Public Health
The secret of a long life? It’s the moles on your skin
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People with a lot of moles on their skin are used to being told that they are at greater risk of cancer. But now they have reason to celebrate; research suggests they can look forward to a longer life.
“Moley” people have a slightly higher risk of developing melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, but a study comparing more than 1,800 twins found that those with more moles have longer telomeres - a marker of biological ageing found in all cells.
Your Spouse Can Pass on Good Health Habits
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Being a good role model can truly help a spouse to adopt a healthy lifestyle.
When one spouse quits smoking or drinking, gets a cholesterol screening or rolls up a sleeve for a flu shot, the other spouse is more likely to follow suit, according to a new study published in the journal Health Services Research.
“America’s Best Hospitals” Not Always
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Heart attack patients admitted to hospitals ranked to be among “America’s Best” by U.S. News & World Report are less likely to die within 30 days than those patients admitted to non-ranked hospitals, Yale School of Medicine researchers report in the July 9 Archives of Internal Medicine.
“The rankings, which include many of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals, did identify a group of hospitals that was much more likely than non-ranked hospitals to have superb performance on 30-day mortality after acute myocardial infarction,” said corresponding author Harlan M. Krumholz, M.D., The Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine. “But our study also shows that not all ranked hospitals had outstanding performance and that many non-ranked hospitals performed well.”
Increase in Prescription Drug Cost Sharing Associated With Lower Rates of Drug Treatment, Adherence
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A review of previous studies indicates that an increase in prescription drug cost sharing is associated with a decrease in drug spending and use of pharmacies; and for some chronic conditions, higher cost sharing is associated with greater use of expensive medical services, according to an article in the July 4 issue of JAMA.
“… with recent increases in pharmacy spending, pharmacy benefit managers and health plans have adopted benefit changes designed to reduce pharmaceutical use or steer patients to less-expensive alternatives. The rapid proliferation of mail-order pharmacies, mandatory generic substitution, coinsurance plans, and multitiered formularies has transformed the benefit landscape,” the authors write.
Poland wants more babies, hospitals can’t cope
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Heavily pregnant Karolina Mrowiec went to a Polish hospital in an advanced stage of labor and was surprised when the nurse asked her what was wrong.
“I am having a baby. Isn’t it obvious?” she replied.
Her story shows how an overstretched hospital system is struggling as Poland experiences its first baby boom in years.
Tainted toothpaste had wider reach than thought
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Chinese-made toothpaste tainted with a potentially poisonous chemical was distributed to more places in the United States than initially thought, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
About 900,000 tubes of toothpaste containing diethylene glycol, an ingredient in antifreeze, were distributed to hospitals for the mentally ill, prisons, juvenile detention centers and some hospitals serving the general population, the Times said.
Computerized Doctors’ Orders Reduce Medication Errors
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Doctors are famous for sloppy scribbling — and handwritten prescriptions lead to thousands of medication errors each year. Electronics to the rescue: U.S. hospitals that switched to computerized physician order entry systems saw a 66 percent drop in prescription errors, according to a new review of studies.
Illegible handwriting and transcription errors are responsible for as much as 61 percent of medication errors in hospitals. A simple mistake such as putting the decimal point in the wrong place can have serious consequences because a patient’s dosage could be 10 times the recommended amount.
Parents have an eye on kids’ media usage - study
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For all the hand-wringing policymakers do over television, parents say they are gaining control over what their kids watch, according to a new survey.
A Kaiser Family Foundation’s national survey of 1,008 parents of children ages 2-17 found that 65 percent say they “closely” monitor their children’s media use, while only 18 percent say they “should do more.”
Pentagon says more funds needed for mental health
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The U.S. military’s mental health system fails to meet the needs of troops and is too short of funds and staff to help service members sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Friday.
Repeated and extended deployments to those war zones over the past five years have driven the need for mental health services higher, but resources have not climbed in response, members of a Defense Department task force said.
US veterans have increased risk of suicide
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Male US military service veterans are more than twice as likely to commit suicide compared with their peers who never served in the armed forces, a new study shows.
And veterans with some type of disability were at particularly high risk of killing themselves, Dr. Mark S. Kaplan of Portland State University in Oregon and colleagues found.
Asthma Not Controlled in Majority of Patients
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A survey of 1,812 patients with moderate-to-severe asthma revealed that the disease was not controlled in 55 percent, despite the fact that most had health insurance and visited their health care providers regularly.
“Even more shocking was the finding that 38 percent of controlled asthmatics and 54 percent of uncontrolled asthmatics reported having had an asthma attack during which they feared for their life,” said Stephen P. Peters, M.D., Ph.D., lead author and a professor of pediatrics, internal medicine-pulmonary and associate director of the Center for Human Genomics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
To what extent are emergency departments being used for primary care?
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There is some belief that Emergency Departments are being used for non-emergency medical care. In particular, do Medicaid recipients and uninsured patients overutilize ED for services better provided in other settings” In two studies conducted at Oregon Health and Science University, to be presented at the 2007 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Annual Meeting, researchers have investigated some common assumptions about ED use and found some surprising results.
To analyze ED usage, a research tool called the “Emergency Department Algorithm” (EDA) has been developed that attempts to categorize all ED visits into four categories: non-emergency; emergency, primary care treatable; emergency, needing ED, but potentially avoidable; and emergency, needing ED, not avoidable.
Obesity Increases Risk of Injury on the Job
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Having a body mass index (BMI) in the overweight or obese range increases the risk of traumatic workplace injury, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy. Employer-sponsored weight loss and maintenance programs should be considered as part of a well-rounded workplace safety plan. The study was Advance Access published on May 7, 2007, by the American Journal of Epidemiology.
BMI is a measure of body fat based on an adult’s height and weight. It is used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a BMI below 18.5 is considered underweight, 18.5–24.9 is normal; 25–29.9 is overweight and over 30 is obese.
Mammography rates declining in the United States
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Since 2000 mammography rates have declined significantly in the United States, according to a new study. Published in the June 15, 2007 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study by Dr. Nancy Breen from the National Cancer Institute and co-authors confirms that screening mammography rates to detect breast cancer fell by as much as four percent nationwide between 2000 and 2005. This is the first study to show that the trend is nationwide among women for whom the test is intended to reduce mortality risk.
Regular mammography is the most efficacious screening test for the early detection of breast cancer available to women today.
Store ads spur teens to smoke, U.S. study finds
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The more cigarette marketing teens are exposed to in retail stores, the more likely they are to smoke, researchers reported on Monday in a U.S. study they said supports even tighter restrictions on tobacco ads.
Point-of-sale advertising can encourage teens to try smoking, the team reported in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
