentially devastating epilepsy condition affecting children aged typically 4-8 months. In a new study appearing in Epilepsia, researchers have found that the ketogenic diet, a high fat, low carbohydrate diet more traditionally used for intractable childhood epilepsy, is an effective treatment for this condition before using drugs. The study is the first description of the ketogenic diet as a first-line therapy for infantile spasms.
New York, NY (Sept. 4, 2008) – A new study finds hospitals can save more than $300 a day taking care of seriously ill patients while giving them even better care.
The Archives of Internal Medicine will publish the study by the Center to Advance Palliative Care and National Palliative Care Research Center in its September 8 issue.
Microscopic particles in polluted air can adversely affect the heart's ability to conduct electrical signals in people with serious coronary artery disease, researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
In a recent study of 48 Boston-area patients, all of whom had coronary artery disease, 24-hour Holter monitors were used to examine electrocardiograms for the conductivity change called an ST-segment depression, which may indicate inadequate blood flow to the heart or inflamed heart muscle.
Women age 70 and older who sleep five hours or less per night may be more likely to experience falls than those who sleep more than seven to eight hours per night, according to a report in the September 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Additionally, the use of sleep medications does not appear to influence the association between sleep and risk of falling.