Public Health
A generation ago, there were awareness campaigns to tell people with an irregular heartbeats to go to the emergency room to prevent possible heart attacks.
It worked. People now go to the emergency room as they have been told but with the gradual government takeover of health care there is sudden concern about the costs of these visits. Atrial fibrillation is the most common kind of arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat and can lead to blood clots, stroke, heart failure and other heart-related complications.
At the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014, researchers analyzed…
Since the year 2000, mortality rates for heart disease declined by almost 4 percent even as higher blood pressure and obesity role, according to a new paper in JAMA.
Matthew D. Ritchey, D.P.T., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, and colleagues examined the contributions of heart disease subtypes, such as coronary HD (CHD) mortality, to overall heart disease (HD) mortality trends during 2000-2010.
The researchers analyzed mortality data from the CDC WONDER database, which contains death certificate information from every U.S. state and the District of…
Breathing secondhand marijuana smoke could damage your heart and blood vessels as much as secondhand cigarette smoke, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014.
That leads to the question of how bad second-hand cigarette smoke are known to be. The scientific answer is that there is no evidence - no one has even gotten lung cancer from secondhand smoke. People who seek to make cigarettes illegal say science can't prove secondhand smoke doesn't cause lung cancer, which is then extrapolated to even more speculative concepts like…
Home dialysis therapies may help prolong the lives of patients with kidney failure compared with hemodialysis treatments administered in medical centers, according to an upcoming study at ASN Kidney Week 2014 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA.
Home dialysis therapies are more convenient and less expensive than in-center treatment, but it's unclear whether all home therapies - which include peritoneal dialysis and home hemodialysis - can prolong patients' survival. Researchers led by Austin Stack, MD, MBBCh, FASN (Graduate Entry Medical School, University of Limerick,…
Air pollution may play a role in the development of kidney disease, according to a study upcoming at ASN Kidney Week 2014 November 11-16 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
There are wide variances in the prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) across the United States, only part of which is explained by differences in individuals' risk factors. To see if air quality may also play a role, Jennifer Bragg-Gresham, PhD (University of Michigan) and her colleagues looked at 2010 Medicare information on 1.1 million persons as well as air-quality data for all US…
India's sterilization program focuses on women. EPA/STR
By Sabu S Padmadas, University of Southampton
A sterilization camp held in Chhattisgarh, an impoverished state in central India, has claimed the lives of 13 women, most of whom were young and marginalized. The women, who died within hours of the procedure, were among a group of 83 patients sterilized over the course of just five hours at the mobile clinic.
It now appears they died as a result of contaminated medicines. The incident raises critical questions about surgical standards, infection control protocols and post-operative care in…
If you like coffee, here is a delightful taste of confirmation bias. If you usually make fun of epidemiology, put your skepticism back in the pot, because coffee reduces diabetes.
As many as 380 million people worldwide have diabetes, with an economic estimate of up to $548 billion, making it one of the most significant global health problems in terms of pretend money no one earned.
The Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) has brewed up its annual diabetes report outlining the latest research on coffee and type 2 diabetes and its delicious news.
The research round…
Trans fats are bad, they damage metabolic health in kids, according to experts and policy makers. So they were banned. Happy Meals too. And drinks with sugar.
It's fashionable in nutritional circles to demonize sodas but they also embrace a lot of unsubstantiated food fads. How much real prospective fact-finding has gone into their beliefs?Not much, it is instead epidemiology putting two curves next to each other and declaring causation.
One curve is sugar-sweetened beverages. They are popular, the largest source of added sugar in the diets of adolescents in the United States. And…
Opioid-involved overdoses in the United States have dramatically increased in the last 15 years, largely due to a rise in prescription opioid (PO) use. Emerging evidence suggests the increase is linked to unintentiona lPO misuse that easily turns into addiction.
Individuals who regularly use opioid analgesic medications do not often recognize that they are using a medication that can be a gateway to heroin use.
“According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number of individuals reporting past year heroin use almost doubled between 2007 (373,000) and 2012 (669,000…
Another American election season has come and gone. In San Francisco, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the House, campaigned only modestly, even in a year when voters turned on Democrats nationwide she was sure to get 80 percent of the vote, and once again she talked about abortion, saying that if Democrats were not in charge, they would be banned.
It is hard to imagine that 1 person out of 435 would cause a 40-year-old abortion law to be overturned but the implication has always been that the federal government must control it because of the dangers of 'back alley…