Research shows that poor coordination among providers all-too-often leads to patients returning to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged. Readmissions following hospitalizations for heart failure, acute MI (heart attack), and pneumonia are common among Medicare beneficiaries, researchers reported in JAMA .
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Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) an autoimmune disease in which the body s immune system attacks healthy tissue, mainly in and surrounding joints but in other regions as well affects an estimated 1.5 million Americans, with an estimated 30 to 40 percent of them beyond the help of available drugs.
Sometimes the latest junk-science news makes us want to bang our heads against the wall. New York's Suffolk County has just passed the "Safer Sales Slip Act," banning the use of bisphenol A (BPA) in thermal cash register slips.
Here s a bit more evidence that our health care system is fraught with waste and inefficiency: Women who have had a hysterectomy only rarely need a Pap test, but new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show most get the test anyway.
Patients can refuse a flu shot. Should doctors and nurses have that right, too? The answer to this thorny question is simple No. Sick and immunocompromised hospital patients should not need to fear being infected with the flu virus by those charged with ministering to them, and healthcare workers should not have to also deal with ill medical workers who didn t get immunized, nor bear their sick co-employees share of the burden.
Before taking headlines at face value, make sure the study authors have the facts right. A new meta-analysis concludes that blood transfusions after a myocardial infarction (heart attack) doubles the mortality risk and increases the chance of subsequent MI in survivors but the study is riddled with serious epidemiological fallacies that render this conclusion suspect, at best.
Binge drinking defined as consuming four or more alcoholic drinks at one time is a dangerous activity that can take a toll on anyone s health. And, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed in a new report, it is an activity that almost 14 million American women indulge in about three times a month.
Sigh. It s another victory for the scaremongers. PepsiCo. is removing brominated vegetable oil from its citrus-flavored Gatorade drinks after hearing rumblings from consumers concerned about the emulsifier.
PepsiCo. spokeswoman Molly Carter told the Associated Press the change was in the works for a year and was not in response to a recent petition on Change.org by a Mississippi teenager that attracted 200,000 signatures.
Depression during pregnancy is not an uncommon affliction, affecting between 1 in 5 and 1 in 14 women throughout the developed world. A new study suggests pregnant women suffering from depression should be able to take a certain class of antidepressants without worrying about harming their baby.
As the flu season rages across the U.S., a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine says the flu vaccine does not increase risk of fetal loss. On the contrary, the research found that the vaccination may actually prevent some deaths, because getting the flu while pregnant makes fetal death more likely.
Antioxidants, and eating a diet filled with antioxidant-rich foods, have often been touted as contributing to disease protection including warding off dementia. A new study, however, has shed some light on the science: older adults who eat diets high in antioxidants had the same risk of dementia or stroke as the comparison group who consumed the lowest amount of the substances.
Bariatric surgery, one of several procedures performed on obese patients to produce rapid weight loss, does not provide the medical savings originally hoped for over the six years following the operation, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The FDA has issued its strongest warning a boxed warning to physicians advising against the use of codeine as a painkiller for children following surgery to remove either tonsils or adenoids a common procedure, estimated to occur about 500,000 times annually. The warning states that kids given codeine following these procedures could experience fatal breathing problems.
When screening patients for lung cancer with CT scanning, a more restrictive definition of a positive result could produce fewer false positive diagnoses, with their attendant unnecessary follow-up studies, including biopsies and surgery.
This conclusion, from a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is based on a higher nodule-size threshold for follow-ups from 5 mm to 6 to 8 mm lesion size before starting a more intensive work-up.
More than 400,000 Americans have full or partial hip replacements each year, and the majority of them are women. Now, a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women were also 30 percent more likely than men to need a repeat procedure within the three years following the initial surgery. However, this news is not nearly as dire as it appears.
BPA is in the news yet again, and this time it is being linked to childhood asthma. According to the new study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, children who are exposed to BPA are at an increased risk for asthma. But from reading the article, we found a paucity of data to support that assertion. In fact, maybe just the opposite.
A Mississippi baby born two and a half years ago has been functionally cured of HIV, according to doctors and scientists. The baby was aggressively treated with antiretroviral drugs starting around 30 hours after birth something that is not standard practice.
The unidentified child has been off medication for about a year with no signs of the HIV infection. This is already unprecedented. If the child remains healthy, it would mark only the second time in the world s history that a person has been cured of HIV the only other case involved a bone marrow transplant.
Coronary artery calcification, the buildup of calcium in the coronary arteries, was found to predict the occurrence of stroke, even in individuals with low-to-intermediate cardiovascular risk, according to a new study. The coronary artery calcification score, measured using an electron-beam CT scan, had been shown previously to predict myocardial infarction as well as cardiovascular risk in the general population.
It s no secret that the US has been (and still is) facing a life-threatening shortage of common hospital drugs. Much has been written about this frightening problem, including a 2011 op-ed in the New York Post by ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom entitled Running out of Common Drugs.
They won t give up, no matter the science or the votes. Anti-technology activists opposed to genetically-engineered food were defeated at the ballot box in California last year, but they re not giving up.
Health care professionals and researchers are scrambling to understand why there is a sharp increase in the number of cases reported of children with type 1 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes, previously known as juvenile or insulin-dependent diabetes, typically strikes those whose immune systems have killed off insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. The disease tends to start in adolescence, but in light of the rising number of cases in very young children, experts have stated that parents need to be aware that toddlers and preschoolers are also at risk.
Are viruses alive? Dead? Dead-alive? ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom posed this question last night on the new ACSH-sponsored Facebook page, Infectious Diseases and Vaccines, with the promise of a Snickers bar for the best answer. He got a ton of responses, including one woman who wrote, They don t contain all of the structures and biosynthetic machinery necessary for reproduction. Their genome is mostly DNA or RNA, but not both like most organisms.
A new study, published yesterday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggests that screening colonoscopy may markedly reduce the risk of developing advanced colon cancer.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg can now add reducing the salt content of foods to the long list of regulations he s espoused during his time in office, including reducing trans fats and imposing a ban on large sized sodas. His efforts to regulate salt began in 2010, when under his direction, 30 companies committed to reducing salt content in their products by 25 percent over a period of five years in an effort to lower consumers blood pressure and reduce incidence of heart attack and stroke.
Here is some relief for women experiencing pain during sexual intercourse (dyspareunia), one of the most common problems reported by postmenopausal women. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has just approved a new drug to treat mild to moderate dyspareunia. Osphena acts like estrogen, making vaginal tissues thicker and less fragile, resulting in a reduction in pain.
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