Culture

Fewer Mexican immigrants returned home from the United States during 2008 and 2009 than in the two years prior to the start of the recession, a finding that contradicts the notion that the economic downturn has hastened return migration to Mexico, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The study, published online by the journal Demography, is the first to track return migration trends by analyzing household survey information routinely collected by the Mexican government.

Hospitalized patients who had conversations about religion and spirituality with the healthcare team were the most satisfied with their overall care. However, 20 percent of patients who would have valued these discussions say their desires went unmet, according to a new study¹ by Joshua Williams from the University of Chicago, USA, and his colleagues. Their work appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study of political polarization in the United States suggests that changes in the labor market since the 1970s has helped create more Republican and Democratic partisans and fewer independents.

The growth in partisanship has to do with people's current income and – importantly – their expectations of job security, said Philipp Rehm, author of the study and assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University.

A health-care delivery model called patient-centered medical home (PCMH) increased the percentage of diabetes patients who achieved goals that reduced their sickness and death rates, according to health researchers.

In this week's PLoS Medicine, John Ioannidis and Alan Garber from Stanford University, USA, discuss how to use incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICER) and related metrics so they can be useful for decision-making at the individual level, whether used by clinicians or individual patients. The authors say that "Cost-effectiveness analysis offers a foundation for rational decision-making and can be very helpful in making health care more efficient and effective at the population level.

STANFORD, Calif. — In an era of skyrocketing health-care costs and finite financial resources, health economists are increasingly called upon to determine which medical treatments are the most cost-effective. To do so, they compare the price of an intervention with the improvement it is expected to deliver. For example, a highly advanced cold medicine that costs $5,000 to deliver just one additional symptom-free day to the average patient would appear to be a less-wise investment than a new chemotherapy that costs $10,000 but delivers a year or more of life to most patients.

Two studies by a team of researchers led by Luis E. Cuevas and Mohammed Yassin from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and jointly coordinated with Andrew Ramsay at WHO-TDR Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases are published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The studies have important implications for the ways in which diagnosis for the endemic infectious disease, tuberculosis (TB), can be done in poor countries.

An ultrasound test can tell if people with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and heart disease are at risk of heart attack or death, according to new research reported in Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, an American Heart Association journal.

Stress echocardiography, better known as a "stress echo," is an ultrasound of the heart during rest and stress that determines risk of heart attack and death in patients with known or suspected blockages in the blood vessels supplying the heart.

DETROIT – Severity of spinal cord injury in adults is not related to how they rate their health, Wayne State University researchers have found.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A study of home purchases during the real estate boom years in Chicago shows how one ethically murky – and sometimes illegal - tactic used to sell homes may have contributed to the housing crash.

The tactic was inflating the selling price of a home, but offering the buyer some incentive – often cash back – to accept the inflated price. The buyer could then use the cash-back for a mortgage down payment or other purposes.

Los Angeles, CA (July 8, 2011) Employers increasingly face wage and hour enforcement actions and costly class action lawsuits under the federal and state laws that regulate minimum wages and tipping. With wide variations in federal and state requirements regarding tip credits, tip pooling and service charges, companies must carefully review their policies to avoid labor department investigations and significant liabilities for back pay, according to a recent study published in Compensation & Benefits Review, a SAGE journal.

07/07/11, Clearwater Beach, FL. Research to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, suggests that people can become dependent on highly palatable foods and engage in a compulsive pattern of consumption, similar to the behaviors we observe in drug addicts and those with alcoholism.

Health care laws to protect patients' privacy make it nearly impossible for medical device designers to develop and test the safety and usability of medical products by observing use in an actual practitioner-patient setting. As a result, usability errors and hazards may be overlooked, with the potential for devastating consequences.

A broad, regional system to lower the temperature of resuscitated cardiac arrest patients at a centrally-located hospital improved outcomes, according to a study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Cooling treatment, or therapeutic hypothermia, is effective yet underused, researchers said.

A network of first responders, EMS departments and more than 30 independent hospitals within 200 miles of Minneapolis, Minn., and Abbott Northwestern Hospital collaborated to implement the protocol.

Obstructive sleep apnea may cause changes in blood vessel function that reduces blood supply to the heart in people who are otherwise healthy, according to new research reported in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.

However, treatment with 26 weeks of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) improved study participants' blood supply and function.