Culture

Cincinnati, OH, October 6, 2011 -- Directly advertising food items to children worries many parents and health care providers, and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association have expressed concern about the negative impact of advertising on children's healthy food choices. A new study soon to be published in The Journal of Pediatrics explores the relationship between fast food advertisements, parental influence, and the food choices made by children.

PHILADELPHIA — Over the next decade, the population of cancer survivors over 65 years of age will increase by approximately 42 percent.

"We can expect a dramatic increase in the number of older adults who are diagnosed with or carry a history of cancer," said Julia Rowland, Ph.D., director of the Office of Cancer Survivorship in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). "Cancer is largely a disease of aging, so we're seeing yet another effect of the baby boom generation and we need to prepare for this increase."

COLUMBIA, Mo. – As more and more people use websites like Craigslist to find roommates and advertise apartment vacancies, the opportunities increase for housing discrimination law violations, yet they don't happen often. Rigel Oliveri, an associate dean for faculty research and development and associate professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law, found that discriminatory online housing ads are almost always posted by people seeking roommates, and are primarily based on familial status.

At the beginning of the 2011-12 flu season, a new study finds that the proportion of nursing home patients who get a shot remains lower than a national public health goal and that the rate is lower for blacks than for whites. The disparity persists even within individual nursing homes, said researchers at Brown University, who investigated the disparity and some of the reasons behind it.

Closures of hospital trauma centers are disproportionately affecting poor, uninsured and African American populations, and nearly a fourth of Americans are now forced to travel farther than they once did.

In a new study led by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), researchers examined changes in driving time to trauma centers, which have increasingly been shuttered in recent years.

A University of Colorado Boulder-led team excavating a Maya village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption 1,400 years ago has unexpectedly hit an ancient white road that appears to lead to and from the town, which was frozen in time by a blanket of ash.

Spanish men prefer immigrant women with a little less going for them. Spanish women, not so much.

A team at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) has studied the marriage strategies of immigrants in order to determine the nature of endogamic (between people of the same nationality) and exogamic partnerships (between people of different nationalities) in Spain. The preliminary results indicate that, unlike Spanish men, Spanish women prefer immigrants with more qualifications.

Although the transtheoretical model stages of change (TTM SOC) method is frequently used to help obese and overweight people lose weight, a newly published Cochrane systematic review indicates there is little evidence that it is effective. "The use of TTM SOC only resulted in 2kg or less weight loss, and there was no conclusive evidence that this loss was sustained," says study leader Nik Tuah, who works at Imperial College London.

Johns Hopkins infectious disease experts say the medical benefits for male circumcision are clear and that efforts in an increasing number of states (currently 18) to not provide Medicaid insurance coverage for male circumcision, as well as an attempted ballot initiative in San Francisco earlier this year to ban male circumcision in newborns and young boys, are unwarranted. Moreover, they say these actions ignore the last decade of medical evidence that the procedure can substantially protect men and their female partners from certain sexually transmitted infections.

Patients who are fed more calories while in intensive care have lower mortality rates than those who receive less of their daily-prescribed calories, according to a recent study of data from the largest critical care nutrition database in the world.

Yale University researchers have found one of the mechanisms that cause fat cells to lose their ability to efficiently store and use energy -- a scientific mystery and a phenomenon that contributes to a major public health problem.

(Baltimore, MD) – New findings from a 16-year study confirm that the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the gold-standard for the classification of mental health conditions, can be used to accurately identify autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in children with Down syndrome, according to research from Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Los Angeles, CA (OCTOBER 3, 2011) —Recent debate about whether acts of "benevolent sexism" harm women are addressed in a new commentary published in Psychology of Women Quarterly (published by SAGE on behalf of the Society for the Psychology of Women, Division 35 of the American Psychological Association).

As soldiers return home from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, America must cope with the toll that war takes on mental health. But the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is becoming increasingly expensive, and promises to escalate as yet another generation of veterans tries to heal its psychological wounds.

PHILADELPHIA - Cognitive therapy has dynamically improved the most neurologically impaired, poorly functioning schizophrenic patients. For the first time, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that a psychosocial treatment can significantly improve daily functioning and quality of life in the lowest-functioning cases of schizophrenia. The study appears in the October 3 edition of Archives of General Psychiatry.