Culture

The widespread use of illegal steroids among Major League Baseball players has been fueled by an "economy of bodily management," the free agent market and exploding television revenues, a UT Arlington assistant professor argues in a newly published research paper.

Sarah Rose, a labor and disability historian, says by attacking individual ballplayers' morality, commentators have obscured the more salient issue.

When a pandemic spreads, health officials must quickly formulate a strategy to limit infections and deaths. That requires sifting through massive amounts of data in a short amount of time and organizing medical personnel who may have little information on the pandemic.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — People with multiple sclerosis (MS) might assume that the fatigue they often feel just comes with the territory of their chronic neurological condition.

But a new University of Michigan study suggests that a large proportion of MS patients may have an undiagnosed sleep disorder that is also known to cause fatigue. And that disorder – obstructive sleep apnea – is a treatable condition.

CHICAGO – From warp drives to hyperspace, science fiction has continuously borrowed from, and sometimes anticipated, the state of the art in scientific progress. This has resulted in the perception that science and science fiction have a causal relationship, one finding direction from and fulfilling the science fantasy laid out before it.

High quality early childhood education for disadvantaged children can simultaneously reduce inequality and boost productivity in America, contends James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and one of the nation's leading experts on early childhood education.

PHILADELPHIA – Heavy drinking is common in the United States and takes a personal and societal toll, with an annual estimated cost of $223.5 billion due to losses in workplace productivity, health care and criminal justice expenses. Data shows that 23 percent of individuals age 12 or older reported drinking five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month, and almost seven percent reported doing so on at least five days per month.

Americans don't like to talk about social class. But new research from Northwestern and Stanford universities suggests that, at least in college and university settings, they should do just that.

An upcoming article in "Psychological Science" describes a novel one-hour intervention that closed by 63 percent the persistent academic achievement gap between first-generation college students and continuing-generation students. (Continuing-generation students are defined as those with at least one parent with a four-year college degree.)

Falling stock prices lead to increased hospitalisations for mental disorders, according to new research published today in the journal Health Policy and Planning.

Researchers assessed the relationship between stock price movements and mental disorders using data on daily hospitalisations for mental disorders in Taiwan over 4,000 days between 1998 and 2009. They found that a 1000-point fall in the Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalisation Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX) coincided with a 4.71% daily increase in hospitalisations for mental disorders.

Suffering an injury to the head or neck increases ischemic stroke risk three-fold among trauma patients younger than 50, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2014.

"These findings are important because strokes after trauma might be preventable," said Christine Fox, M.D., M.A.S., lead author and assistant professor of neurology at the University of California San Francisco.

Hispanic stroke patients admitted to hospitals in the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were less likely than non-Hispanics in the same border states to receive clot-busting drugs and more likely to die, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2014.

Researchers analyzed stroke care for Hispanic and non-Hispanic patients according to demographics and clinical characteristics in states bordering Mexico and states not on the Mexican border. They found:

Washington, DC (February 13, 2014) — Intensive dialysis treatments in pregnant women with kidney failure lead to a higher proportion of live births than standard dialysis care, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The findings suggest that more frequent and longer dialysis sessions should be considered for dialysis patients of childbearing age who want to become pregnant or who are already pregnant.

Metabolic risk factors cluster similarly in children and adults, according to a study carried out at the University of Eastern Finland. Furthermore, in adults, the clustering of these risk factors increases the risk of premature death caused by type 2 diabetes, myocardial infarction and cardiovascular diseases. The results indicate that lifestyle interventions aiming at the prevention of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases should be invested in already in childhood. The results of the study were recently published in Diabetologia.

Japanese researchers have determined that sarcopenia—a loss of skeletal muscle mass—increases risk of sepsis and mortality risk in patients undergoing live donor liver transplantation. Findings published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, suggest that post-transplant sepsis was reduced in candidates with sarcopenia who received early nutritional support with a feeding tube, known as enteral nutrition.

Looking for a good book? Stay away from the award-winning section of the bookstore or library.

New research from Amanda Sharkey of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business finds that a book read after winning a prestigious award will likely be judged more negatively than if it's read in its pre-award days.

Four out of five people in the United States live within an hour's drive of a hospital equipped to treat acute stroke — yet very few get recommended treatment, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2014.

Of the more than 370,000 Medicare stroke claims for 2011 that researchers examined: