Culture

A prior fracture at least doubles a patient's future fracture risk – yet numerous studies from across the world have found that healthcare systems fail to respond to the first fracture to prevent future fractures. Professor Cyrus Cooper, chair of the Committee of Scientific Advisors of the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and director of the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton in the UK stated, "Studies from the UK, USA and Australia have reported that 45% or more of today's hip fracture patients have a prior fracture history.

Toronto – Not allowed to advertise your booze or smokes on a billboard?

That's okay. Research shows online advertising works especially well in places with government ad bans.

"If you want to regulate the offline world, you have to remember that people have access online too and you have to think about how that online world is going to mitigate the effects of your regulation," says Avi Goldfarb, a marketing professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management who co-wrote a study on the topic with Catherine Tucker of MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the third most common type of cardiovascular disease after coronary heart disease and stroke. Researchers at the Centre for Primary Health Care Research in Malmö have mapped the significance of hereditary factors for venous thromboembolism in the entire Swedish population by studying the risk of VTE in children of parents with VTE compared with the children of parents who have not had VTE.

May 30, 2011 – Fredericton, N.B. – In recent years, the apparent decline in boys' academic success rates has troubled politicians, researchers, and educators. It has been described as an educational crisis and a failure of the traditional school setting. The decline has spurred scores of potential solutions to the problem, including the adoption of same-sex classrooms as a way to better address boys' educational needs.

Two years ago, a widely publicized scientific report plucked an old mouse virus out of obscurity and held it up as a possible cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. According to a new study published today by a group of researchers in California, Wisconsin and Illinois, that report was wrong.

The mouse virus is not the culprit in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, said University of California, San Francisco Professor Jay A. Levy, MD, the senior author on the study, published this week by the journal Science.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The end of the Norse settlements on Greenland likely will remain shrouded in mystery. While there is scant written evidence of the colony's demise in the 14th and early 15th centuries, archaeological remains can fill some of the blanks, but not all.

A new position paper by researchers at the European Centre for the Environment and Human Health (ECEHH - part of the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry) and the University of Birmingham has compared the benefits of interaction with actual and virtual natural environments and concluded that the development of accurate simulations are likely to be beneficial to those who cannot interact with nature because of infirmity or other limitations: but virtual worlds are not a substitute for the real thing.

Attending frequently with medically unexplained symptoms is distressing for both patient and doctor and effective treatment or management options are limited: one in five patients have symptoms that remain unexplained by conventional medicine. Studies have shown that the cost to the NHS of managing the treatment of a patient with medically unexplained symptoms can be twice that of a patient with a diagnosis.

The results of this study, conducted in Germany, re-open the debate on whether it is ethical to conduct placebo-controlled studies where patients in the placebo-group are at a serious disadvantage compared to patients taking the new treatments. The study analysed current study designs, for new therapies such as abatacept (Orencia®), golimumab (Simponi®) or tocilizumab (Actemra®), and showed that patients in the placebo group experienced no change in medication, having to continue with their former, ineffective treatment plus placebo.

Results of a study, involving 98,454 patients demonstrated that at 30 days following their first heart attack, RA patients were approximately 20% less likely to be prescribed standard MI treatments, such as statins and betablockers, compared to healthy patients. These finding remained relatively unchanged at 180 days, further highlighting differences between the two groups, with a high number being prescribed the current standards of care within the 180 day period (statins 80%, betablockers 82%, clopidogrel 70%, aspirin 79%) in general.

Results demonstrate that 91% of RCTs recording this kind of FCOI achieved a positive - outcome, compared to 66.7% of RCTs without specific FCOI (p=0.02) and adjusting for confounding factors did not change this finding.

Young children who do not get enough sleep are at increased risk of becoming overweight, even after taking account of lifestyle factors, finds a study published on bmj.com today.

Several studies have shown a relatively consistent relation between shorter sleep duration and increased body weight in children, but doctors are still not sure how sleep and body composition interact in early childhood and whether this shows cause and effect.

Disparities between racial/ethnic minorities and whites cross all aspects of stroke care, according to an American Heart Association/American Stroke Association scientific statement.

Omega-3 fatty acids, combined with two blood-thinning drugs, significantly changed the blood-clotting process and may reduce the risk of heart attacks in patients with stents in their heart arteries, according to research reported in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association.

CORAL GABLES, FL (May 26, 2011) A new research study conducted by University of Miami Frost School of Music's Music Engineering Technology Group touches upon multi-touch surfaces as emerging valuable tools for collaboration, display, interaction, and musical expression. The study will be presented at the 2011 International Conference on New Instruments for Musical Expression in Oslo, Norway this month.