A new study from North Carolina State University shows that the vast majority of patients at high risk for heart disease or stroke do a poor job of taking statins as prescribed. That's especially unfortunate, because the same study shows that taking statins can significantly increase the quality and length of those patients' lives.
Culture
Increasing access to rogue online pharmacies – those which dispense medications without a doctor's prescription – may be an important factor behind the rapid increase in the abuse of prescription drugs.
WASHINGTON—May 11, 2011—Most Maryland residents trust the health and medical research information provided by traditional media—newspapers (77%), television (71%), magazines (68%), radio (66%)—and the Internet (also 66%), according to a new state poll commissioned by Research!America. Social media fared less well, with 51% saying social media is not trustworthy for health and medical research issues. Fewer than 20% use their cell phone or other mobile device to find health information.
The package on a supermarket steak may say "grass-fed" or "grass-finished," but how can a consumer know whether the cow spent its days grazing peacefully on meadow grass or actually gorged on feedlot corn? In ACS's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, scientists are now reporting the development of a method that can reconstruct the dietary history of cattle and authenticate the origins of beef.
Advances in technology have almost lifted the curtain on the long-awaited era of the "$1,000 genome" — a time when all the genes that make up a person can be deciphered for about that amount – compared to nearly $1 million a few years ago.
London, UK (May 11th, 2011) - In 1988 Margaret Thatcher took control of business rates away from local councils and in 2011 Eric Pickles wants to give it back to them. In his article, What do business rates measure? published by SAGE, Dominic Williams carries out research into the link between business rates and the local economy.
Resettlement services over the last few years have helped many homeless people make positive changes in their lives. The largest study in the UK of the resettlement of single homeless people has found that four-in-five (81 per cent) of a large representative sample were still living independently 18 months after being re-housed.
Medicines regulators are protecting drug company profits rather than the lives and welfare of patients by withholding unpublished trial data, argue researchers on bmj.com today.
They call for full access to full trial reports (published and unpublished) to allow the true benefits and harms of treatments to be independently assessed by the scientific community.
Though "variety is the spice of life" and "opposites attract," most people marry only those whose political views align with their own, according to new research from Rice University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Political scientists found that political attitudes were among the strongest shared traits and even stronger than qualities like personality or looks.
While many 16-year-olds are content with PlayStation, Toronto-area student Marshall Zhang used the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network to invent a new drug cocktail which could one day help treat cystic fibrosis.
The Grade 11 student at Bayview Secondary School in Richmond Hill so impressed eight eminent scientists at the National Research Council of Canada laboratories in Ottawa they awarded him first prize today in the 2011 Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge.
CHICAGO, IL (May 10, 2011) — Research being presented at Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) shows that patients taking a blood thinner (clopidogrel) after having polyps removed during colonoscopy were at relatively low risk of bleeding. Another study shows that a new drug that acts as a hormone, teduglutide, increases intestinal absorption for individuals with short bowel syndrome, which may decrease dependence on intravenous fluid and nutritional support in this at-risk population.
TORONTO, Ont., May 11, 2011 — Disease-modifying drugs (DMDs) are injected medications used to slow the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS), and have been shown to reduce the frequency and severity of relapses. But according to a new study led by St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), adherence to all DMDs is low, with less than half of patients, or 44 per cent, continually adherent after two years.
DETROIT – Lowering the cost of hearing aids isn't enough to motivate adults with mild hearing loss to purchase a device at a younger age or before their hearing worsens, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital.
A new study shows that simply lowering the cost of hearing aids – even by as much as 40% – does not improve hearing aid purchase for patients with partial insurance coverage or those who need to cover the entire cost out of pocket.
Sudden cardiac death is always a shocking, tragic event, especially when it occurs at a young age. But, for the first time, scientists are unraveling how genetic defects can help predict the risk of dying suddenly in individuals with one of the leading causes of this unfortunate phenomenon.
People who are depressed are less likely to adhere to medications for their chronic health problems than patients who are not depressed, putting them at increased risk of poor health, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Researchers found that depressed patients across a wide array of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease had 76 percent greater odds of being non-adherent with their medications compared to patients who were not depressed. The findings were published online by the Journal of General Internal Medicine.