Culture

Women 55 and younger are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack, die or require artery-opening procedures if they're moderately or severely depressed, according to new research in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

A new survey of North Carolina doctors finds that many are concerned about the increasing number of requests they are receiving to assess their patients' competency to carry concealed weapons.

In particular, a majority of physicians who responded to the survey said they were worried about the potential ethical consequences in the doctor-patient relationship if they participated in the concealed-weapon permit process.

The surge in murders of polio vaccination workers in Pakistan has made headlines this year, but little attention has been devoted to the ethical issues surrounding the global health impact of current counterterrorism policy and practice. An essay in the Hastings Center Report reviews the range of harms to population health traceable to counterterrorism operations.

PRINCETON, N.J.—A study that would track the health of 100,000 babies to age 21 has been put on hold following the release of an assessment report issued June 16 by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine (IOM).

More than 5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer's disease, the affliction that erodes memory and other mental capacities, but no drugs targeting the disease have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 2003. Now a paper by an MIT professor suggests that a revamped way of financing Alzheimer's research could spur the development of useful new drugs for the illness.

Anglers in North Carolina and Virginia who are looking for privacy at good fishing spots should head for the mountains, according to a Virginia Tech study of the capacity, quality, and demand of freshwater recreational fishing sites in the two states.

A new register-based study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that drug therapy for ADHD does not entail an increased risk of suicide attempts or suicide, as was previously feared. The results are published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

A new report finds that Ph.D.s who work as researchers represent, on average in the OECD, 68.6% of those who are employed. By institutional sectors, the percentages of employees who work as researchers break down as follows: 45.4% in the private sector, 70.8% in public administration and 75.9% in higher education. In Spain, 86% of Ph.D.s employed in higher education are researchers, while for the private sector, this figure is only 26.5%.

England remains the only UK country still charging patients for their prescriptions – currently £8.05 (€10; $13.5) per prescribed item.

Although prescription charges have been rising, the latest data show that the number of pharmaceutical items prescribed in England reached its highest level yet - over one billion in 2012 - equivalent to nearly 19 per person in that year and an increase of 62% since 2002, writes Appleby.

Patients with mental illness are two and a half times more likely to be victims of homicide than people in the general population, according to a national study examining the characteristics of homicide victims across England and Wales, published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

Homicides committed by patients with mental illness have received much media attention, but patients' risk of being victims of homicide and their relationship to the perpetrators has rarely been examined.

The number of deaths by suicide among mental health patients treated at home by crisis resolution home treatment teams (CRHT)*, has more than doubled in England in recent years, rising from an average of 80 in 2003-2004 to 163 in 2010-2011, according to new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry. In contrast, suicides on psychiatric wards fell by more than half, from 163 in 2003-2004 to 76 in 2010-2011.

Adults are widely exposed to e-cigarette marketing through the media, but those messages reach different demographic groups in different ways, according to a survey by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute for Health Research and Policy.

The study is published as a special supplement in the July 2014 issue of Tobacco Control.

The risks and benefits of red blood cell transfusions for patients with trauma and major bleeding might vary considerably based on a patient's predicted risk of death on arrival at a trauma centre, according to new research published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

Heart attack patients with kidney problems may not be getting the full treatment they need, according to a new study led by King's College London. The study found that patients admitted to hospital with chest pains and poorly functioning kidneys are less likely to be given an angiogram and early invasive treatment, which might increase their chance of surviving a heart attack.

PHILADELPHIA - Bringing clarity to a decades-long debate, a national team of researchers led by experts from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has found that adding clot-busting medications known as thrombolytics to conventional approaches when treating sudden-onset pulmonary embolism patients is associated with 47 percent fewer deaths than using standard intravenous or under-the-skin anticoagulant medications alone. A pulmonary embolism is a blockage of one or more arteries in the lungs, primarily because of blood clots that travel there from the legs.