Patients newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias, and their families, need better guidance from their physicians on how to plan for the patient’s progressive loss of ability to handle finances, according to a study led by a physi…
Drinking excess alcohol during pregnancy can cause fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) due to the damaging effects of alcohol on a developing baby’s brain. Despite its harmful effects, pregnant mothers continue to drink alcohol — up to 3 in every 1000 ba…
Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Scie…
In two studies published today in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, the risk factors for readmission to the hospital are examined based upon general medicine inpatients and those with at least two admissions in a six-month period. Alongside clinica…
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 27 — Mothers who did not breastfeed their children have significantly higher rates of type 2 diabetes later in life than moms who breastfed, report University of Pittsburgh researchers in a study published in the September issue of…
Public education is needed about the symptoms and risks of mini-stroke, also called transient ischemic attack or TIA, according to the first large study on the topic, which is published in the May 13 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study found that only 9 percent of people could give the definition of a TIA or identify a symptom of TIA. TIA symptoms are the same as those for a regular stroke, but TIA symptoms resolve themselves within 24 hours.
Diabetes management may improve when physicians use an interactive communication technique with patients. Unfortunately, physicians underuse this simple strategy, according to a new study, which appears in the January 13, 2003 issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine.
Prior research has shown that patients fail to recall or comprehend as much as half of what they are told by their physicians, according to UCSF researchers. “In this study, we tried to identify simple communication techniques that make physicians more effective teachers,” said Dean Schillinger, MD, UCSF assistant professor of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center (SFGHMC) and lead author of the study.
A substantially higher death rate and inability to recover from kidney failure was documented in a study of 552 critically ill, hospitalized patients who were given diuretics, the most commonly used therapy for kidney failure. Published in the November 27, 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the study suggests that physicians treating patients in acute kidney failure should reassess the use of diuretics, particularly when there is a limited response in terms of increased urine output.
While cautioning that their findings still must be evaluated in humans, University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University Medical Center researchers report that the cholesterol-lowering drug atorvastatin (Lipitor) significantly improved, prevented relapses or reversed paralysis in mice with an experimental disease that closely resembles multiple sclerosis. The study, reported in the November 7 issue of Nature, was conducted in mice with experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), the standard animal model for multiple sclerosis.