Culture

Why do innocent people go to jail in the United States every year for violent crimes they did not commit? It's a serious question representing the ultimate miscarriage of justice—taking away the freedom of a factually innocent person while also allowing the guilty person to remain free. The U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) wanted to learn answers to prevent wrongful convictions in the first place.

Female doctors' patients do not use health-care services more or die less frequently than patients treated by male doctors, a prospective, observational study by researchers at UC Davis Health System has found.

The study, published in the March-April issue of The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, is the first large, nationwide evaluation of the association between provider gender and patients' use of health-care services and mortality.

TORONTO -- What can sports teams learn from the manufacturing industry? Plenty, according to Timothy Chan of the University of Toronto (U of T) and Douglas Fearing of the Harvard Business School.

Using statistics from the 2012 Major League Baseball season, Chan and Fearing found that positional flexibility – the ability of a player to play multiple positions – is valuable, responsible for up to 15 per cent of the team's runs, as was the case with the Chicago Cubs. Other teams like the Washington Nationals and the Tampa Bay Rays were less robust to injuries.

Participant-led research, such as studies conducted via social networks, are increasingly common and have several advantages over more standard research but there are some concerns about their ethical oversight, according to experts writing in this week's PLOS Medicine.

In low-income countries a substantial challenge in planning and delivering healthcare is the accurate assessment of disease burden. In this week's PLOS Medicine, Miguel SanJoaquin from the University of Malawi College of Medicine and colleagues describe their experience of implementing an electronic patient record system in a large referral hospital in southern Malawi.

Among patients who were identified as likely having moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, treatment based in primary care was not clinically inferior to treatment at a specialist sleep center for improvement in daytime sleepiness scores, according to a study appearing in the March 13 issue of JAMA.

In a study that included 3.3 million percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI; procedures such as balloon angioplasty or stent placement used to open narrowed coronary arteries) procedures, major bleeding after PCI was associated with significantly increased in-hospital mortality, with an estimated 12 percent of deaths after PCI related to bleeding complications, according to a study appearing in the March 13 issue of JAMA.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — As Kenyan citizens negotiated the tensions following the March 4 nationwide elections, memories of the violence that followed the December 2007 vote weighed heavily for many reasons. Among those in any nation with an HIV epidemic, argue authors of a new paper in AIDS Reviews, should be the long-term damage that political conflict can do to public health by disrupting treatment and thereby promoting resistance to antiretroviral drugs and treatment failure.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- A twist on thin-film technology may provide a way to optically detect and analyze multiple substances simultaneously, leading to quicker diagnostics in such industries as health care and homeland security, according to Penn State researchers. One current optical-sensing technology can launch and guide a single light wave, called a surface-plasmon-polariton wave -- SPP wave -- that travels along the flat interface of the sample to be analyzed and a metal film. The SPP wave is launched by sending a light beam through a prism to the other face of the metal film.

Little is known about the value and emotional consequences of expressing anger on the Internet. Rant-sites provide an outlet for anonymous, angry outbursts. How people feel after reading and writing rants and the effects of this behavior is explored in an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Americans work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and retire later than employees in other industrialized countries around the globe. With such demanding careers, it's no surprise that many experience job burnout — physical, cognitive, and emotional exhaustion that results from stress at work. Researchers have found that burnout is also associated with obesity, insomnia, and anxiety.

Researchers from Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have found that a commonly used drug to treat anemia in heart failure patients does not improve patients' health, nor does it reduce their risk of death from heart failure. Results of the international study were presented at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting in San Francisco on March 10 and published simultaneously online by The New England Journal of Medicine.

SAN FRANCISCO (March 11, 2013) — For at-risk patients, a simple screening and management program can be effective in preventing heart failure, according to research presented today at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session.

SAN FRANCISCO (March 11, 2013) —Despite high hopes that a blood pressure-lowering medication called aliskiren would help people following hospitalization for heart failure, no beneficial effects were found, according to research presented today at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session.

Heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalization for people over age 65, costing Medicare billions of dollars annually, and researchers are always on the lookout for more effective treatments.

SAN FRANCISCO (March 11, 2013) — Despite high expectations for a commonly used erectile dysfunction drug to treat patients with diastolic heart failure, no beneficial effects were found in a study presented today at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session.