Culture

DARIEN, Ill. – According to new research that will be presented Saturday, June 11, at the 20th Anniversary Meeting of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine (AADSM), objective compliance measurements agree with subjective compliance estimates in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) undergoing oral appliance therapy (OAT) – a finding that is not apparent in patients using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy.

DARIEN, Ill. – According to new research that will be presented Saturday, June 11, at the 20th Anniversary Meeting of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine (AADSM), the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) was more improved by a combination treatment of a mandibular advancement splint (MAS) and positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy than by continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy alone.

DARIEN, Ill. – New research that will be presented Saturday, June 11, at the 20th Anniversary Meeting of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine (AADSM) in Minneapolis, Minn., quantified the efficacy of mandibular advancement splints (MAS) using a self-administered, at-home device to monitor snoring and sleep-disordered breathing.

New software 'hearing dummies' are part of cutting-edge research that promises to revolutionise the diagnosis and treatment of hearing impairments.

The work could also be used in the long-term to develop a radical new type of hearing aid that can be customised using the hearing dummy to meet the different needs of individual patients. If the procedures gain clinical acceptance, a device could reach the market within 4 years.

Deaths related to prescription opioid therapy are under intense scrutiny, prompting those in pain medicine—clinicians, patient advocates, and regulators—to understand the causes behind avoidable mortality in legitimately treated patients. Studies reporting on statistics, causes, and adverse events involving opioid treatment are now available in a special supplement of Pain Medicine, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM).

BOSTON—The rehospitalization of senior patients within 30 days of discharge from a skilled nursing facility (SNF) has risen dramatically in recent years, at an estimated annual cost of more than $17 billion. A new study from Hebrew Rehabilitation Center (HRC), an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, demonstrates improvements in discharge disposition following a three-pronged intervention that combines standardized admission templates, palliative care consultations, and root-cause-analysis conferences.

Among Medicare patients with heart attack in 4 California counties, diversion of ambulance traffic by the nearest emergency department for 12 hours or more was associated with an increased risk of death for up to one year, according to a study in the June 15 issue of JAMA. This study is being released early online to coincide with its presentation at the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting.

Small loans, somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 to $500 dollars, are an increasingly popular weapon in the fight to reduce poverty. Called microcredit, institutions dole out these monetary advances to help extremely poor people engage in successful entrepreneurship and improve their quality of life.

While proponents extol its virtues, researchers look for evidence; they want to know if it works. Does it really increase financial development and help individuals make solid monetary decisions as its supporters claim?

Noninvasive ventilation (NIV) used as a weaning technique for mechanically ventilated patients can shorten intubation time and may reduce the risk of post-extubation acute respiratory failure (ARF), according to French researchers. They also found that NIV used as a post-intubation rescue therapy could significantly reduce the risk of reintubation and death.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Voters in states with early primary races such as Iowa and New Hampshire have up to five times the influence of voters in later states in selecting presidential candidates, according to research by Brown University economist Brian Knight. The paper, the first to quantify the effects of early victories in the race for the presidential nomination, is co-authored by Nathan Schiff and published in The Journal of Political Economy.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — It's time for the United States to consider establishing higher standards for math teachers if the nation is going to break its "vicious cycle" of mediocrity, a Michigan State University education scholar argues in Science magazine. As American students continue to be outpaced in mathematics by pupils in countries such as Russia and Taiwan, William Schmidt recommends adopting more rigorous, demanding and internationally benchmarked teacher-preparation standards for math teachers.

STANFORD, Calif. — Any legislation that slows human embryonic stem cell research is likely to also seriously harm the study of induced pluripotent stem cells, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Michigan.

The finding strongly refutes the idea that embryonic stem cell research can be abandoned in favor of the less-controversial iPS cells, which are derived from adult human tissue.

Amsterdam, NL, 9 June 2011 – In a new study published today in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Parkinson's Disease, Israeli researchers report that by tracking pharmacy purchases of anti-Parkinson drugs they could estimate the number of Parkinson's disease (PD) cases in a large population. The study identified a sharp rise in PD prevalence from 170/100,000 in 2000 to 256/100,000 in 2007 in Israel, which warrants further investigation.

"It never occurred to me that we would have data on them eating out and where they were eating out. But the kids — if they said they ate out, they always wrote down where they ate by the name of the restaurant," McIntosh said. "So it was just a matter of tracking down information about the restaurant to find out if they were full-service or more like a fast-food place."

That's where the real meat of the study was revealed, according to McIntosh.

A team from the University of Sheffield's School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) has developed a new index to measure hospital mortality rates that has been accepted for use by the Department of Health.