Social Sciences

GOLDEN, Colo. (April 7, 2009) – The 2009 HealthGrades Patient Safety Excellence Award™ recipients were identified in a report issued today by the leading independent healthcare ratings organization. These hospitals represent an elite group that save lives, save money and prevent errors at a higher rate than other U.S. hospitals. If all hospitals performed at the level of Patient Safety Excellence Award™ hospitals, approximately 211,697 patient safety events and 22,771 Medicare deaths could have been avoided while saving the U.S. approximately $2.0 billion from 2005 through 2007. Between 2005…

PHILADELPHIA (April 7, 2009) – It may be wise to trust the female nose when it comes to body odor. According to new research from the Monell Center, it is more difficult to mask underarm odor when women are doing the smelling. "It is quite difficult to block a woman's awareness of body odor. In contrast, it seems rather easy to do so in men," said study lead author Charles J. Wysocki, PhD, a behavioral neuroscientist at Monell. The researchers speculate that females are more attuned to biologically relevant information in sweat that may guide women when choosing a mate. In the study,…

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Carrying extra weight earlier in life increases the risk of developing problems with mobility in old age, even if the weight is eventually lost, according to new research out of the Sticht Center on Aging at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging and the Wake Forest University Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, appears in the April 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. "In both men and women, being overweight or obese put them at greater risk of developing mobility limitations in old…

A new standardized tool for the assessment of chronic pain can differentiate between pain subtypes and may help tailor treatment. The new tool is published in this week's open-access journal PLoS Medicine. Joachim Scholz from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA and his colleagues studied the symptoms and signs of patients with peripheral neuropathic pain (nerve pain such as sciatica) and non-neuropathic (non-nerve) low back pain to identify the best clinical questions and physical tests for diagnosing pain types. These questions and tests formed the items contained in the authors'…

A simple and inexpensive method of assessing pain, developed by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers, is better than currently used techniques for distinguishing neuropathic pain – pain caused by damage to the nervous system – from other types of chronic back pain. Being able to more precisely determine the underlying nature of the pain is essential to choosing the best treatment. The report appears in the April 7 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. "Currently clinicians measure pain only by asking how bad it is, using scales from mild to moderate to severe or…

A cancer scientist from Johns Hopkins has convinced an international group of colleagues to delay their race to find new cancer biomarkers and instead begin a 7,000-hour slog through a compendium of 50,000 scientific articles already published to assemble, decode and analyze the molecules that might herald the furtive presence of pancreatic cancer. With limited resources available for the exhaustive and expensive testing that needs to be done before any candidate can be considered a bona fide biomarker of clinical value, it's important to take stock of the big picture and strategize, says…

Caused by a mutation of the SMN gene, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is an infantile and juvenile neurodegenerative disorder where motor neuron loss causes progressive paralysis. A new study published in the open access journal BMC Medicine details the first research focused on human muscle tissue atrophied due to a genetic condition, and sheds light on two distinct mechanisms at work in different forms of SMA. A research team from Italy, led by Gerolamo Lanfranchi, analyzed muscle biopsies and genomic DNA from peripheral blood of four SMA I and five SMA III patients from the Neuromuscular…

1. Two New Studies Suggest an Intensive Disease Management Approach to Smoking Cessation (Smoking cessation is the subject of a video news release. Feed dates, times, and coordinates are listed below.) Philadelphia, April 7, 2009 – According to two new studies being published in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, physicians should treat smoking as a chronic disease if they want to help their patients quit successfully. Patients may require repeated or intensive interventions that include pharmacotherapy and counseling, as well as continued dialogue with their physicians. In…

For the first time, researchers have clearly shown regeneration of a critical type of nerve fiber that travels between the brain and the spinal cord and which is required for voluntary movement. The regeneration was accomplished in a brain injury site in rats by scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and is described in a study to be published in the April 6th early on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "This finding establishes a method for regenerating a system of nerve fibers called corticospinal motor axons.…

Nicotinic acid is one of the most effective drugs for raising levels of "good" cholesterol and lowering levels of "bad" cholesterol and other lipids (fats), thereby reducing the risk of heart attack. However, patients often stop taking the drug due to one specific side effect, flushing of the skin that often includes an intense burning and itching sensation. A way to separate the beneficial effects of nicotinic acid from the flushing response has now been elucidated in mice by Robert Lefkowitz and colleagues, at Duke University Medical Center, Durham. In the study, analysis of human cell…