Culture

As the nation's headlines turn more and more to issues of tolerance -- race, religion, free speech, same sex marriage -- research by San Diego State University Psychology Professor Jean M. Twenge shows that Americans are actually more tolerant than ever before.

Some of social media's greatest stars aren't even old enough to tweet: Pictures of kids playing dress up, having meltdowns and even in the bathtub adorn Facebook walls. Diaper-donning toddlers dancing to the likes of Beyonce and Taylor Swift rack up YouTube views. Countless blogs share stories about everything from potty training to preschool struggles.

ROCHESTER, Minn. - Increasingly high prices for cancer drugs are affecting patient care in the U.S. and the American health care system overall, say the authors of a special article published online in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

"Americans with cancer pay 50 percent to 100 percent more for the same patented drug than patients in other countries," says S. Vincent Rajkumar, M.D., of Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, who is one of the authors. "As oncologists we have a moral obligation to advocate for affordable cancer drugs for our patients."

A work group of physicians has developed new quality measures for the detection and treatment of childhood obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a potentially morbid, life-altering condition that affects hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents nationwide. The measures, commissioned and endorsed by the American Association of Sleep Medicine (AASM), are published on March 15 in a special section of The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Unless you are a mountain hermit or a committed Luddite, you will have noticed there has been a massive growth in self-publishing activity over the last decade or so.

A father's depression during the first years of parenting - as well as a mother's - can put their toddler at risk of developing troubling behaviors such as hitting, lying, anxiety and sadness during a critical time of development, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study.

Social media has become an important way for institutions to communicate - both sending messages and receiving feedback - with clients and with the general public. Hospitals and other health care organizations use social media for a variety of purposes, but there has been little investigation of whether hospitals ratings that patients and other consumers submit via social media accurately reflect patient satisfaction or the quality of care delivered.

Senior citizens were concerned about the Affordable Care Act because they knew adding more people to Medicare would lead to even fewer doctors available. And they were right, they are now discriminated against by the healthcare system and it is not just stressful, it is literally bad for their health. A national survey shows that one in every three older Americans who are on the receiving end of age-related discrimination in the healthcare setting will likely develop new or worsened functional ailments in due course.

Many of us are walking around all the time in a fog caused by "social jetlag." That's what happens when we lose sleep because our daily schedules don't match our bodies' natural rhythms. The condition can be a particular problem for shift workers, who work into the night or on a shifting schedule. Now, researchers report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 12 that sleep and workers' general wellbeing could be improved if work schedules took workers' biological clocks into account.

Where you receive medical care impacts many things - including whether or not you receive inappropriate medical tests, according to a new study.

Researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center, in a new retrospective study publishing online March 12th in JAMA Oncology, conclude that patients with low-risk prostate or breast cancer were more likely to receive inappropriate imaging during treatment, based on the region of the country in which they received medical care.

Increasing the minimum age of legal access (MLA) to tobacco products will prevent or delay initiation of tobacco use by adolescents and young adults, particularly those ages 15 to 17, and improve the health of Americans across the lifespan, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine.

Despite legal and ethical mandates for disclosure, results from most clinical trials of medical products are not reported promptly on a registry specifically created to make results of human studies publically available, according to Duke Medicine researchers.

New research has shown that patients having heart surgery do not benefit if doctors wait until a patient has become substantially anaemic before giving a transfusion.

new study by University of Alberta law researchers reveals sometimes overly optimistic news coverage of clinical translation of stem cell therapies--and as spokespeople, scientists need to be mindful of harnessing public expectations.

A reformulation of OxyContin that makes it harder to abuse has curtailed the drug's illicit use. But some 25 percent of drug abusers entering rehab said they still abused the prescription painkiller despite package labeling that emphasizes its abuse-deterrent properties, new research indicates.

The study, by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is published March 11 in JAMA Psychiatry.