BOSTON—A large proportion of Medicare expenditures for nursing home residents with advanced dementia, a terminal illness, is spent on aggressive treatments that may be avoidable and of limited clinical benefit, according to a new study by the Institute for Aging Research, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, published in the online version of the Archives of Internal Medicine on Jan. 10, 2011.
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Nursing home closures eliminated about 5 percent of available beds between 1998 and 2008, with closures concentrated in minority and poor communities, according to a report posted online today that will be published in the May 9 print issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
An implant that releases the medication dexamethasone within the eye appears safe and effective for the treatment of some types of uveitis (swelling and inflammation in the eye's middle layer), according to a report posted online today that will appear in the May print issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Bottle rockets can cause significant eye injuries in children, often leading to permanent loss of vision, according to a report posted online today that will appear in the May print issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, January 10, 2011 -- Previous research regarding the association between alcohol consumption and dementia or cognitive impairment in later life suggests that mild to moderate alcohol consumption might be protective of dementia. However, most of the research has been conducted on subjects already rather elderly at the start of the follow-up. A new study published in the December issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease addresses this problem with a follow-up of more than two decades.
CHICAGO --- One out of every four or five students who visits a university health center for a routine cold or sore throat turns out to be depressed, but most centers miss the opportunity to identify these students because they don't screen for depression, according to new Northwestern Medicine research.
About 2 to 3 percent of these depressed students have had suicidal thoughts or are considering suicide, the study found.
University of Illinois research reports that several herbicides used on corn also have good selectivity to Miscanthus x giganteus (Giant Miscanthus), a potential bioenergy feedstock.
In recent years, developers have been investigating light-harvesting thin film solar panels made from nanotechnology –– and promoting efficiency metrics to make the technology marketable. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher is providing new evidence to challenge recent "charge" measurements for increasing solar panel efficiency.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Using detailed land analysis, Illinois researchers have found that biofuel crops cultivated on available land could produce up to half of the world's current fuel consumption – without affecting food crops or pastureland.
Published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the study led by civil and environmental engineering professor Ximing Cai identified land around the globe available to produce grass crops for biofuels, with minimal impact on agriculture or the environment.
Alexandria, VA – Where to next in the search for oil and gas? EARTH examines several possible new frontiers - including the Arctic, the Falkland Islands, the Levant, Trinidad and Tobago and Sudan - where oil and gas exploration are starting to take hold. One of those places, Sudan, is in the news for other reasons: South Sudan voted yesterday on whether to secede from North Sudan.
The number and scale of forest fires has increased dramatically in recent decades. Who can forget last summer's television images of blazing infernos devouring miles and miles of forest in Russia, Australia and California? In Germany, too, several regions are under threat precipitated by climate change – Brandenburg, for example, is one of the areas of Europe that are most at risk.
The so-called "superstreet" traffic design results in significantly faster travel times, and leads to a drastic reduction in automobile collisions and injuries, according to North Carolina State University researchers who have conducted the largest-ever study of superstreets and their impacts.
A Spanish study has challenged the long-held belief that people in the Mediterranean all enjoy more healthy diets and lifestyles, after discovering alarmingly high cardiovascular risk factors similar to those found in the UK and USA.
Research published in the January issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice, also found strong links between low levels of education and increased risk.
KINGSTON, R.I. – January 10, 2011 -- While most blood tests require shipping a vial of blood to a laboratory for analysis and waiting several days for the results, a new device invented by a team of engineers and students at the University of Rhode Island uses just a pinprick of blood in a portable device that provides results in less than 30 minutes.