COLUMBUS, Ohio – A study of home purchases during the real estate boom years in Chicago shows how one ethically murky – and sometimes illegal - tactic used to sell homes may have contributed to the housing crash.
The tactic was inflating the selling price of a home, but offering the buyer some incentive – often cash back – to accept the inflated price. The buyer could then use the cash-back for a mortgage down payment or other purposes.
Los Angeles, CA (July 8, 2011) Employers increasingly face wage and hour enforcement actions and costly class action lawsuits under the federal and state laws that regulate minimum wages and tipping. With wide variations in federal and state requirements regarding tip credits, tip pooling and service charges, companies must carefully review their policies to avoid labor department investigations and significant liabilities for back pay, according to a recent study published in Compensation & Benefits Review, a SAGE journal.
07/07/11, Clearwater Beach, FL. Research to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, suggests that people can become dependent on highly palatable foods and engage in a compulsive pattern of consumption, similar to the behaviors we observe in drug addicts and those with alcoholism.
Health care laws to protect patients' privacy make it nearly impossible for medical device designers to develop and test the safety and usability of medical products by observing use in an actual practitioner-patient setting. As a result, usability errors and hazards may be overlooked, with the potential for devastating consequences.
A broad, regional system to lower the temperature of resuscitated cardiac arrest patients at a centrally-located hospital improved outcomes, according to a study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Cooling treatment, or therapeutic hypothermia, is effective yet underused, researchers said.
A network of first responders, EMS departments and more than 30 independent hospitals within 200 miles of Minneapolis, Minn., and Abbott Northwestern Hospital collaborated to implement the protocol.
Obstructive sleep apnea may cause changes in blood vessel function that reduces blood supply to the heart in people who are otherwise healthy, according to new research reported in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.
However, treatment with 26 weeks of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) improved study participants' blood supply and function.
Despite changes in standard treatment practice guidelines issued by the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association and the European Society of Cardiology several years ago, there has been no meaningful change in the nation's practice of opening completely blocked coronary arteries with balloons and stents in the days after a heart attack, according to a new study published in the July 11, 2011, issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. The new study concludes that cardiologists in the United States are still performing this procedure late after a heart attack.
PITTSBURGH, July 11 – A new method for scoring the severity of illness for patients after cardiac arrest may help to predict their outcomes, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Most importantly, their findings, published in the early online version of Resuscitation, also show that none of the severity categories rules out the potential for a patient's recovery.
SALT LAKE CITY – One-fifth of all patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension suffer with the fatal disease for more than two years before being correctly diagnosed and properly treated, according to a new national study led by researchers at Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City.
Teenaged boys from well-off Chinese families who say they are physically active and eat plenty of vegetables but few sweets are more likely to be overweight, according to a study led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC).
There is no difference between brand-name and generic drug formulations of amiodarone — taken to control arrhythmia – in the incidence of thyroid dysfunction, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/site/embargo/cmaj101800.pdf.
INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana University and Regenstrief Institute researchers report that it takes significantly longer for orders to forgo resuscitation in the event of cardiac arrest to be written for patients who had that decision made for them by a surrogate decision-maker compared to patients who made their own decisions, even though patients with a surrogate were sicker and the resuscitation issue might arise sooner.
Tel Aviv — Most marketing departments work hard to establish a flawless reputation for their product or service. But new research from Tel Aviv University is showing that perfection is not all it's cracked up to be.
TORONTO, Ont. — More patients are tested and treated for osteoporosis when fracture clinics have someone dedicated to screening for the bone disease, a new study has found. Those patients also do better when the clinic actually provides bone mineral density (BMD) testing or prescription drug treatment as part of its program rather than just referring fracture patients elsewhere.
Philadelphia, PA, July 11, 2011 – In people with Parkinson's Disease (PD), the inability to make quick movements limits basic functioning in daily life. Movement can be improved by various cueing techniques, such as providing visual or auditory stimuli when movements are started. In a study scheduled for publication in the August issue of the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, researchers report that virtual reality (VR) and physical reality exercises can be used to provide effective stimuli to increase movement speeds in PD patients.