Top A-level results are not always necessary for students to succeed in medicine, according to the authors of a paper in this week’s BMJ. Students with average grades, who come from economically and educationally deprived areas, can do well at medical school provided they have extra academic and pastoral support during their first two years.
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In March, the US House Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation into potential conflicts of interest in scientific panels that advise the Environmental Protection Agency on the human health effects of toxic chemicals. The committee identified eight scientists that served as consultants or members of EPA science advisory panels while getting research support from the chemical industry to study the chemicals under review. Two scientists were actually employed by companies that made or worked with manufacturers of the chemicals under review.
| | | | | | | | | Two University of Miami (UM) students have received prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their doctoral work on coral reefs. Rachel Silverstein and Nitzan Soffer will each receive three years of support for their work in the laboratory of Dr. Andrew Baker, an assistant professor in the Division of Marine Biology and Fisheries at UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. In addition, a third student entering Baker’s lab this fall, Ross Cunning, also received an Honorable Mention in the same national NSF competition.
| | | | | | | | | Health care in the United States is expensive, but its funding is crucial because it also is a major contributor to the economy and can better lives, according to an essay appearing in the June 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). Because of the cost of health care, this is not time to shrink the budget at the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research that leads to potentially curative therapy.
| | | | | | | | | Major mental disorders cost the nation at least $193 billion annually in lost earnings alone, according to a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The study was published in the May 2008 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.
| | | | | | | | | In humans, faces are an important source of social information. One property of faces that is rapidly noticed is attractiveness. Research has highlighted symmetry and sexual dimorphism (how masculine/feminine a face is) as important variables that determine a face’s attractiveness.
But why are these traits attractive?
| | | | | | | | | A new study by Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University researchers reports that fewer than half the patients previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder based on a comprehensive, psychiatric diagnostic interview--the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID).
| | | | | | | | | A community-wide study in upstate New York found that nearly 28 percent of all visits to the pediatric emergency department could have been replaced with a more cost-effective Internet doctor’s “visit,” or telemedicine, according to investigators from the University of Rochester Medical Center. The Rochester team will present these findings and more at this year's Pediatric Academic Society Meeting, to be held Friday, May 2 through Tuesday, May 6, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
| | | | | | | | | The largest randomized study of breastfeeding ever conducted reports that breastfeeding raises children’s IQs and improves their academic performance, a McGill researcher and his team have found.
In an article titled, Breastfeeding and Child Cognitive Development, published in the current issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Michael Kramer reports the results from following the same group of 14,000 children for 6.5 years.
| | | | | | | | | A new study in the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences found that companies that traded their shares on riskier stock exchanges attempted to manage internal trouble by selectively releasing information.
The study, led by Karen Lightstone, PhD, CA, of Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada, focused on companies that had received a cease-trading order (CTO), indicating that the investor could not sell shares and that the company could not issue more shares as a way of raising money.
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