Culture

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (June 26, 2014) – It's tough being the parent of a child with food allergies. Constant vigilance is needed for everything your child eats, when a single food item containing a hidden ingredient can be fatal.

In the first national survey of U.S. obstetricians' attitudes towards counseling pregnant patients about environmental health hazards, nearly 80 percent agreed that physicians have a role to play in helping patients reduce their exposures, but only a small minority use their limited time with patients to discuss how they might avoid exposure to toxics, according to a UCSF-led study.

Adults who watch TV for three hours or more each day may double their risk of premature death compared to those who watch less, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

PITTSBURGH, June 25, 2014 – While bringing new drugs to market is important for increasing life expectancy in younger people with HIV, lowering the toxicity of those drugs may have an even greater health impact on all HIV patients, a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analysis reveals.

CHICAGO – Larry Ambrose was diagnosed as having a stroke a few days after he woke up one night, wandered into his kitchen and couldn't read the time on his microwave. Ambrose, like 25 percent of all stroke patients, experienced a cryptogenic ischemic stroke, meaning physicians were unable to determine a cause.

PASADENA, Calif., June 25, 2014 — An innovative framework for identifying and addressing potential gaps in health care in outpatient settings using electronic clinical surveillance tools has been used to target patient safety across a variety of conditions, according to a study published today in the journal eGEMs.

Over the last two decades, nearly half of all initiatives that review and provide feedback to clinicians on healthcare practices show little to no impact on quality of care, according to a new study by Women's College Hospital's Dr. Noah Ivers.

The study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found only 28 per cent of all studies showed an improvement of at least 10 per cent in quality of care over a 25-year period.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It's a classic Catch-22: Medical researchers need to figure out if a promising new treatment is truly better than a current one, by randomly assigning half of a group of patients to get each treatment.

But when they approach patients about taking part in the study, those 50-50 random odds don't sound good enough – and the study struggles to get enough volunteers. That slows down the effort to improve treatment for that condition.

As many patients know, treating wounds has become far more sophisticated than sewing stitches and applying gauze, but dressings still have shortcomings. Now scientists are reporting the next step in the evolution of wound treatment with a material that leads to faster healing than existing commercial dressings and prevents potentially harmful bacteria from sticking. Their study appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

In a study of all adult deaths occurring in hospitals in England from June 1, 2010, to October 31, 2012, and reported by National Health Service (NHS) staff as related to patient safety incidents, Liam J Donaldson, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, and colleagues categorized the incidents and classified them into types of systemic failures. They sought to identify specific areas that, if addressed, potentially could help to save patient lives.

(PHILADELPHIA) – Patients who received regional anesthesia during hip fracture surgery had moderately lower mortality and a significantly lower length of stay than those who received general anesthesia, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The study, published this week in JAMA, employed a new, more reliable Penn-developed technique for comparative-effectiveness research to pinpoint best practices.

Millennials, the generation after Generation X, born in the 1980s and 1990s, form their own demographic group, with their own unique tastes. According to a June 23rd panel at the 2014 Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting & Food Expo® in New Orleans, industry must keep up with Millennials high-speed, digital-age expectations, if they're going to gain and keep them as customers.

Ecstasy, also known by its chemical abbreviation MDMA, is an illicit drug that is commonly taken at nightclubs and dance parties. Ecstasy's street names include: "Molly" (U.S.), "Mandy" (U.K.), "E," and "X." Although not limited to nightlife scenes, ecstasy is popular at dance parties, as it tends to enhance the party experience (e.g., perceptions of lights and music, nightlife socialization).

CHICAGO, IL—An intensive weight loss program involving lifestyle modifications improves obese diabetic patients' physical and mental health as well as gastric bypass surgery does over two years, but the weight loss surgery leads to a greater reduction in adverse effects of obesity on quality of life. These results, from a new study in patients with Type 2 diabetes, were presented Tuesday at the joint meeting of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society: ICE/ENDO 2014 in Chicago.

Queen's University assistant professor Pendar Farahani (Department of Medicine and Department of Public Health Sciences) is advocating the use of gender-based treatment for mitigating the cardiovascular risk factors related to diabetes.

Research has shown women with Type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol are less likely than their male peers to reach treatment goals to lower their bad cholesterol, or low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol.