A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down—and so do movie tickets, cell phone minutes and discounts on airline flights.
A private South African health plan increased patient use of preventive care such as mammograms and influenza vaccine with a program that incentivized healthy behavior using discounts on retail goods and travel. The study, which was led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation, was published today in The American Journal of Managed Care.
A new data analysis technique could radically improve monitoring of kidney transplant patients, according to new research published this week in PLOS Computational Biology.
The research, carried out by a team comprising physicists, chemist and clinicians at the University of Leeds, provides a method for making sense out of the huge number of clues about a kidney transplant patient's prognosis contained in their blood.
Washington, DC (June 26, 2014) — Risk factors for chronic kidney disease (CKD) are present and identifiable 30 years before diagnosis, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The findings suggest avenues for future research to determine whether certain early interventions can prevent future kidney disease.
Scientists at VIB and KU Leuven have demonstrated in fruit-flies that over-activity of the enzyme HDAC6 in the nerve ends exacerbates the symptoms of the neurodegenerative condition Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS / Lou Gehrig's Disease). Inhibition of this enzyme could offer a protective effect against ALS.
WASHINGTON – While preferring silence to music from the West, chimpanzees apparently like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
Why does one physician in a walk-in practice order laboratory monitoring tests for patients more often than a colleague working down the hallway? Which factors influence the use of these important tests that can help doctors ensure that high-risk drugs are prescribed safely? Clues to these questions lie in the age and general health of the patient, and whether the doctor is a specialist or not, says Shira Fischer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina presented their joint recommendations on "Scientific Freedom and Scientific Responsibility" on 26 June 2014 in Berlin. Attended by representatives from the media, the Professors Jörg Hacker and Peter Strohschneider, Presidents of the Leopoldina and the DFG respectively, presented recommendations for handling security-relevant research, placing the subject against the background of the current political debate.
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.