Culture

  • Alcohol screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) refers to clinical strategies that identify and manage unhealthy alcohol use.
  • A new study has assessed potential delivery of SBIRT by nurses to hospitalized patients.
  • Results suggest hospitalized patients find nurse-delivered SBIRT-related care acceptable during their stay.

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A study about how wearing contact lenses affects glaucoma measurements has been named the top presentation at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine's annual St. Albert's Day research symposium.

First author of the study is Marie Brenner, a fourth-year student at Stritch School of Medicine.

A study at the University of Alcalá, Spain has compared the employment crisis of 1991-1994 with the current crisis from 2007 to 2010, as well as the labour reforms that took place in 1994 and 2010 respectively. Its results show that both the evolution of labour market indicators and the response of financial authorities have been quite similar in terms of timing and the design of measures.

BINGHAMTON, NY – Heart attacks in women go largely unrecognized 30 to 55 percent of the time and those who miss the warning signs and fail or delay getting help, run the risk of death or grave disability. But researchers at Binghamton University and SUNY Upstate Medical University have developed an educational program they believe will shorten the time to treatment and ultimately, save lives.

Thousands more American senior citizens with kidney disease are good candidates for transplants and could get them if physicians would get past outdated medical biases and put them on transplant waiting lists, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The Hopkins investigators estimate that between 1999 and 2006, roughly 9,000 adults over 65 would have been "excellent" transplant candidates and approximately 40,000 more older adults would have been "good" candidates for new kidneys. None, however, were given the chance.

New Orleans, LA – A study led by Russell R. Russo, MD, a third-year Orthopaedic Surgery resident at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Medicine, has identified a new source of life-threatening necrotizing fasciitis – "bath salts." The study, describing the first known case of necrotizing fasciitis from an intramuscular injection of the street drug known as "bath salts," is published in the January 2012 issue of Orthopedics, now available online.

It is time to leave apart the belief that mass media are always a source of bad habits. Television, newspaper and the Internet, when used to get information, may turn out to be of help for health.

It is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Research Laboratories at the Fondazione di Ricerca e Cura "Giovanni Paolo II" in Campobasso which analyzed data from a sample of more than 1,000 people from the largest Moli-sani Project, the epidemiological study that recruited 25,000 subjects in Molise, a southern region of Italy.

FRESNO, Calif. – Can eating grapes slow or help prevent the onset of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a debilitating condition affecting millions of elderly people worldwide? Results from a new study published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine suggest this might be the case. The antioxidant actions of grapes are believed to be responsible for these protective effects.

Archaeologists examining late period Mayan containers have identified nicotine traces from a codex-style flask, revealing the first physical evidence of tobacco use by ancient Mayans. The study published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry reveals the flask is marked with Mayan hieroglyphics reading, "y-otoot 'u-may," ("the home of its/his/her tobacco,") making it only the second case to confirm that the text on the exterior of a Mayan vessel corresponds to its ancient use.

Participation in marathon and half-marathon races is at an all-time high, but numerous reports of race-related cardiac arrests have called the safety of this activity into question. A new study finds that participating in these races actually is associated with a relatively low risk of cardiac arrest, compared to other forms of athletics. An analysis of 10 years of data, appearing in the January 12 New England Journal of Medicine, reveals that most of those experiencing cardiac arrest during marathons and half-marathons had undiagnosed, pre-existing cardiac abnormalities.

Hamilton, ON (Jan. 9, 2012) – An irregular heartbeat that you don't even feel but can be picked up by a pacemaker is associated with a significantly increased risk of stroke, says a new McMaster University study.

The report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine today, says that of nearly 2,600 patients without a history of atrial fibrillation but with a recently implanted pacemaker, more than one-third had episodes when the heartbeat would become rapid and irregular for more than six minutes.

AMHERST, Mass. – Chemical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, using a catalytic fast pyrolysis process that transforms renewable non-food biomass into petrochemicals, have developed a new catalyst that boosts the yield for five key "building blocks of the chemical industry" by 40 percent compared to previous methods. This sustainable production process, which holds the promise of being competitive and compatible with the current petroleum refinery infrastructure, has been tested and proven in a laboratory reactor, using wood as the feedstock, the research team says.

MADISON –Placing a stent in a key artery in the neck is safer than ever in patients ineligible for the standard surgical treatment of carotid artery disease, according to a new study published online today in the Journal of Vascular Surgery.

Detroit - Exposure to light appears to have therapeutic effects on Alzheimer's disease patients, a Wayne State University researcher has found.

In a study published recently in the Western Journal of Nursing Research, LuAnn Nowak Etcher, Ph.D., assistant professor of nursing, reported that patients treated with blue-green light were perceived by their caregivers as having improved global functioning.

Promoting immunizations as a part of routine office-based medical practice is needed to improve adult vaccination rates, a highly effective way to curb the spread of diseases across communities, prevent needless illness and deaths, and lower health care costs, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

Increasingly, vaccinations are being offered outside of physician offices at pharmacies, workplaces and retail medical clinics. Even so, office-based medical practice continues to be central to the delivery of recommended vaccinations to adults.