INDIANAPOLIS -- Nearly half of hospitalized American adults age 65 and older require decision-making assistance from family members or other surrogates because the patient is too impaired to make decisions independently, according to a new study from the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University Center for Aging Research. The vast majority of surrogates are children or spouses, and some patients have two or more family member making decisions together.
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ROCHESTER, Minn. — Jan. 21 — A comparative long-range study by Mayo Clinic ophthalmology researchers shows that the probability of blindness from glaucoma 20 years after diagnosis has dropped by half in the last generation. The findings appear online in the "in press" section of the journal Ophthalmology.
From the world of nanotechnology we've gotten electronic skin, or e-skin, and electronic eye implants or e-eyes. Now we're on the verge of electronic whiskers. Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created tactile sensors from composite films of carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles similar to the highly sensitive whiskers of cats and rats. These new e-whiskers respond to pressure as slight as a single Pascal, about the pressure exerted on a table surface by a dollar bill.
DURHAM, N.H. – Thirty-nine percent of unemployed Americans are experiencing long-term unemployment in the wake of the 2008 recession, which is more than double the percent unemployed more than six months but actively seeking work in 2007, according to new research about trends in long-term unemployment since the recession from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.
MISSOULA – A recent study by University of Montana faculty and graduate students found that wolf predation of cattle contributes to lower weight gain in calves on western Montana ranches. This leads to an economic loss at sale several times higher than the direct reimbursement ranchers receive for a cow killed by wolves.
The study found that wolves living on the landscape with cattle have no effect on herd weight, but once a ranch has a confirmed wolf kill, average calf weight decreases relative to if that ranch had not experienced a wolf depredation.
There is much value in training hospital and nursing home staff in the basics of palliative care to make the last days of a dying patient's life as comfortable and dignified as possible. So says F. Amos Bailey of the Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the US. Bailey is the leader of a study¹ that saw the benefits of introducing palliative care strategies, typical of hospices, within the setting of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers.
People may be able to keep the weight off by using a compact elliptical device while sitting at a desk or watching TV, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.
"Adults in the United States spend more than 11 hours per day sitting while doing things like watching television and working on a computer," said Liza Rovniak, assistant professor of medicine and public health sciences. "Evidence suggests that this sedentary lifestyle has contributed to average weight gains of one to two pounds per year among U.S. adults over the last 20 years."
Mortality is higher, and emergency treatment takes longer, for heart attack patients who arrive at hospital during the night or at weekends compared with regular hours, finds a study published on bmj.com today.
The results suggest that presenting outside regular hours may lead to thousands of extra deaths every year. They also show a longer 'door to balloon time' - an emergency procedure to inflate the coronary artery.
Several potentially preventable deficiencies, including failure to select optimal drug doses and suitable outcome measures for a study, accounted for significant delays in the approval of new drugs by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to a study in the January 22/29 issue of JAMA.
Most high-risk cardiac devices in use today approved as modifications to previously-approved devices
Boston – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ensures that high-risk medical devices, such as implantable cardioverter-defibrillators and pacemakers, are safe and effective through its premarket approval (PMA) pathway, during which manufacturers must collect preclinical and clinical data before the device is approved.
Many patients and physicians assume that the safety and effectiveness of newly approved drugs is well understood by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) —but a new study by researchers at Yale School of Medicine shows that the clinical trials used by the FDA to approve new drugs between 2005 and 2012 vary widely in their thoroughness.
Published in the Jan. 22/29 issue of JAMA, the study is the first systematic analysis of the standard used by the FDA in making drug approval decisions.
British Muslims with diabetes may avoid attending GP surgeries to discuss fasting during the holy month of Ramadan – with potentially serious consequences for their future health, new research by the universities of Manchester and Keele shows.
The first study in the UK to explore the beliefs which influence the experience and practices of British Muslims' diabetes management found tensions often exist between observing the important religious ritual in accordance with their faith and the competing need to manage their health.
Levels of depression and anxiety in people with severe rheumatoid arthritis are higher than previously reported, according to new research.As a result of their findings, a multi-centre team led by researchers at the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Genetics and Genomics at the University of Manchester, say that patients with severe active disease, who are waiting to go onto a biological therapy, should be routinely screened for depression by their doctors.
(Boston) – The first large scale study in the U.S. on the mortality of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) has been published and provides new information about the life expectancy of people with the disease. The study appears in the journal Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders.
If you have ever tried to make waffles then you are bound to be familiar with the following problem: You only get good waffles if the iron is heated to the correct temperature. The same principle applies to the manufacture of plastics parts, such as displays, facings, covers and instrument panels, using injection molding techniques. A liquid plastic melt is injected into a steel forming tool which is heated just like a waffle iron. The point is to produce a perfect cast of the tool's surface, which may be smooth like a mirror or feature a functional structure.