Culture

Bottom Line: A multipart intervention increased adherence rates of annual fecal occult blood testing (FOBT) for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening in vulnerable populations.

Author: David W. Baker, M.D., M.P.H., of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, and colleagues.

Cancer clinicians and a chaplain at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have developed a new tool to help doctors, nurses and other health care providers talk to dying patients and families who are, literally, praying for a miracle.

Due to their previously discovered fractal nature, financial data patterns are self-similar when scaling up. New research shows that the most extreme events in financial data dynamics—reflected in very large price moves—are incompatible with multi-fractal scaling. These findings have been published in EPJ B by physicist Elena Green from the National University of Ireland in Maynooth and colleagues. Understanding the multi-fractal structure of financially sound markets could, ultimately, help in identifying structural signs of impending extreme events.

June 16, 2014 (San Francisco) – Researchers have long understood there is a strong association between diabetes and depression. But new research presented at the American Diabetes Association's 74th Scientific Sessions® shows that symptoms of depression in people with type 2 diabetes can be significantly reduced through interventions for "diabetes distress," suggesting that much of what is being labeled as depression may not be a co-morbid psychiatric disorder after all, but rather a reaction to living with a stressful, complex disease that is often difficult to manage.

WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J., June 14, 2014 – Merck (NYSE: MRK), known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, today announced results from a late-breaking observational study that assessed the differences in time to initiation of insulin use and the proportion of the population initiating insulin among patients with type 2 diabetes taking the combination of JANUVIA® (sitagliptin) and metformin, and patients taking the combination of a sulfonylurea and metformin.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Most research examining growing income inequality in the United States has focused on economic causes, for seemingly obvious reasons.

But a new study suggests that a different cause – the politically induced decline in the strength of worker unions – may play a much more pivotal role than previously understood.

In fact, the role that union decline has played in growing income inequality may actually be larger than many of the favorite explanations offered by economists, such as the education gap in the United States.

CHESTERBROOK, Pennsylvania, June 16, 2014 –Animas Corporation today shared encouraging results from its predictive hypoglycemia-minimizing algorithm in development. Data from a clinical feasibility study demonstrated that the algorithm was capable of helping maintain glucose above hypoglycemic levels an average of 99.1 percent of the time for the 12 participants investigated, all of whom were adults with type 1 diabetes.