Culture

Science and education funding have gotten a lot more political. New York state, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, received 20 percent of all Medicare's graduate medical education (GME) funding while 29 states, including Mississippi, among the reddest of red states and severely lacking in doctors, got less than 1 percent.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., – Nov. 4, 2013 – Doctors have known for years that atrial fibrillation (AF), or irregular heartbeat, increases the risk for stroke, but now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have shown that it also increases the risk for heart attack. In fact, for women and African Americans, it more than doubles the risk.

The study is published in the Nov. 4 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Will the growing use of health information technology (IT) and electronic-health (e-health) applications impact the future demand for physicians? Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and The Commonwealth Fund think so. Based on their analysis of recent trends in digital health care and a review of the scientific literature, the authors conclude that patients' future use of physician services will change dramatically as electronic health records and consumer e-health "apps" proliferate.

Thanks to a wave of aging baby boomers, epidemics of diabetes and obesity, and the Affordable Care Act, which aims to bring health care coverage to millions more Americans, the United States faces a severe shortage of primary health care providers.

In a series of papers published in the November 2013 issue of Health Affairs, researchers at UC San Francisco advocated a number of potential solutions to the problem.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – When patients undergo diagnostic lab tests as part of the inpatient admission process, they may wonder why or how physicians choose particular tests. Increasingly, medical professionals are using electronic medical systems that provide lists of lab tests from which medical professionals can choose. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her colleagues have studied how to modify these lists to ensure health professionals order relevant tests and omit unnecessary lab tests, which could result in better care and reduced costs for patients.

Usually, research findings on the state of U.S. race relations are pretty bleak. But a study of online dating by UC San Diego sociologist Kevin Lewis suggests that racial barriers to romance are not as insurmountable as we might suppose.

Published Nov. 4 in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "The Limits of Racial Prejudice" analyzes, over a two-and-a-half month period, the interaction patterns of 126,134 users in the United States of the popular dating site OkCupid.com.

Advanced imaging techniques may be able to distinguish which patients' tumors will respond to treatment with anti-angiogenic drugs and which will not. In patients newly diagnosed with the dangerous brain tumor glioblastoma, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report, those for whom treatment with the anti-angiogenic drug cediranib rapidly 'normalized' abnormal blood vessels around their tumors and increased blood flow within tumors survived significantly longer than did patients in whom cediranib did not increase blood flow. The report appears in PNAS Early Edition.

CHICAGO --- Physical activity tracking apps on smartphones are a potentially important tool for doctors who want to collect data and create treatment or intervention plans to improve the health of patients who struggle with activity and movement -- such as those with Parkinson's disease.

A new Northwestern Medicine® study has found a way to make these apps more accurate -- no matter where patients carry their phones. The study was recently published online in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A unique collaboration between a University of California, Riverside sociologist and the Indio Police Department has produced a computer model that predicts, by census block group, where burglaries are likely to occur.

Using the model, the Indio department has developed interventions to address the problem, and can better anticipate hot spots of criminal activity and deploy officers accordingly. The result is an 8 percent decline in thefts in the first nine months of 2013.

OTTAWA, Canada – November 4, 2013 – A CHEO-led multi-site North American study, headed by Dr. Robert Klaassen, lead investigator at CHEO and associate professor in the University of Ottawa's Department of Pediatrics, has confirmed the validity and reliability of a quality of life measurement tool for children and adults with thalassemia major. The tool was created between 2006 and 2009 through the combined efforts of CHEO, the Hospital for SickKids and Laurentian University.

New York, NY—An independent panel of military, ethics, medical, public health, and legal experts today charged that U.S. military and intelligence agencies directed doctors and psychologists working in U.S. military detention centers to violate standard ethical principles and medical standards to avoid infliction of harm. The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers (see attached) concludes that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA improperly demanded that U.S.

Norfolk, Va. – An original article by scientists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) evaluated acceptance of Other Scientifically Relevant Information (OSRI) by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the agency's Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) in lieu of requiring new testing on animals and found it to be low and at times inconsistent.

MADISON, Wis. — As American schools struggle with issues of race, diversity and achievement, a new study in the American Sociological Review has split the difference in the ongoing discussion of resegregation. Yes, black, white and Hispanic students were less likely to share classrooms in 2010 than in 1993, but no, that increase in segregation is usually not the result of waning efforts to reduce it.

New research from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that patients with heart failure have high mortality and often are undertreated. According to a study, published in the scientific periodical JACC, many more of these patients would benefit from advanced treatment by heart specialists – something that could be decided by a simple evaluation of five common risk factors for early death due to heart failure.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – October 31, 2013 – According to a new study, genetic profiling of patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) may help cardiology teams adjust treatment and improve ischemic outcomes for patients that do not properly metabolize thienopyridine blood thinning therapies such as clopidogrel.