NEW YORK – July 28, 2011 – The Journal of Financial Economics recently published a paper by Andrew Ang, Chair, Ann F. Kaplan Professor of Business and Chair, Finance and Economics Division at Columbia Business School; Sergiy Gorovyy, PhD candidate, Columbia Business School; and Gregory B. van Inwegen, Head of Quantitative Research/Managing Director for Tailored Portfolio Group of Citi Private Bank, that was the first paper to formally investigate hedge fund leverage using actual hedge fund ratios.
Culture
A recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) found that the greater an individual's total muscle mass, the lower the person's risk of having insulin resistance, the major precursor of type 2 diabetes.
ST. PAUL, Minn. – A new type of therapy may help people with symptoms such as pain, weakness, or dizziness that can't be explained by an underlying disease, according to a study published in the July 27, 2011, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. These symptoms, which can also include fatigue, tingling and numbness, are also known as functional or psychogenic symptoms.
Can a cozy dining table and nice music prompt people to reach for the greens and go light on dessert?
So suggests a new study probing why people tend to eat more-nutritious meals at home than away from home. The findings, based on data from 160 women who reported their emotional states before and after meals, add to mounting evidence that psychological factors may help override humans' wired-in preference for high-fat, sugary foods.
Got lots of fast food restaurants and other outlets that sell junk food in your neighborhood? Then your teen is more likely to nosh regularly on burgers and fries and wash them down with a soda.
That is the unpalatable finding of a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research that examined the effect of higher concentrations of less healthy food outlets on adolescent junk food consumption.
- Patients' own kidney cells can be reprogrammed and used as therapy against kidney disease
- Cells can easily be collected from the urine
- 88,000 patients are waiting for a kidney transplant in the United States, and they wait for an average of 3 to 5 years
Subtle physical changes impact panic sufferers more severely
People with panic disorder probably won't be surprised by the results, Meuret said.
By definition, the majority of the 13 symptoms of panic attack are physiological: shortness of breath, heart racing, dizziness, chest pain, sweating, hot flashes, trembling, choking, nausea and numbness. Only three are psychological: feeling of unreality, fear of losing control and fear of dying.
A wide range of clinical and non-clinical factors can affect whether women go on to have a vaginal delivery after having a caesarean, according to two major reviews published in the August issue of the Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Private health insurance, induction, cervical ripening agents, local guidelines and scoring systems were just some of the issues explored by the reviews of 60 studies, published over 24 years, covering more than 700,000 women and hundreds of hospitals in 13 countries.
While some pain killers need to be injected into the damaged tissue in order to work, topical anaesthetics only need to be spread on the surface. The earliest examples of "topical" anaesthetics contained cocaine, but now a new systematic review has shown that newer agents that don't contain cocaine can effectively treat pain caused by torn skin. This makes these pain killers an attractive choice for doctors who need to sew-up a patient's skin wound.
Studies have shown that family history is a risk factor for COPD, but have not accounted for family history of smoking. Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital, the University of Colorado, and National Jewish Health compared 821 COPD cases with 776 control smokers from the COPD Gene Study, capturing parental smoking and COPD histories, along with environmental tobacco smoke exposure. Their findings noted a strong risk factor for COPD when a family COPD history exists, independent of other factors.
DURHAM, N.H. – Families are increasingly relying on public health insurance plans to provide coverage for their children, a growing trend that researchers say is tied to job losses, coverage changes to private health insurance plans, and expanded access to public plans, according to new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.
The trend is particularly pronounced within rural and inner-city areas, which traditionally have had lower coverage rates than suburban areas.
Nibbling by herbivores can have a greater impact on the width of tree rings than climate, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, could help increase the accuracy of the tree ring record as a way of estimating past climatic conditions.
Many factors in addition to climate are known to affect the tree ring record, including attack from parasites and herbivores, but determining how important these other factors have been in the past is difficult.
Children born after unplanned pregnancies tend to have a more limited vocabulary and poorer non-verbal and spatial abilities; however this is almost entirely explained by their disadvantaged circumstances, according to a new study published on bmj.com today. The same study reported no adverse effects of infertility treatment on the children.
In the UK, as many as 30-40% of pregnancies that end in childbirth are unplanned, while the number of children born after assisted reproductive technologies is growing every year.
Doctors should be cautious about prescribing intensive glucose lowering treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes as a way of reducing heart complications, concludes a new study published on bmj.com today.
French researchers found that intensive glucose lowering treatment, which is widely used for people with type 2 diabetes to reduce their heightened risk of cardiovascular disease, showed no benefit on all-cause or cardiovascular mortality.
Around a sixth of fast food customers used calorie information and, on average, bought food with lower calories since the introduction of a labelling system in the US, says a new study published on bmj.com today.
US researchers found there has been a small but positive impact from a law introduced in 2008 in New York requiring chain restaurants with 15 or more branches nationally to provide calorie information on menus and menu boards in the city.