Culture

It is time to leave apart the belief that mass media are always a source of bad habits. Television, newspaper and the Internet, when used to get information, may turn out to be of help for health.

It is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Research Laboratories at the Fondazione di Ricerca e Cura "Giovanni Paolo II" in Campobasso which analyzed data from a sample of more than 1,000 people from the largest Moli-sani Project, the epidemiological study that recruited 25,000 subjects in Molise, a southern region of Italy.

FRESNO, Calif. – Can eating grapes slow or help prevent the onset of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a debilitating condition affecting millions of elderly people worldwide? Results from a new study published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine suggest this might be the case. The antioxidant actions of grapes are believed to be responsible for these protective effects.

Archaeologists examining late period Mayan containers have identified nicotine traces from a codex-style flask, revealing the first physical evidence of tobacco use by ancient Mayans. The study published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry reveals the flask is marked with Mayan hieroglyphics reading, "y-otoot 'u-may," ("the home of its/his/her tobacco,") making it only the second case to confirm that the text on the exterior of a Mayan vessel corresponds to its ancient use.

Participation in marathon and half-marathon races is at an all-time high, but numerous reports of race-related cardiac arrests have called the safety of this activity into question. A new study finds that participating in these races actually is associated with a relatively low risk of cardiac arrest, compared to other forms of athletics. An analysis of 10 years of data, appearing in the January 12 New England Journal of Medicine, reveals that most of those experiencing cardiac arrest during marathons and half-marathons had undiagnosed, pre-existing cardiac abnormalities.

Hamilton, ON (Jan. 9, 2012) – An irregular heartbeat that you don't even feel but can be picked up by a pacemaker is associated with a significantly increased risk of stroke, says a new McMaster University study.

The report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine today, says that of nearly 2,600 patients without a history of atrial fibrillation but with a recently implanted pacemaker, more than one-third had episodes when the heartbeat would become rapid and irregular for more than six minutes.

AMHERST, Mass. – Chemical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, using a catalytic fast pyrolysis process that transforms renewable non-food biomass into petrochemicals, have developed a new catalyst that boosts the yield for five key "building blocks of the chemical industry" by 40 percent compared to previous methods. This sustainable production process, which holds the promise of being competitive and compatible with the current petroleum refinery infrastructure, has been tested and proven in a laboratory reactor, using wood as the feedstock, the research team says.

MADISON –Placing a stent in a key artery in the neck is safer than ever in patients ineligible for the standard surgical treatment of carotid artery disease, according to a new study published online today in the Journal of Vascular Surgery.

Detroit - Exposure to light appears to have therapeutic effects on Alzheimer's disease patients, a Wayne State University researcher has found.

In a study published recently in the Western Journal of Nursing Research, LuAnn Nowak Etcher, Ph.D., assistant professor of nursing, reported that patients treated with blue-green light were perceived by their caregivers as having improved global functioning.

Promoting immunizations as a part of routine office-based medical practice is needed to improve adult vaccination rates, a highly effective way to curb the spread of diseases across communities, prevent needless illness and deaths, and lower health care costs, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

Increasingly, vaccinations are being offered outside of physician offices at pharmacies, workplaces and retail medical clinics. Even so, office-based medical practice continues to be central to the delivery of recommended vaccinations to adults.

Imagine the following scenarios: a co-worker is spoken to condescendingly, excluded from a meeting, or ignored by a supervisor. How does it make you feel? Do you feel differently depending on whether your co-worker is a man or a woman? According to a new study, workers who witness incivility towards colleagues feel negative emotions – especially when the incivility is aimed at workers of the same sex.

All patients with hip fractures should be fast-tracked through hospital emergency departments and operated on within 48 hours of admission, according to new consensus guidelines developed by UK experts in anaesthesia, orthopaedics, geriatrics and emergency medicine and published in the January issue of Anaesthesia.

Visual rehabilitation will continue to increase in importance in the near future, particularly because the number of older patients is rising. Susanne Trauzettel-Klosinski summarizes the present state of knowledge in the current issue of the Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2011; 108[51/52]: 871-8).

A worldwide study has shown that physical activity during work and leisure time significantly lowers the risk of heart attacks in both developed and developing countries. Ownership of a car and a television was linked to an increased risk of heart attacks, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

Giving overweight or obese patients a gut hormone that suppresses appetite leads to clinically beneficial weight loss as well as reduced blood pressure and cholesterol levels, finds a study published on bmj.com today.

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) is a hormone that is secreted from the intestine when we eat. GLP-1 based therapy was recently introduced as a new treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes because of its ability to regulate blood sugar levels.

Jason Nickerson and Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa, Canada examine in this week's PLoS Medicine the vast inequities in medical pain relief around the world, arguing that the imbalance has arisen from restrictive drug laws designed to prevent access to illegal substances, and proposing that the global control of licit narcotics be shifted from the International Narcotic Control Board to WHO.