Researchers in the Netherlands find a surprisingly high prevalence and long duration of chronic abdominal pain among children consulting in primary care.
Analyzing data from a 12-month prospective study of 305 children ages 4 to 17 years who visited a primary care physician for abdominal pain, researchers found most had or developed chronic abdominal pain – pain at least one time a month during at least three consecutive months that has an impact on daily activities.
DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. – June 21, 2013 – A new study reports that the use of a quarterly report card is associated with improved colonoscopy quality indicators. Endoscopists at the Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Indianapolis, Ind., who participated in the study showed an overall adjusted adenoma (precancerous polyp) detection rate increase from 44.7 percent to 53.9 percent, and a cecal intubation rate increase from 95.6 percent to 98.1 percent. These two metrics are validated measures of colonoscopy performance quality.
PHILADELPHIA-- The brain-preserving cooling treatment known as therapeutic hypothermia is rarely being used in patients who suffer cardiac arrest while in the hospital, despite its proven potential to improve survival and neurological function, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania report in the June issue of Critical Care Medicine.
Scientists at the University of Sheffield have found that high quality science by female academics is underrepresented in comparison to that of their male counterparts.
The researchers analysed the genders of invited speakers at the most prestigious gatherings of evolutionary biologists in Europe - six biannual congresses of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) and found that male speakers outnumbered women.
Patients transferred to hospital via helicopter ambulance tend to have a higher survival rate than those who take the more traditional road route, despite having more severe injuries. The research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care suggests that air ambulances are both effective and worthy of investment.
Helicopters have been used as emergency ambulances for the past 40 years. For much of that time there has been ongoing debate about the cost of the service compared to the benefit in saving lives.
The young field of "neureconomics" has shown that humans have a well-developed, innate sense of justice, presumably due to our evolutionary history as social animals. Johanna Alexopoulos and colleagues from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, here show that two key variables determine whether we feel that a reward has been fairly distributed: how much we received compared to our peers, and how much influence we had over the distribution.
WASHINGTON —More than three-quarters (81.8 percent) of unscheduled admissions to the hospital now come through the emergency department, which is a sharp increase from the previous decade when only 64.5 percent of unscheduled admissions came through the ER. A study, published early online this week in the journal Medical Care, re-confirms recent findings by the RAND Corporation highlighting the growing role emergency physicians play in health care beyond the emergency department ("Changes in the Source of Unscheduled Hospitalizations in the United States").
San Francisco, CA. (June 20, 2013) – Residents in anesthesiology training programs have high rates of burnout and depression, reports a survey study in the July issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS).
The findings raise concerns that, "In addition to effects on the health of anesthesiology trainees, burnout and depression may also affect patient care and safety," write Dr Gildasio S. de Oliveira, Jr, and colleagues of Northwestern University, Chicago.
INDIANAPOLIS -- An interdisciplinary team that actively involves a nursing home patient's own physician plus a pharmacist has substantially better odds of improving the quality of nursing home care, according to a new systemic review of studies on long-term-stay patients' care.
A new study by Queen's University researchers has determined that adults who accumulated 150 minutes of exercise on a few days of the week were not any less healthy than adults who exercised more frequently throughout the week.
Ian Janssen and his graduate student Janine Clarke studied 2,324 adults from across Canada to determine whether the frequency of physical activity throughout the week is associated with risk factors for diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – June 20, 2013 – African-Americans with Medicaid as their primary insurance were less likely to receive a living kidney transplant (LKT) than patients with private insurance, according to a new study by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
The study is published on the Early View online edition of Clinical Transplantation.
Almost half of the mobile apps running on Apple's iOS operating system access the unique identifier of the devices where they're downloaded, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have found. In addition, more than 13 percent access the devices' location and more than 6 percent the address book. The researchers developed a new app that detects what data the other apps running on an iOS device are trying to access.
OAKLAND, Calif., June 20, 2013 — A more accurate and reliable stroke prediction model has been developed to help physicians decide whether to start blood-thinning treatment for patients with atrial fibrillation, as described in the current online issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association.
State policymakers' attention to teacher quality—an issue education research shows is essential to improving schooling outcomes for racial minority students—is highly responsive to low graduation rates among white students, but not to low graduation rates among black students, according to a Baylor University study.
The findings are evidence that "the persisting achievement gap between white and black students has distinctively political foundations," the researchers wrote.
Patients who have early arthritis consume less alcohol than controls, regardless of the type of arthritis, according to a new study published online today in the journal Rheumatology. In rheumatoid arthritis (RA) specifically, the inverse association between alcohol and disease was greater in men than it was in women.