Culture

WASHINGTON, DC—Patients who undergo surgical removal of the appendix on a weekend do not experience more postoperative complications than those who undergo the same operation on weekdays, but they do pay slightly more in hospital charges, a new national study finds. Results were presented during a scientific poster session at the 2013 Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons.

Healthcare providers should treat unhealthy behaviors as aggressively as they treat high blood pressure, cholesterol and other heart disease risk factors, according to an American Heart Association policy statement published in Circulation.

A study of patients in the United Kingdom suggests widespread prescribing of the medication levothyroxine sodium to boost thyroid function among patients with borderline high levels of the thyroid-stimulating hormone thyrotropin (a sign of low thyroid function), raising the possibility of overtreatment, according to a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.

Small farms and businesses may be the unintended victims of legislation aimed at cutting the federal budget by eliminating certain sets of local and county-based economic data, according to a group of economists.

"This local data is really what we use in our lab," said Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural economics and regional economics, Penn State, and director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. "And, at the end of the day, we're using this information to try to understand how our world is changing."

Philadelphia, PA, October 7, 2013 – Atrial fibrillation (AF), characterized by a rapid and irregular heartbeat, is the most common chronic arrhythmia in adults, but is rare in children. In one of the first studies of pediatric "lone AF" (AF without associated heart disease), researchers found a nearly 40% recurrence rate and that AF in the young is accompanied by substantial symptoms. Three patients had significant complications: one with a stroke and two with substantially impaired heart function.

A new study, published in Springer's Journal of Family Violence, casts light on how health care providers respond to the emotional, sexual and physical violence that female veterans sometimes experience at the hands of their intimate partners. According to the research group, this type of abuse can be common in the lives of women veterans and there is a need to understand how health care providers can best be responsive to this population's health care needs. The research was headed by Dr.

Clinical ethicists play a vital role in hospitals and other health care systems by helping to resolve ethical conflicts that arise between patients, families, and clinicians about end-of-life care and other important medical decisions. To improve the quality of clinical ethics consultants, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) has proposed a method for assessing them. An article in the Hastings Center Report describes the process and explains its importance.

A new study published by JAMA questions using the rate of postoperative blood clots as a hospital quality measure. The study is being released early online to coincide with the American College of Surgeons 2013 Annual Clinical Congress.

Scientists from Royal Holloway University have found that when bees are exposed to low levels of neonicotinoid pesticides - which do not directly kill bees - their behaviour changes and they stop working properly for their colonies.

The results showed that exposure to pesticides at levels bees encounter in the field, has subtle impacts on individual bees, and can eventually make colonies fail.

This discovery provides an important breakthrough in identifying the reasons for the recent global decline of bees, a trend that has baffled many experts worldwide.

Obesity increases a chronic kidney disease patient's risk of developing kidney failure.

Obesity suppresses an important cellular process that prevents kidney cell damage, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The findings suggest that restoring the process could protect the kidney health of obese individuals.

Obesity increases a chronic kidney disease patient's risk of developing kidney failure, but the mechanism underlying this connection has remained unclear.

SAN FRANCISCO – Oct. 4, 2013 – Healthcare workers' use of disposable gowns and gloves upon entering all patient rooms on an intensive care unit (ICU), versus only in rooms on standard isolation protocol, helped reduce patient acquisition of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) by approximately 40 percent, according to new research co-led by the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Yale New Haven Health System Center for Healthcare Solutions.

The wearing of gloves and gowns by health care workers for all intensive care unit (ICU) patient contact did not reduce the rate of acquisition of a combination of the bacteria methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), although there was a lower risk of MRSA acquisition alone, according to a study published online by JAMA. The study is being released early to coincide with its presentation at IDWeek 2013.

SAN FRANCISCO – When patients with HIV are hospitalized for other conditions, such as a heart problem, surgery or complications of diabetes, mistakes are often made involving their complicated anti-retroviral therapy (ART) regimens. But those errors are more than twice as likely to be corrected when patients are seen by an infectious diseases (ID) physician, suggests a Cleveland Clinic study being presented at IDWeek 2013™ today.

Boston, Mass., Oct. 3, 2013 – In a paper in Cell Stem Cell, a team led by researchers in the Boston Children's Hospital's Stem Cell Transplantation Program reports a new approach for turning induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells for in vivo disease modeling.

The ability to make induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from mature cells in the body holds great potential for improved drug screening, disease modeling, and medical treatments for numerous conditions. Establishing well-characterized panels of iPSC lines that reflect the diversity of the human population and include samples from patients with a wide range of diseases will be key to tapping into the potential of iPSCs.