Injured patients who live near trauma centers that have closed have higher odds of dying once they reach a hospital, according to a new analysis by UC San Francisco researchers.
Trauma centers are specially staffed and equipped to provide care to severely injured people. They can be costly to operate and many centers struggle to keep their doors open. During the last two decades, about a third of the nation's 1,125 trauma centers have shut down.
Oxytocin, also known as the 'love hormone', could provide a new treatment for anorexia nervosa, according to new research by a team of British and Korean scientists.
The study, published today, found that oxytocin alters anorexic patients' tendencies to fixate on images of high calorie foods, and larger body shape. The findings follow an earlier study by the same group showing that oxytocin changed patients' responses to angry and disgusted faces.
A new paper published online today in the British Geriatrics Society journal Age and Ageing argues that despite a year-on-year increase in the number of people over the age of 50 being diagnosed with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), there is a reluctance of healthcare professionals to offer HIV tests to older people. This results in high rates of "late presentation" and therefore significantly increased mortality.
You can't catch a cold from a friend online. But can you catch a mood? It would seem so, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego.
Published in PLOS ONE, the study analyzes over a billion anonymized status updates among more than 100 million users of Facebook in the United States. Positive posts beget positive posts, the study finds, and negative posts beget negative ones, with the positive posts being more influential, or more contagious.
Pregnant women may face an increased risk of early heart disease when they develop gestational diabetes, according to research in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Gestational diabetes, which develops only during pregnancy and usually disappears after the pregnancy, increases the risk that the mother will develop diabetes later. The condition is managed with meal planning, activity and sometimes insulin or other medications.
OAKLAND, Calif. — Women who experience gestational diabetes may face an increased risk of early heart disease later in life, even if they do not develop type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome subsequent to their pregnancy, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
A multi-institutional study led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Broad Institute has identified how the intestinal microbial population of newly diagnosed Crohn's disease patients differs from that of individuals free of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In their paper in the March 12 issue of Cell Host and Microbe, the researchers report that Crohn's patients showed increased levels of harmful bacteria and reduced levels of the beneficial bacteria usually found in a healthy gastrointestinal tract.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Megan Ranney, M.D., M.P.H., an emergency medicine attending physician at Hasbro Children's Hospital, recently led a study that found a text-message program may be an effective violence prevention tool for at-risk teen girls. The study has been published online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Valentine's Day has come and gone. But those images of romance are still everywhere : a happy couple holding hands in an eharmony ad, two lovebirds sharing a tender kiss in a Nikon camera commercial.
Advertising filled with romantic images, featuring "happy togetherness" in magazines and stores as well as on television and websites might resonate with you if you have a special someone. But if you're single, a new study shows you're not buying.
Thin films of spin ice have been shown to demonstrate surprising properties which could help in the development of applications of magnetricity, the magnetic equivalent of electricity.
Published today in Nature Communications, a team of researchers based at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), in collaboration with scientists from Oxford and Cambridge, found that, against expectations, the Third Law of Thermodynamics could be restored in thin films of the magnetic material spin ice.
NEW ORLEANS─The number of total knee replacement (TKR) procedures continues to climb, as does the number of revision total knee replacement (RTKR) surgeries. In the study, "The Epidemiology of Revision Total Knee Arthroplasty in the United States," presented today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), researchers used the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) to evaluate the cause of knee failure for 301,718 revision RTKR surgeries performed between 2005 and 2010.
Implementation of community-based interventions alone is unlikely to be effective for reducing most alcohol-related harms and risky alcohol consumption, according to a study by Australian researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Anthony Shakeshaft and colleagues from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW (University of New South Wales), report that alcohol-related crime, road-traffic crashes, and hospital inpatient admissions did not differ between communities that did and did not implement community-based interventions.
A large team of experts led by a Johns Hopkins geriatrician reports that efforts to improve the care of older adults and others with complex medical needs will fall short unless public policymakers focus not only on preventing hospital readmission rates, but also on better coordination of community-based "care transitions." Lessons learned from managing such transitions for older patients, they say, may offer a framework for overall improvement.
Patients who received help from a poison center had shorter hospital stays and lower hospital charges among those who are the most expensive to treat, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
Poison centers provide 24-hour assistance year round to the public and to medical professionals. While studies show that poison centers reduce system-wide costs, their impact on patient outcomes at the hospital level has not been clear, the study's authors report.
Patients brought to hospital emergency departments (EDs) more than once in a year for treatment of opioid drug overdoses are more likely to be hospitalized for overdose and to need respiratory support with a mechanical ventilator. A study conducted by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators also identified factors that increased the risk of subsequent overdoses requiring emergency department visits.