Culture

A husband's agreeable personality and good health appear crucial to preventing conflict among older couples who have been together a long time, according to a study from University of Chicago researchers.

The report found that such characteristics in wives play less of a role in limiting marital conflict, perhaps because of different expectations among women and men in durable relationships.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Shame on you. These three simple words can temporarily — or, when used too often, permanently — destroy an individual's sense of value and self-worth.

"In modernity, shame is the most obstructed and hidden emotion, and therefore the most destructive," said Thomas Scheff, professor emeritus of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. "Emotions are like breathing — they cause trouble only when obstructed."

WASHINGTON, DC, March 13, 2014 — When it comes to Oscars and some other Hollywood movie awards, who your friends are affects whether you win, according to a new study.

PORTLAND, Ore. – About three out of four older Americans have multiple chronic health conditions, and more than 20 percent of them are being treated with drugs that work at odds with each other – the medication being used for one condition can actually make the other condition worse.

This approach of treating conditions "one at a time" even if the treatments might conflict with one another is common in medicine, experts say, in part because little information exists to guide practitioners in how to consider this problem, weigh alternatives and identify different options.

DETROIT— While Mother Nature continues to challenge drivers across the country, a team of traffic engineers is working hard on a new way to make rush-hour commutes safer and faster in any weather.

"We can't do much about snow falling, but we can do something about road capacity and congestion," said Joseph Hummer, traffic engineering expert and Wayne State University College of Engineering chair of civil and environmental engineering.

Same-day bilateral knee replacement surgery is safe for select patients with rheumatoid arthritis, researchers from Hospital for Special Surgery in New York have found.

Generally, patients with an inflammatory systemic disease such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are sicker than patients with the degenerative condition osteoarthritis (OA), says senior study author Mark Figgie, M.D., chief of the Surgical Arthritis Service at Hospital for Special Surgery, and the hospital's first Allan E. Inglis, MD, Chair in Surgical Arthritis.

NEW ORLEANS – As the effectiveness of anesthesia, pain management and rehabilitation continues to improve, more orthopaedic procedures are being done on an outpatient basis. In a new research study presented today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), same-day total joint replacement (TJR) patient outcomes were comparable to those of patients admitted to the hospital and staying at least one night following surgery. However, readmission rates, although statistically "non-significant," were higher for outpatient procedures.

Injured patients who live near trauma centers that have closed have higher odds of dying once they reach a hospital, according to a new analysis by UC San Francisco researchers.

Trauma centers are specially staffed and equipped to provide care to severely injured people. They can be costly to operate and many centers struggle to keep their doors open. During the last two decades, about a third of the nation's 1,125 trauma centers have shut down.

Oxytocin, also known as the 'love hormone', could provide a new treatment for anorexia nervosa, according to new research by a team of British and Korean scientists.

The study, published today, found that oxytocin alters anorexic patients' tendencies to fixate on images of high calorie foods, and larger body shape. The findings follow an earlier study by the same group showing that oxytocin changed patients' responses to angry and disgusted faces.

A new paper published online today in the British Geriatrics Society journal Age and Ageing argues that despite a year-on-year increase in the number of people over the age of 50 being diagnosed with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), there is a reluctance of healthcare professionals to offer HIV tests to older people. This results in high rates of "late presentation" and therefore significantly increased mortality.

You can't catch a cold from a friend online. But can you catch a mood? It would seem so, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego.

Published in PLOS ONE, the study analyzes over a billion anonymized status updates among more than 100 million users of Facebook in the United States. Positive posts beget positive posts, the study finds, and negative posts beget negative ones, with the positive posts being more influential, or more contagious.

Pregnant women may face an increased risk of early heart disease when they develop gestational diabetes, according to research in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Gestational diabetes, which develops only during pregnancy and usually disappears after the pregnancy, increases the risk that the mother will develop diabetes later. The condition is managed with meal planning, activity and sometimes insulin or other medications.

OAKLAND, Calif. — Women who experience gestational diabetes may face an increased risk of early heart disease later in life, even if they do not develop type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome subsequent to their pregnancy, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

A multi-institutional study led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Broad Institute has identified how the intestinal microbial population of newly diagnosed Crohn's disease patients differs from that of individuals free of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In their paper in the March 12 issue of Cell Host and Microbe, the researchers report that Crohn's patients showed increased levels of harmful bacteria and reduced levels of the beneficial bacteria usually found in a healthy gastrointestinal tract.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Megan Ranney, M.D., M.P.H., an emergency medicine attending physician at Hasbro Children's Hospital, recently led a study that found a text-message program may be an effective violence prevention tool for at-risk teen girls. The study has been published online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.