Culture

Researchers in Belgium also show how dogs can help patients with severe sleep problems.

They describe a 35 year old patient with severe excessive daytime sleepiness. She suffered sleep attacks up to six times a day and sometimes slept up to 16 hours a day.

Until recently, this severe sleepiness considerably hampered her social life and limited her use of public transport, as she usually fell asleep within a few minutes of sitting down.

People over age 65 with high psychosocial distress face increased risk of stroke, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.

Psychosocial distress is a broad concept that includes depression, stress, a negative outlook and dissatisfaction with life.

MAYWOOD, Il. - A survey has identified career burnout as a significant problem among neurologists who predominantly work with hospital inpatients.

Nearly 29 percent of these "neurohospitalists" said they had experienced burnout, and 45.8 percent said they were concerned about burnout but had not yet experienced it. (Burnout was defined as maintaining a schedule so burdensome as to limit the time a physician will or could spend as a neurohospitalist.)

A computer model of the heart wall predicted risk of irregular heart rhythms and sudden cardiac death in patients, paving the way for the use of more complex cardiac models to calculate the consequences of genetic, lifestyle and other changes to the heart.

Authors of the new study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, say this is the first report of cardiac modeling being used as an arrhythmic risk predictor for patients.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Low-wage workers, who make up a large and growing share of the U.S. workforce, are especially vulnerable to financial hits that can result from on-the-job injuries and illnesses, according to a policy brief released today by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS).

Efforts to reduce underage exposure to alcohol advertising by implementing time restrictions have not worked, according to new research from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Dutch Institute for Alcohol Policy. The report, published in the Journal of Public Affairs, confirms what Dutch researchers had already learned in that country: time restrictions on alcohol advertising actually increase teen exposure, because companies move the advertising to late night.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Despite U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations requiring generic medications to carry identical warnings to those on corresponding brand-name products, a study by Regenstrief Institute researchers has found that more than two-thirds of generic drugs have safety-warning labels that differ from the equivalent brand-name drug.

Over 9 million people died as a consequence of high blood pressure in 2010, making it the health risk factor with the greatest toll worldwide, say experts.

Smoking and alcohol use have also overtaken child hunger in the last two decades to become the second and third leading risks globally, according to a study estimating the disease burden attributable to 43 risk factors in 1990 and 2010.

The analysis was undertaken by an international consortium of scientists as part of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, which is published in The Lancet today.

Primary sources publisher, Adam Matthew, has announced the release of the fourth section of its highly renowned Victorian Popular Culture Portal. "Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema" explores the cultural history of optical entertainments from the late 18th century to the early 20th century, bringing to life the rich cultural and scientific history from which cinema was born.

Almost one in three pedestrians is distracted by mobile devices while crossing busy road junctions, finds an observational study published online in Injury Prevention.

Texting while crossing the road is the most distracting, and potentially most dangerous, activity, prompting the authors to suggest that a low tolerance approach similar to that taken towards drink-driving might be needed.

HOUSTON - Donated umbilical cord blood establishes a new blood supply in patients more quickly after transplantation when it is first expanded in the lab on a bed of cells that mimics conditions in the bone marrow, researchers report in the Dec. 13 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Poor eating and exercise habits could be the game-changer in the fight against heart disease and stroke deaths, according to the American Heart Association's "Heart Disease and Stroke Statistical Update 2013," published in the American Heart Association journal, Circulation.

Some people like to have a few close friends, while others prefer a wider social circle that is perhaps less deep. These preferences reflect people's personalities and individual circumstances — but is one approach to social networks "better" than the other? New research suggests that the optimal social networking strategy depends on socioeconomic conditions.

  • People who develop chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) are typically age 65 and older, but participants in CLL clinical trials are usually several years younger;
  • The age of CLL patients is not usually considered when determining treatment;
  • This study suggests that older and younger CLL patients require different therapy.

A new listening device, developed by scientists from the University of Southampton, is being used to monitor the effectiveness of the treatment of kidney stones - saving patients unnecessary repeat therapy and x-ray monitoring.

If kidney stones cannot be dissolved by drugs, the favoured procedure is lithotripsy. Lithotripsy works by focusing thousands of shock waves onto the kidney stones in an effort to break them into pieces small enough to urinate out of the body or be dissolved by drugs.