CHICAGO --- When physicians spend too much time looking at the computer screen in the exam room, nonverbal cues may get overlooked and affect doctors' ability to pay attention and communicate with patients, according to a Northwestern Medicine® study.
Published online in January in the journal Medical Informatics, the study found that doctors who use electronic health records (EHR) in the exam room spend about a third of their visits looking at a computer screen.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — As hospitals and doctors' offices across the country race to join online systems that let them share medical information securely, a new study suggests that these systems may already be helping cut unnecessary care.
Fewer emergency patients got repeated medical scans when they went to a hospital that takes part in a health information exchange, or HIE, according to new findings by University of Michigan researchers published online in the journal Medical Care.
Montreal, January 23 2014 – Living in a household implies sharing duties and responsibilities but it could also imply sharing your diabetes. A research team from the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) has shown, through combined analyses of several studies, evidence that spousal diabetes is a diabetes risk factor. These findings, published today in the open access journal BMC Medicine, have important clinical implications since they can help improve diabetes detection and motivate couples to work together to reduce the risk of developing the condition.
A study of interpretations of anti-social behaviour (ASB) found a significant gap between the views of different age groups - with older people more likely than younger people to interpret public behaviour as anti-social, particularly when associated with young people.
More than 80% of adults thought swearing in a public place was ASB compared with less than 43% of young people, and more than 60% of adults listed cycling or skateboarding on the street compared with less than 8% of young people.
The UK government is considering whether to adopt a recommendation to introduce a new criminal sanction in cases where healthcare workers are "unequivocally guilty of wilful or reckless neglect or mistreatment of patients". A discussion on bmj.com today asks whether this will improve patient care.
A paper in this month's edition of Global Heart (the journal of the World Heart Federation advocates including ultrasound in medical education programmes to realise the full benefits of the technology as early as possible. The review is by J. Christian Fox, Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine and Director of Instructional Ultrasound at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine, CA, USA, and colleagues.
A paper in this month's edition of Global Heart (the journal of the World Heart Federation) says there is mounting evidence regarding the utility of ultrasound in areas outside its traditional field of cardiology, with increasing use reported in general hospital wards, clinics, and even pre-hospital environments. The paper is by Associate Professor Bret Nelson and Dr Amy Sanghvi of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, USA.
Washington, DC (January 23, 2014) — The presence of sickle cell trait among African Americans may help explain why those on dialysis require higher doses of an anemia medication than patients of other ethnicities, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Additional studies are needed to determine the long-term health consequences of this increased dosing.
Drug resistance mutations in HIV reduce the genetic diversity in the rest of the virus genome when they spread within an infected patient, but they do so to a different extent in different patients. A new study published in PLOS Genetics, by Dr Pleuni Pennings and colleagues, found that in some patients a resistance mutation to a particular drug appeared in a single virus particle, which then rapidly proliferated until the entire viral population within the patient consisted of its progeny and was also resistant to the drug.
Researchers from New Zealand report that morbidity following liver transplant is highest among obese patients with diabetes, but these risk factors do not influence post-transplant survival. According to the study published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, body mass index (BMI) is effective for assessing obesity in liver transplant patients.
All those people who've been telling us for years that we should eat more healthy foods and cut our calories – stop, take a moment, and celebrate.
It appears that we actually listened.
Philadelphia, Pa. (January 23, 2014) – Symptoms such as insomnia and emotional distress account for much of the work impact of mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, reports a study in the February issue of Medical Care. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
Drugs used to treat HIV penetrate poorly into lymphatic tissues where most HIV replication takes place and there is persistent low-level virus replication in these tissues according to research from the University of Minnesota and University of Nebraska Medical Center.
The results appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Hispanic women surveyed in the metro Detroit area were twice as likely as white women to be affected by vulvodynia, unexplained vulvar pain that can make sex, tampon use or even sitting excruciating. Meanwhile, the condition affected half as many black women, new University of Michigan research shows.
In all ethnic groups, the prevalence and incidence rates were substantial.
Preclinical studies show that gene therapy can improve muscle strength in small- and large-animal models of a fatal congenital pediatric disease known as X-linked myotubular myopathy. The results, appearing in the Jan. 22 issue of Science Translational Medicine, also demonstrate the feasibility of future clinical trials of gene therapy for this devastating disease.