Attending Hospital at Night Or Weekends May be Associated with Treatment Delays
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The time of day or night at which severely injured patients attend hospital has a huge impact on their treatment and prognosis, warn two senior doctors in this week’s BMJ.
This is because provision of key aspects of hospital trauma services such as staffing, access to operating theatres, and interventional radiology is reduced after normal working hours, say Paul Frost and Matt Wise, consultants in intensive care medicine at the University Hospital of Wales.
Their views follow the publication last month of a large trial to predict outcomes in patients with traumatic brain injury.
Nearly 6 million older Americans fall each year-report
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A survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that 5.8 million adults aged 65 and older fell at least once in 2006, and for 1.8 million of these individuals, the resulting injury required a doctor visit or restricted activity.
“The effect these injuries have on the quality of life of older adults and on the US healthcare system reinforces the need for broader uses of scientifically-proven fall-prevention interventions,” investigators emphasize in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for March 7. According to the report, one of the most effective interventions is exercise.
Weight loss common in stroke survivors
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Many people lose weight after suffering a stroke, a finding that highlights the need for closer observation of nutritional status in stroke patients, the researchers say.
Loss of weight in stroke patients may be related to a variety of factors, including difficulty swallowing, depression, decreased food intake, and other neurologic deficits that contribute to eating difficulties, Dr. Ann-Cathrin Jonsson and colleagues from Lund University, Sweden, note in a report in the journal Stroke.
Depression, inactivity up teen girls’ fatigue risk
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Anxiety and depression and an inactive lifestyle can herald the development of persistent and severe fatigue in teen girls, according to the first study to look at fatigue in adolescent girls over time.
Dr. Cobi J. Heijnen of University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands and colleagues found that one in four girls who reported being fatigued at the study’s outset were still fatigued one year later. “It’s a very constant phenomenon,” Heijnen told Reuters Health.
Strokes more common in springtime
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Strokes occur more often in the spring than any other season, and the heightened risk is seen in men, women, young and old alike, new research suggests.
In a study of Japanese adults who had suffered a stroke between 1988 and 2001, researchers found that the risk of having a stroke in the spring was roughly one-quarter higher than it was in the summer.
“Dirty Dancing” star Patrick Swayze has cancer
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Actor and dancer Patrick Swayze, star of such hit films as “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost,” has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer but is responding well to treatment, his publicist said on Wednesday.
The 55-year-old performer was working during his treatments, publicist Annett Wolf said, dismissing reports in the tabloid media that portrayed him in grave condition with only weeks to live.
Wolf issued a written statement from his physician, Dr. George Fisher that said: “Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment.”
US House OKs bill backing mental health coverage
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A bill to require health insurers to provide the same level of coverage for mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction as for other ailments was passed on Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The White House made clear its opposition to the bill, saying it favored a less-expansive version passed unanimously by the Senate last September.
Known as mental health parity, the idea is making progress in Congress after a decade-long crusade by advocates for the mentally ill who say insurers can shortchange people with mental conditions ranging from depression to schizophrenia.
Torrefacto-roasted coffee has higher antioxidant properties
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Torrefacto-roasted coffee has higher antioxidant properties, according to a dissertation defended at the University of Navarra
Torrefacto-roasted coffee has higher antioxidant properties than natural roast, according to the dissertation defended by a biologist of the University of Navarra, Isabel López Galilea. She has emphasized in her study that the addition of sugar during the roasting process increases the development of compounds with high antioxidant activity.
The researcher of Department of Food Sciences, Physiology and Toxicology of the University of Navarra analyzed eleven varieties of commercial coffee for her study, which was entitled “The Influence of Torrefacto Roasting on the Principal Components of Coffee and its Antioxidant and Pro-oxidant Capacity.”
Quitting smoking—it’s never too late
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Many people spend a lifetime trying to give up smoking, but there is good news for older smokers from research carried out at the Peninsula Medical School in South West England.
A study by Dr. Iain Lang and his colleagues has revealed that the point of retirement is one of the most effective times to try to give up smoking. The study followed 1712 smokers aged 50 years and older over a six-year period, taking into account their work status (whether an individual was working or retired) and smoking status (whether a non-smoker or smoker).
The research showed that a total of 42.5 per cent of those who had recently retired had quit smoking, compared with 29.3 per cent of those in employment and 30.2 per cent for those who were already retired. The results indicate those who undergo the transition into retirement are more likely to quit smoking than those who do not.
Depression, anxiety tied to unhealthy habits
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Depression and anxiety are associated with obesity and poor health behaviors like smoking, drinking, and inactivity, new research indicates.
“Depression and anxiety are serious mental health conditions and without treatment may assume a chronic course,” Dr. Tara W. Strine who led the study told Reuters Health. “Given this, it is important to take depression and anxiety seriously and to seek medical care when needed.”
Strine, from the division of adult and community health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta and colleagues analyzed data from 217,379 U.S. adults who took part in the 2006 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System—a large telephone survey that monitors the prevalence of key health behaviors.
Cancer pill could affect women’s fertility - report
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Long-term use of the cancer pill Gleevec may produce fertility problems in women, Greek doctors reported on Wednesday.
Chemotherapy and radiation have long been known to damage the fertility of patients, but little is known about more targeted drugs such as Gleevec, known generically as imatinib.
Dr. Constantinos Christopoulos of the Amalia Fleming General Hospital in Athens and colleagues reported on the case of a 30-year-old woman with chronic myeloid leukemia who stopped menstruating after two years of taking Gleevec, made by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.
Expensive sugar pills work better than cheap ones
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Want a sugar pill to work really well? Charge more for it.
A study published on Tuesday shows the well-known “placebo effect” works even better if the dummy pill costs more.
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University in North Carolina, and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested 82 volunteers.
Diabetes type affects joint replacement outcomes
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People with type 1 diabetes who undergo total hip or knee replacement generally fare worse than people with type 2 diabetes, who in turn do worse than non-diabetic patients, according to study findings presented this week at the meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in San Francisco.
“The biggest finding was that diabetes predicted higher complication rates, and this is obviously not a huge surprise,” researcher Dr. Michael P. Bolognesi, from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, told Reuters Health.
While type 1 diabetic patients overall did worse than type 2 diabetics, he added, the very worst outcomes were actually seen in a subgroup of type 2 diabetics with uncontrolled disease.
Mother-daughter conflict, low serotonin level may be deadly combination
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A combination of negative mother-daughter relationships and low blood levels of serotonin, an important brain chemical for mood stability, may be lethal for adolescent girls, leaving them vulnerable to engage in self-harming behaviors such as cutting themselves.
New University of Washington research indicates that these two factors in combination account for 64 percent of the difference among adolescents, primarily girls, who engage in self-harming behaviors and those who do not.
“Girls who engage in self harm are at high risk for attempting suicide, and some of them are dying,” said Theodore Beauchaine, a UW associate professor of psychology and co-author of a new study. “There is no better predictor of suicide than previous suicide attempts.”
A new more effective tuberculosis screening test for HIV victims
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World Health Organization (WHO) figures show that each year an estimated 9 million new cases of tuberculosis (TB) arise in the world. The growth of this disease remains particularly strong in Africa owing to a high proportion of HIV patients (nearly 13% compared with less than 1% in Asian countries for example). This region of the world is experiencing accelerating advance of a deadly combination of AIDS and TB, developed because the virus weakens the immune system of TB-infected individuals. A person infected by HIV who is also contaminated with Koch’s bacillus bears a greater risk of developing active TB than a non HIV-infected individual. Latent TB infection diagnosis has for several decades been founded on a positive response to the tuberculin skin test (TST). However, TST’s reliability is limited in highly TB-endemic geographical settings because the presence in the environment of mycobacteria similar to that which causes TB plus the BCG vaccination people receive in early infancy can skew the results. Moreover, in HIV-carrying patients, the sensitivity of the test is drastically reduced owing to their inability to develop an allergic reaction, the very basis of the skin test. TB is a strong contributing factor to HIV mortality, therefore it is of crucial importance to be able to diagnosis latent infection early in order to adopt an appropriate treatment and prevent the development of the full disease.
The development of new IGRA3 tests is based on in vitro measurement of T-cells secretion of interferon- when challenged with antigens specific to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium causing tuberculosis.
