Culture

In its 150th anniversary yearlong celebration, Bacardi celebrates its tremendous success as the world’s largest privately-held spirits company and the incredible drive and perseverance it took to get there following the illegal confiscation of its assets in Cuba on October 15, 1960 – 52 years ago.

In a new perspective piece being published Online First tonight in Annals of Internal Medicine, a physician recalls lessons learned from treating patients affected by the 2002 outbreak of Exophiala (Wangiella) dermatitidis meningitis or arthritis related to contaminated, injectable coticosteroids prepared from a compounding pharmacy. According to the author, the lessons he learned in 2002 are applicable to the current outbreak. He warns that compounding of preservative-free corticosteroids requires meticulous sterility to ensure lack of fungal contamination.

NEW ORLEANS – Few adolescent females undergo pregnancy testing in the hospital emergency department (ED), even when they complain of lower abdominal pain, or before they are exposed to radiation for tests or examinations, according to an abstract presented Friday, Oct. 19, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans.

Claudio Anasetti, M.D., chair of the Department of Blood & Marrow Transplant at Moffitt Cancer Center, and colleagues from 47 research sites in the Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network conducted a two-year clinical trial comparing two-year survival probabilities for patients transplanted with peripheral blood stem cells or bone marrow stem cells from unrelated donors. The goal was to determine whether graft source, peripheral blood stem cells or bone marrow, affects outcomes in unrelated donor transplants for patients with leukemia or other hematologic malignancies.

Highlights

• A drug that activates the liver x receptor blocks expression of an inflammatory molecule involved in diabetic nephropathy, the leading cause of kidney failure.
• The drug improves kidney health and function in diabetic mice.
• Such a drug might help protect the health of diabetic patients' kidneys.

About 20%-30% of patients with diabetes develop evidence of diabetic nephropathy.

Highlights

• Kidney failure patients have less sugar coating along the insides of their blood vessels, and they have high levels of the coating's constituents in the blood, consistent with increased shedding.
• Damage to this sugar coating may be responsible for kidney failure patients' increased risks of heart problems.

  Heart disease is the number one killer of individuals with kidney disease.

In a new perspective piece being published Online First tonight in Annals of Internal Medicine, a physician recalls lessons learned from treating patients affected by the 2002 outbreak of Exophiala (Wangiella) dermatitidis meningitis or arthritis related to contaminated, injectable coticosteroids prepared from a compounding pharmacy.

A hospital stroke team used auto industry "lean" manufacturing principles to accelerate treatment times, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke.

In a prospective observational study, the average time between patients arriving at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Mo., and receiving the clot-busting agent tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), decreased 21 minutes using process improvement techniques adapted from auto manufacturing. Data from more than 200 patients was included in the study analysis, ranging over 3 years.

Simply knowing a child's home address and some socioeconomic data can serve as a vital sign – helping hospitals predict which children admitted for asthma treatment are at greater risk for re-hospitalization or additional emergency room visits, according to new research in the American Journal of Public Health.

Segregation is supposed to be a bad thing but African-American and Mexican-American seniors living in communities where their neighbors are most like them get cancer or heart disease less than their counterparts in a more diverse neighborhood.

Philadelphia, Pa. (October 18, 2012) - An ongoing program is developing new tools for assessing health care quality from the most important viewpoint—that of the patient receiving care, according to a special supplement to Medical Care. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –The last few months leading up to an election can be a critical, political game changer. One right or one wrong move can quickly change a candidate's standing at the polls. New research suggests that judges who are elected, rather than appointed, respond to this political pressure by handing down more severe criminal sentences – as much as 10 percent longer –in the last three months before an election compared with the beginning of their terms.

WHAT:

A newly released IOF report for World Osteoporosis Day, 'Capture the Fracture – A global campaign to break the fragility fracture cycle', clearly outlines the care gap which is leaving millions of fracture patients undiagnosed and without treatment for osteoporosis or assessment for falls risk.

Men have borne the brunt of worsening mental health across the population of England since the start of the economic downturn in 2008, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open.

But unemployment and a falling household income don't seem to be the culprits, prompting the authors to suggest that it is the threat of losing their jobs that has affected men's mental health.

They base their findings on data taken from the national representative annual Health Survey for England for adults aged 25 to 64, between 1991 and 2010.