PHILADELPHIA, November 20, 2012 -- Six organizations representing physicians, other health care professionals, and patients today issued two new clinical practice guidelines for diagnosing and treating stable ischemic heart disease (IHD), which affects an estimated one in three adults in the United States. The guidelines and patient summaries appear in the November 20 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, published by the American College of Physicians (ACP).
Culture
Boston, MA— More than 85,000 medications are discontinued each year by physicians, yet while physicians share this information with their patients, it is too often not shared with the pharmacists. This communication gap, identified by researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, allows discontinued medications continue to be dispensed at pharmacies, representing an important patient safety concern.
The study will be published on November 20, 2012 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
BOSTON – While stress may be a factor in 60 to 80 percent of all visits to primary care physicians, only three percent of patients actually receive stress management counseling, say researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The study appears online Nov. 19 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
PITTSBURGH, Nov. 19, 2012 – One of the first studies to compare patients who see their doctors in person to those who receive care through the Internet, known as an e-visit, underscores both the promise and the pitfalls of this technology.
CHICAGO – A study suggests that diagnostic tests are frequently repeated among Medicare beneficiaries, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.
Repeat examinations are a "major determinant" of a physician's capacity to care for new patients and of the ability to contain health care costs, the authors write in the study background.
CHICAGO – A study of postdischarge (PD) complications after general surgery procedures found that overall, 16.7 percent of patients experienced a complication and 41.5 percent of complications occurred PD, according to a report published in the November issue of Archives of Surgery, a JAMA Network publication.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 19, 2012) — A new study review published by the University of Kentucky found that music therapy can be beneficial to patients before, during and after a surgical procedure and may reduce pain and recovery time.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Support for gay marriage is growing in Michigan, mirroring changing attitudes in many parts of the United States, according to Michigan State University's State of the State Survey.
A recent survey found that 56 percent of the state's residents support gay marriage while 39 percent oppose it. Two years ago, 48 percent supported gay marriage and 51 percent were opposed.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Three organizations representing America's research universities today launched a website that aims to inform policymakers and the public of the impact that the upcoming budget sequester would have on federal funding for university research.
Injured patients were less likely to die in the hospital if they had alcohol in their blood, according to a study from the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health -- and the more alcohol, the more likely they were to survive.
"This study is not encouraging people to drink," cautions UIC injury epidemiologist Lee Friedman, author of the study, which will be published in the December issue of the journal Alcohol and is now online.
A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows, that a technique for measuring bone density called digital X-ray radiogrammetry (or DXR) used on standard hand radiographs can help to identify patients with a higher risk of hip fracture. The researchers believe that DXR, which is fully comparable with other, more costly methods, can be used preventively to identify people in the risk zone for osteoporosis – a disease estimated to effect some 200 million women worldwide.
These are some of the results of a report for the World Bank, conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Climate Analytics in Berlin. The poorest in the world are those that will be hit hardest, making development without climate policy almost impossible, the researchers conclude.
A drug commonly prescribed to help patients sleep in hospitals has been associated with an increased risk of falls, according to a study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
U.S. sleep specialists from the Mayo Clinic found that the fall rate among the 4,962 patients who took zolpidem during their hospital stay was more than four times as high as the 11,358 who did not take the drug.
Athens, Ga. – Psychological factors can have as much—or more—impact on pediatric chest pain as physical ones, a University of Georgia study found recently. UGA psychologists discovered pediatric patients diagnosed with noncardiac chest pain have higher levels of anxiety and depression than patients diagnosed with innocent heart murmurs–the noise of normal turbulent blood flow in a structurally normal heart.
The UGA research was done in collaboration with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University.
Small floating objects change the dynamics of the surface they are on. This is an effect every serious student of breakfast has seen as rafts of floating cereal o's arrange and rearrange themselves into patterns on the milk. Now scientists have suggested that this process may offer insight into nanoscale engineering processes.