A study in the July issue of Anesthesiology revealed that patients who receive a simple, multicolor, standardized medication instruction sheet before surgery are more likely to comply with their physician's instructions and experience a significantly shorter post-op stay in recovery.
Culture
A debilitating syndrome that causes an excessively rapid heartbeat on standing up, predominantly affects young well educated women, and blights their lives, because it is so poorly understood and inconsistently treated, reveals a small study published in the online journal BMJ Open.
Postural tachycardia syndrome, or PoTS for short, is a by-product of orthostatic intolerance - a disorder of the autonomic nervous system in which the circulatory and nervous system responses needed to compensate for the stress put on the body on standing upright, don't work properly.
Stroke risk in women begins in young adulthood, according to a guideline synopsis being published in Annals of Internal Medicine. While stroke typically affects women in old age, sex-specific guidelines from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association recommend that physicians assess a woman's health history for unique events that increase her risk of stroke later in life, such as being diagnosed with preeclampsia or using of hormonal contraceptives.
Boston, MA — A new poll by The Boston Globe and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) finds, eight years into the state's universal health insurance legislation enacted in 2006, 63% of Massachusetts residents support the law and 18% oppose it, while 7% are not sure, and 12% have not heard or read about the law. The percentage of residents supporting the law remains unchanged since a 2011 Boston Globe/HSPH poll. Support for the law varies by party affiliation, with 77% of Democrats, 60% of Independents, and 49% of Republicans saying they support the legislation.
Bottom Line: Use of beta (β)-blockers in patients who have not had a recent heart attack but were undergoing nonemergency coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery was not associated with better outcomes.
Author: William Brinkman, M.D., of the Cardiopulmonary Research Science and Technology Institute, Dallas, and colleagues.
Background: The use of preoperative β-blockers has been associated with a reduction in perioperative mortality for patients undergoing CABG surgery in previous observational studies. Preoperative β-blocker therapy is a national quality standard.
Bottom Line: A multipart intervention increased adherence rates of annual fecal occult blood testing (FOBT) for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening in vulnerable populations.
Author: David W. Baker, M.D., M.P.H., of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, and colleagues.
Bottom Line: Military personnel with concussive traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by a blast or a nonblast-related event had similar outcomes, including headache severity and depression.
Author: Christine L. Mac Donald, Ph.D., of the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and colleagues.
Cancer clinicians and a chaplain at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have developed a new tool to help doctors, nurses and other health care providers talk to dying patients and families who are, literally, praying for a miracle.
The first Canadian guideline for Bell palsy, facial weakness or paralysis caused by facial nerve damage, is aimed at helping physicians manage and treat patients during the acute phase as well as recovery. The guideline, published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal), is based on the growing body of recent evidence on the condition.
Due to their previously discovered fractal nature, financial data patterns are self-similar when scaling up. New research shows that the most extreme events in financial data dynamics—reflected in very large price moves—are incompatible with multi-fractal scaling. These findings have been published in EPJ B by physicist Elena Green from the National University of Ireland in Maynooth and colleagues. Understanding the multi-fractal structure of financially sound markets could, ultimately, help in identifying structural signs of impending extreme events.
Land use policies and preferential tax treatment for housing – in the form of federal income tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes – have increased carbon emissions in the United States by about 2.7 percent, almost 6 percent annually in new home construction, according to a new Georgia State University study.
June 16, 2014 (San Francisco) – Researchers have long understood there is a strong association between diabetes and depression. But new research presented at the American Diabetes Association's 74th Scientific Sessions® shows that symptoms of depression in people with type 2 diabetes can be significantly reduced through interventions for "diabetes distress," suggesting that much of what is being labeled as depression may not be a co-morbid psychiatric disorder after all, but rather a reaction to living with a stressful, complex disease that is often difficult to manage.
Long-term follow-up of diabetes prevention program shows continued reduction in diabetes development
June 16, 2014 (San Francisco) – Treatments used to decrease the development of type 2 diabetes continue to be effective an average of 15 years later, according to the latest findings of the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study, a landmark study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J., June 14, 2014 – Merck (NYSE: MRK), known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, today announced results from a late-breaking observational study that assessed the differences in time to initiation of insulin use and the proportion of the population initiating insulin among patients with type 2 diabetes taking the combination of JANUVIA® (sitagliptin) and metformin, and patients taking the combination of a sulfonylurea and metformin.
Taxation in the UK has become increasingly regressive since the financial crisis, particularly since the coalition government came to office, according to academics at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI).
The latest evidence on tax revenue shows that progressive taxes such as income tax and capital gains tax contribute 54 per cent of total tax receipts, down from 58 per cent five years earlier. In contrast, regressive taxes such as VAT contribute 28 per cent of total tax receipts, an increase from 25 per cent.Tax