CHICAGO – Patients with major depression who received telephone-administered cognitive behavioral therapy (T-CBT) had lower rates of discontinuing treatment compared to patients who received face-to-face CBT, and telephone administered treatment was not inferior to face-to-face treatment in terms of improvement in symptoms by the end of treatment; however, at 6-month follow-up, patients receiving face-to-face CBT were less depressed than those receiving telephone administered CBT, according to a study in the June 6 issue of JAMA.
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Among nearly 200,000 individuals, daily use of low-dose aspirin was associated with an increased risk of major gastrointestinal or cerebral bleeding, according to a study in the June 6 issue of JAMA. The authors also found that patients with diabetes had a high rate of major bleeding, irrespective of aspirin use.
A researcher in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and his colleagues in the Centre for Lung Health are on a mission to keep patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder out of hospital. No easy task, seeing as COPD is one of the top causes of hospitalization in the country and a major burden on the health-care system.
Mathematicians from the University of Delaware have created a new model of the fluid dynamics and heat flow in human tears. When people blink their eyes, a thin liquid film is spread across the surface of the eye.
Experiments show that the surface of the tear film cools slightly after each blink, and for dry eye patients the rate of cooling can be even higher. The Delaware researchers set out to create a heat transfer model with enough detail to capture this experimentally observed cooling.
Preliminary results from research at Rice University show more than a dozen Gulf Coast bridges on or near Galveston Island would likely suffer severe damage if subjected to a hurricane with a similar landfall as Hurricane Ike but with 30 percent stronger winds.
An awareness of which bridges are most at risk of damage in a strong hurricane helps public safety officials, said Jamie Padgett, a Rice assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Air pollution, a serious danger to the environment, is also a major health risk, associated with respiratory infections, lung cancer and heart disease. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher has concluded that not only does air pollution impact cardiac events such as heart attack and stroke, but it also causes repeated episodes over the long term.
Pirfenidone inhibits the development of inflammation and scarring (fibrosis) in pulmonary tissue and has been approved for the treatment of mild to moderate idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) since the beginning of 2011. In an early benefit assessment in accordance with the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has examined the extent of added benefit of pirfenidone.
Growing popularity of hip and knee replacement surgery places extra burden on critical care services
Roughly 3 percent of patients who undergo total hip and knee replacement surgery require critical care services before they are discharged from the hospital, according to an analysis of roughly half a million patients. The study, published online in advance of print in the July issue of the journal Anesthesiology, demonstrates that these elective surgeries are placing an increasing burden on the critical care services of the health care system and hospitals should respond proactively.
Washington, DC—In a study of mostly minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged families, 99 percent of participants reported having access to the Internet. More than half of the families were interested in receiving health information electronically, an important finding in the quest to improve access to health information. The study, conducted in the Emergency Department at Children's National Medical Center, is published in the June issue of Pediatric Emergency Care.
Physicians can reduce the number of heart failure deaths and unnecessary hospital admissions by using a new computer-based algorithm developed at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) that calculates each patient's individual risk of death. Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the algorithm improves upon clinical decision-making and determines whether or not a patient with heart failure should be admitted to hospital.
Half of adults over age 65 made at least one emergency department (ED) visit in the last month of life, in a study led by a physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and UCSF.
Three quarters of ED visits led to hospital admissions, and more than two-thirds of those admitted to the hospital died there.
In contrast, the 10 percent of study subjects who had enrolled in hospice care at least one month before death were much less likely to have made an ED visit or died in the hospital.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Nobody wins when patients stay in the hospital unnecessarily, so the federal government in recent years has pushed hospitals to be careful about admitting Medicare recipients as inpatients. The apparent result is that more patients are being "held for observation" instead, according to a new study by Brown University gerontologists. While the shift in how hospitals care for elderly patients in the emergency department may reduce costs to Medicare, it can also increase out-of-pocket expenditures for patients.
North Carolina's coordinated, regional systems for rapid care improved survival rates of patients suffering from the most severe heart attack, according to research in the American Heart Association's journal, Circulation.
DURHAM, N.C.— An ambitious effort to coordinate heart attack care among every hospital and emergency service in North Carolina improved patient survival rates and reduced the time from diagnosis to treatment, according to Duke University Medical Center researchers who spearheaded the program.
CHICAGO – An observational study that examined the comparative effectiveness of rhythm control vs. rate control drug treatment on mortality in patients with atrial fibrillation (a rapid, irregular heart beat) suggests there was little difference in mortality within four years of treatment, but rhythm control may be associated with more effective long-term outcomes, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.