Public Health

A secondary analysis of a mild gestational diabetes mellitus treatment trial long-term follow-up study looked at the relationship between maternal oral glucose tolerance testing and childhood body mass index, fasting glucose, insulin and anthropometrics in the offspring of untreated mild GDM and non GDM assessed at ages five to 10 years. They concluded that maternal glycemia impacts childhood obesity and metabolic dysfunction. The study analyzed 236 offspring with untreated mild gestational diabetes mellitus and 481 non GDM. The conclusion was that maternal glycemia is associated with some…

An upcoming presentation at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting argues that more midwives and a general change to the American child delivery process can reduce cesarean delivery rates - the very thing doctors were sued for not doing enough of in the 1990s.  Primary and repeat cesarean delivery rates are now high in the U.S., with nearly one-third of women delivering by cesarean compared to 21 percent in 1995. Cesarean delivery has also associated with a higher risk of maternal complications, longer length of stay and longer postpartum recovery, but there are non-…

Much of the public think malpractice insurance is a big cost of health care and so they rightly think that if there were reasonable checks on lawsuit judgments health care would be affordable without government intervention. But it's actually the defensive medicine to not need to use malpractice insurance, along with medical culture that is told to teach to the protocol rather than think, that has caused health care costs to skyrocket. Defensive medicine is the practice of performing additional tests and procedures to have all of the proper boxes checked off in any possible deposition, even…

89 percent of young people in one region of Spain own their first mobile phone before they reach the age of 13 and a recent study has analyzed the use of information and communication technologies by using a sample of 5,538 students from the Vallès Occidental region of Catalonia. The study, based on surveys taken in the 2010/2011 academic year, finds links between school failure and an elevated use of computers at home. It also correlates an intensive use of video devices with the consumption of toxic substances.  The researchers writing in Atención Primaria say the 5,538 secondary…

Write Your Story, Improve Your Health Studies have shown that writing about yourself and your personal experiences can improve mood disorders, improve health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory. Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health. In an early study on personal story editing,…

More than 2 million years of life have been saved by solid-organ transplants since 1987, according to a new report in JAMA Surgery.   The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) maintains a national registry for organ matching. Abbas Rana, M.D., of the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, and coauthors analyzed data from UNOS and the Social Security Administration Master File to determine the survival benefit of solid-organ transplants from September 1987 through 2012.   The authors reviewed the records of more than 1.1 million patients: 533,329 were organ transplant recipients…

Fortifying food with folic acid saves about 1,300 babies each year from serious birth defects of the brain and spine known as neural tube defects (NTDs), according to new data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.The number of babies born in the United States with these conditions has declined by 35 percent since 1998. About 3,000 pregnancies in the U.S. still are affected by neural tube defects annually. The March of Dimes says that even with folic acid-fortified grain products, many women still may not be getting enough…

Women are at an increased risk of relapse after a smoking cessation attempt. Research indicates that both the hormonal fluctuations of the menstrual cycle and the negative symptomatology experienced while quitting play a role during smoking cessation and can influence outcomes. Although more men than women smoke, women take less time to become dependent after initial use, report shorter and less frequent abstinence periods, smoke for longer periods in their lives, and have more difficulties quitting the habit than men. The number of smokers is gradually decreasing in the Western…

For most people, they can extend their healthy lifespan by walking for 20 minutes a day. Yet most people don't do it. It's become a popular sport to criticize obese people while lamenting that our pop culture encourages people to be too thin. We should be criticizing people who don't go for walks rather than fat people if we care about lowering health care costs, according to a study of over 334,000 European men and women which found that twice as many deaths may be attributable to lack of physical activity compared with the number of deaths attributable to obesity. Physical inactivity has…

A national survey of students in U.S. middle schools and high schools shows some important improvements in levels of substance use. The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study tracks trends in substance use among students in 8th, 10th and 12th grades. Each year the national study surveys 40,000 to 50,000 students in about 400 secondary schools throughout the United States. Both alcohol and cigarette use in 2014 are at their lowest points since the study began in 1975. All three grades showed a decline in the proportion of students reporting any alcohol use in the…