Culture

Efforts to halt the growing abuse of prescription drugs must include addressing the availability of these drugs on the Internet and increasing physician awareness of the dangers posed by Internet pharmacies.

As Americans live longer with multiple medical conditions, managing their care is becoming increasingly challenging. Being able to define and measure patient complexity has important implications for how care is organized, how physicians and health care systems are paid, and how resources are allocated. In an article in the Dec.

What do sweaty palms and abnormal heart rhythms have in common? Both can be initiated by the nervous system during adrenaline-driven "flight or fight" stress reaction when the body senses danger.

Governed by the sympathetic nervous system, an abnormal "flight or fight" stress response which causes excessive sweaty palms (called hyperhidrosis) may also contribute to problems like dangerous irregular heart rhythms from the lower chambers of the heart, called ventricular arrhythmias.

Sophia Antipolis -- The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) welcomes the spotlight that a US study has placed on the importance of measuring rates of rehospitalisation following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures.

The research, published today in JACC Cardiovascular Interventions¹, represents one of the first studies to explore PCI readmissions and highlights the need for similar studies to be initiated across Europe to improve patient care.

(Chicago, IL) - Location and other geographical factors play an important role in supporting economic growth and development in emerging markets, a new study from the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty has found.

The study, which examines growth in the Thai economy between 1986 and 1996, shows that a high concentration of enterprise in an area predicts high subsequent growth in and around that area. Entrepreneurial activity decreases virtually by the mile the further away one gets from centers of economic concentration.

BOSTON – In a new study, researchers have found a 44 percent increase since 2001 in the number of hospitals that offer definitive emergency care to patients with heart attack, but only a 1 percent increase in access to that care. The study, led by Thomas W. Concannon, PhD, Assistant Professor Tufts Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine, will be published January 1, 2012 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a journal of the American Heart Association.

An increase in female representation in local politics has caused a significant rise in documented crimes against women in India, new research has found.

That is good news, say the authors of the study carried out at the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) at the University of Warwick in the UK, Harvard Business School and the IMF, who argue that the increase is down to greater reporting of crimes against women, rather than greater incidence of crimes against them.

New research shows 63% of women age 50 and older reported persistent, incident, or intermittent knee pain during a 12-year study period. Predictors for persistent pain included higher body mass index (BMI), previous knee injury, and radiographic osteoarthritis (OA). Details of this longitudinal study are available in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

With the share of married adults at an all-time low in the United States, new research by demographers at Cornell University and the University of Central Oklahoma unveils clues why couples don't get married – they fear divorce.

Among cohabitating couples, more than two-thirds of the study's respondents admitted to concerns about dealing with the social, legal, emotional and economic consequences of a possible divorce.

Most people remember listening to the official UK top 40 singles chart and watching the countdown on Top of the Pops, but can science work out which songs are more likely to 'make it' in the chart? New research has looked at whether a song can be predicted to be a 'hit'.

Among people recently infected with HIV, immediate antiretroviral therapy (ART) appears preferable to deferring treatment, according to a new study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases and now available online. Although the benefits of ART during early HIV-1 infection remain unproven, the findings support growing evidence favoring earlier ART initiation.

Alcohol use has often been linked to criminal activity on the part of both perpetrators as well as victims. While this relationship has been well documented among adults, fewer studies have explored this relationship among adolescents. A new study has found a strong relationship between drinking during adolescence and the commission of crimes, and criminal victimization, for both genders.

Results will be published in the March 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

Severely impaired stroke survivors could walk better when a robotic assist system was added to conventional rehabilitation, according to a study in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Italian researchers evaluated two-year mobility outcomes in 48 stroke survivors who had been discharged from a hospital and were unable to walk at the study's start. Half underwent conventional overground gait rehabilitation and half had conventional rehab plus electromechanical robotic gait training for several months.

America's heart and blood vessel health is far from ideal, according to data in the American Heart Association's "Heart Disease and Stroke Statistical Update 2012," published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Gay men are able to lead healthier, less stress-filled lives when states offer legal protections to same-sex couples, according to a new study examining the effects of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The study, "Effect of Same-Sex Marriage Laws on Health Care Use and Expenditures in Sexual Minority Men: A Quasi-Natural Experiment," is online in the American Journal of Public Health.