Culture

Clinical research in the US needs to better reflect the population's changing demographics in order to better understand the factors that lead to disease or health, according to an article written by concerned physicians and scientists representing several universities within the U.S. published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

Patients trained to administer their own intravenous antibiotics at home (self-administered outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy or S-OPAT), achieved similar or better outcomes compared to patients who received healthcare-delivered OPAT (H-OPAT) with assistance from a home-care nurse or skilled nursing facility, according to a paper published this week in PLOS Medicine. The study, by Kavita P.

DALLAS - December 15, 2015 - Uninsured patients can be trained to safely and efficiently self-administer long-term intravenous antibiotics, UT Southwestern Medical Center physicians have found, a result that may have profound implications for patient treatment at public hospitals across the country.

Rochester, MN, Dec. 15, 2015 - More than 95% of the world's adult population is infected with the virus that causes chickenpox. Up to one third of these individuals will develop shingles (herpes zoster) in their lifetime. A new U.S. study has found that there is a short-term increased risk of stroke after having shingles, reports Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The threat of ostracism influences children to imitate group behaviors as a means of re-affiliating, according to psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin.

Previous studies indicate that, when excluded, adults will mimic behaviors of others to increase "liking and rapport" in an attempt to be re-included; and now, researchers suggest children are no different.

(Boston)-- Healthcare consumers, policy and insurance organizations rely heavily on hospital ranking reports, but how accurate are they? Do differences in patient preferences for life-sustaining treatments that exist between different hospitals affect how hospitals are ranked?

Early research indicates that the use of tumor-treating fields, a type of electromagnetic field therapy, along with chemotherapy in patients with a brain tumor who had completed standard chemoradiation resulted in prolonged progression-free and overall survival, according to a study in the December 15 issue of JAMA.

Among adults with difficult to treat Crohn disease not amenable to surgery, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, compared with conventional therapy, did not result in significant improvement in sustained disease remission at l year and was associated with significant toxicity, according to a study in the December 15 issue of JAMA.

"Switzerland's excellent result in terms of internet access is tainted by the fact that certain parts of the population are disadvantaged, and by rising concerns about privacy. Internet access is not everything", says Prof. Michael Latzer from the Media Change & Innovation Division of IPMZ at the University of Zurich. After 2011 and 2013, he and his team have now carried out the World Internet Project Switzerland for the third time.

When we speak, we "leak" information about our social identity through the nuanced language that we use to describe others, according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This research shows that people can infer a speaker's social identity (e.g., political party affiliation) from how the speaker uses abstract or concrete terms to describe someone else's behavior.

We see it happen all too often: The youthful visage of a candidate becomes, in a few short years, the grizzled countenance of a head of state. But is this oft-observed rapid aging evidence of a statistically significant health impact of being an elected head of state?

A team of researchers led by senior author Anupam Jena, associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, set out to test the theory that politicians elected to lead a country's government may experience premature death.

Researchers from Houston Methodist Hospital and five partner institutions used data from a major stroke clinical study to show that medical centers with more experience and expertise in aggressive medical management had a significantly positive impact on patient outcomes. This, according to research published in the Dec. 15, 2015, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

From diabetes to dementia, from depression to AIDS, large segments of the UK's population are living with conditions that cannot be cured, but must be managed outside of the hospital environment. How technology could transform the future of healthcare will be discussed by Professor Ian Craddock from the University of Bristol at the IEEE World Forum on the Internet of Things (WF-IoT) in Milan, Italy.

Stories about lap dogs are everywhere, but researchers at the Virginia Tech College of Engineering can tell the story of dog lapping.

Using photography and laboratory simulations, researchers studied how dogs raise fluids into their mouths to drink. They discovered that sloppy-looking actions at the dog bowl are in fact high-speed, precisely timed movements that optimize a dogs' ability to acquire fluids.

Their discovery appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Nearly 66 percent of all adverse events experienced by nursing home residents, such as falls, delirium and hallucinations, could be prevented, in part, by monitoring medication more closely. In nursing homes, both registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) perform medication reconciliation, a safety practice during which health care professionals review patients' medications to reduce the likelihood of preventable adverse drug events.