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First Edition: August 10, 2012

Reporting for Kaiser Health News, in collaboration with The Washington Post, Susan Jaffe writes: "Concerned that a growing number of seniors have been unexpectedly forced to pay thousands of dollars for nursing home care after a stay in a hospital, Medicare has launched a pilot project to test whether relaxing its hospital payment rules could help beneficiaries".

10 Aug 2012

Depressed patients at risk of developing peripheral artery disease

Depression was linked with an increased risk of peripheral artery disease (PAD) in a study of more than one thousand men and women with heart disease conducted by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.

10 Aug 2012

Longer looks: Waking up to the need for sleep

Among the more than 11,000 dearly departed inhabitants of Southeast Portland's Multnomah Park Cemetery, friends Eric Cordingley and David Anderson have their favorites: a reputed French madam, a young Norwegian institutionalized for being gay, and Louis Napoleon Lepley -- or, as they call him, "Louis the cannibal." Intriguing as their individual stories may be, together they help tell a bigger, darker tale

10 Aug 2012

Access to care in Mass. improves, but many docs still don't accept new patients

The survey by the Massachusetts Medical Society says access to primary care is slowly improving, but that it can still take a month or longer to get an appointment. In addition, only about half of internal and family medicine practices are accepting new patients.

10 Aug 2012

Weight training lowers diabetes risk in men

Men who engage in weight training are at a reduced risk for Type 2 diabetes, especially if they combine this with aerobic exercise, show study findings.

10 Aug 2012

Two-drug combination helps combat cocaine addiction

A combination of two existing pharmaceutical drugs may soon be used to treat cocaine addiction, findings from an animal study in Science Translational Medicine suggest.

10 Aug 2012

Weight training lowers diabetes risk in men

Men who engage in weight training are at a reduced risk for Type 2 diabetes, especially if they combine this with aerobic exercise, show study findings.

10 Aug 2012

Combination therapy delays progression for metastatic breast cancer patients

Phase III trial results show that a combination of the aromatase inhibitor anastrozole and fulvestrant, an analog of estradiol that downgrades the estrogen receptor, is superior to anastrozole alone in prolonging progression-free survival in patients with metastatic breast cancer.

10 Aug 2012

Trauma: spending more money doesn’t translate to higher survival rates

A large-scale review of national patient records reveals that although survival rates are the same, the cost of treating trauma patients in the western United States is 33 percent higher than the bill for treating similarly injured patients in the Northeast. Overall, treatment costs were lower in the Northeast than anywhere in the United States.

10 Aug 2012

Color-coded food labels help improve employee diets

A study carried out in a hospital cafeteria in the USA shows that color-coding food labels to indicate whether the foods are healthy or unhealthy can significantly improve the dietary choices made by employees.

9 Aug 2012

Pay more than lip service to sun-screen advice for antihypertensive users

Users of common antihypertensive drugs, such as hydrochlorothiazide and nifedipine, may be at increased risk for developing lip cancer.

9 Aug 2012

Pre-cesarean antibiotics cut infection risk

Administering prophylactic antibiotics before women undergo cesareans significantly reduces postsurgical infection rates, show US study findings.

9 Aug 2012

Risk model predicts illness after ambulatory surgery

A marked proportion of patients undergoing ambulatory surgery suffer postdischarge nausea and vomiting, say US scientists who have developed a simplified risk score to identify patients who may benefit from long-acting prophylactic therapy.

9 Aug 2012

Salvage surgery for oropharyngeal cancer needs due consideration

Japanese study results indicate a 5-year overall survival rate of 49% for oropharyngeal cancer patients treated with salvage surgery after initial treatment with chemoradiotherapy has failed.

9 Aug 2012

Organ donation: an interview with David Shaw

Most donors die in intensive care units, frequently after car accidents. Once it is clear that recovery is out of the question, families will be told that further treatment is futile and the issue of donation can be sensitively raised.

9 Aug 2012

Normal weight teens who perceive themselves as fat are more likely to become obese

They're everywhere -- in magazines, on the Internet, on television-people with super-thin bodies who are presented as having the ideal body form. But despite the increasing pressure to be thin, more and more of us are overweight. Now, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have found that normal weight teens who perceive themselves as fat are more likely to grow up to be fat.

9 Aug 2012

NSF awards Yale University and UCSD collaborative grant to develop Neuroscience Gateway

The University of California, at San Diego and Yale University have been awarded a collaborative grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) that gives neuroscientists broadened access to essential high-performance computing (HPC) and storage resources.

9 Aug 2012

Newborn death risk increases with maternal obesity in sub-Saharan Africa

New research published Online First in The Lancet indicates that babies born to mothers who are overweight or obese in sub-Saharan Africa, where rates of obesity are projected to increase at an alarming rate during the next two decades, are significantly more likely to die in the first two days after their birth. The study is the first to shed light on the role of maternal obesity in neonatal death (during the first 28 days of life) in developing countries.

9 Aug 2012

Doctors sometimes fail to warn patients of particular risks before treatment

Australian doctors sometimes fail to warn patients of risks that could affect the patient's quality of life before providing treatment or surgery, a new study led by University of Melbourne researchers has shown.

9 Aug 2012

Clinical trials to test safety of 3K3A-APC in patients with ischemic stroke

Clinical trials start this week for a stroke drug initially created by a team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and the University of Southern California (USC), and further developed by biotech company ZZ Biotech.

9 Aug 2012