(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – September 24, 2014) St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators found that adjusting treatment based on early response to chemotherapy made a life-saving difference to young patients with an acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) subtype associated with a poor outcome. The study appeared in the September 20 edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Culture
On September 30, 2014, in Washington, DC, higher education and health leaders will release a report that is the first to examine nationwide the impact and use of holistic review—a university admissions process that assesses an applicant's unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic achievement such as grades and test scores—for students pursuing careers in the health professions.
Cardiac arrest outside of hospital is a common and catastrophic medical emergency experienced by about 60,000 people a year in the UK. Less than 10% survive to discharge from hospital.
Immediate cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) offers the best chance of survival and ambulance services throughout the developed world tend to take patients in cardiac arrest to hospital, with CPR ongoing.
EUGENE, Ore. -- Women living where rates of infectious disease are high, according to theory, prefer men with faces that shout testosterone when choosing a mate. However, an international study says not so much, says University of Oregon anthropologist Lawrence S. Sugiyama.
The new study, on which Sugiyama is one of 22 co-authors, ended with that theory crumbling amid patterns too subtle to detect when tested with 962 adults drawn from 12 populations living in various economic systems in 10 nations.
WASHINGTON (Sept. 23, 2014) — A patient survives life-threatening trauma, is intubated in the intensive care unit (ICU) to support his or her affected vital functions, starts to recover, and then develops pneumonia. It's a scenario well-known to physicians, who understand that the development of ventilator-associated pneumonia in critically ill patients often results in significant morbidity, mortality, and additional health care costs.
Fruit and vegetable consumption could be as good for your mental as your physical health, new research suggests.
The research, conducted by the University of Warwick's Medical School using data from the Health Survey for England, and published by BMJ Open focused on mental wellbeing and found that high and low mental wellbeing were consistently associated with an individual's fruit and vegetable consumption.
WASHINGTON, DC -- Gender-based violence affects the physical and mental health of girls and boys, men and women worldwide. A recent study by researchers from the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University addresses the challenge of developing effective strategies to change inequitable and harmful social norms that result in gender-based violence.
Inequitable gender norms are not only related to domestic violence, but also to other behaviors such as multiple sexual partners, smoking and alcohol abuse which lead to poor health outcomes.
Researchers at the University of Chicago have shown that after a long stay in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) only a handful of pathogenic microbe species remain behind in patients' intestines. The team tested these remaining pathogens and discovered that some can become deadly when provoked by conditions that mimic the body's stress response to illness.
September 23, 2014 – The "area under the curve of oxygen desaturation" (AUCDesat) may provide a more sophisticated approach to monitoring blood oxygen levels during procedures using sedation, according to a study published in Anesthesia & Analgesia.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends intensive behavioral counseling to reduce risky sexual behaviors among all sexually active adolescents and for those adults who are at risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), according to a recommendation being published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Approximately 20 million new cases of STIs occur each year in the United States and half of these cases occur in persons ages 15 to 24 years.
The findings back up other epidemiological studies pointing to a link between the development of asthma and stress, particularly work related stress, say the researchers.
They base their findings on just over 7000 working adults, who responded to the German Socio-Economic Panel Study—an annual representative survey of the German population—in 2009 and 2011, when questions about asthma were asked.
OAKLAND, Calif., September 22, 2014 –Patients who were treated with a statin in the hospital after suffering from a hemorrhagic stroke were significantly more likely to survive than those who were not, according to a study published today in JAMA Neurology. This study was conducted by the same researchers who recently discovered that the use of cholesterol-lowering statins can improve survival in victims of ischemic stroke.
Bottom Line: Hospitalized patients who took statins after a stroke caused by an intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH, bleeding in the brain) appeared to have better 30-day survival and were more likely to be discharged to their home or an acute rehabilitation facility than patients who did not use statins or whose statin use was discontinued in the hospital.
Author: Alexander C. Flint, M.D., Ph.D., of Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Redwood City, Calif., and colleagues.
Bottom Line: A health care system reduced its use of telemetry (monitoring to detect irregular heartbeats) by 70 percent by integrating the American Heart Association's (AHA's) guidelines into its electronic ordering system.
Author: Robert Dressler, M.D., M.B.A., of the Christiana Care Health System, Newark, Del., and colleagues.
Generic discount drug programs (GDDPs, which charge nominal fees to fill prescriptions) have grown over time and their initial lower use by racial/ethnic minorities has evaporated., writes author Song Hee Hong, Ph.D., of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, and Sunghee H. Tak, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N., of the University of Memphis, Tennessee.
GDDPS can reduce medication costs and help patients get their drug therapy. However, the initial use of GDDPs was low in 2007 at 3.6 percent of patients receiving any prescription drugs, especially among minorities.