Culture

Is it possible for a health care system to redesign its services to better educate patients to deal with their immediate health issues and also become more savvy consumers of medicine in the long run?

The answer is yes, according to a study led by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (SFGH) that was recently reported by the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

HOUSTON — Research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has found that symptoms of depression in patients with newly diagnosed metastatic kidney cancer are associated with survival and inflammatory gene regulation may explain this link.

Linagliptin (trade name: Trajenta®) has been approved since August 2011 to improve blood glucose control ("glycaemic control") in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus whose elevated blood glucose levels are inadequately controlled by diet and exercise. It is an option for patients who do not tolerate or should not take the usual treatment with the drug metformin. Moreover, linagliptin can be added if treatment with metformin alone is not sufficient.

Treating chronic venous leg ulcers with a topical spray containing a unique living human cell formula provides a 52 percent greater likelihood of wound closure than treatment with compression bandages only.

That's the conclusion of a new study conducted in part at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and published online by The Lancet this week.

Religious reasoning should not affect how judges decide cases—and may even infringe on religious freedom, says a scholar. There's a passage in the Old Testament's Deuteronomy that says if a case too difficult to decide comes before the courts, it should be brought to the Levite priests who will render a verdict in God's name. However, one University of Alberta researcher says that may be taking religious freedom a step too far.

Marrying multiple husbands at the same time, or polyandry, creates a safety net for women in some cultures, according to a recent study by a University of Missouri researcher. Extra husbands ensure that women's children are cared for even if their fathers die or disappear. Although polyandry is taboo and illegal in the United States, certain legal structures, such as child support payments and life insurance, fill the same role for American women that multiple husbands do in other cultures.

Researchers in India have developed an improved expert system for the diagnosis of thyroid disease. They describe details of their approach to screening medical data in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering.