News by Subject Medicine & Health

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London studied the effectiveness of one of the largest ever national quality improvement programmes in the National Health Service (NHS) and found no improvement in patient survival.

Medicare-covered stroke patients receive vastly different amounts of physical and occupational therapy during hospital stays despite evidence that such care is strongly associated with positive health outcomes, a new study by Brown University researchers found.

San Diego-Researchers at Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine (RCIGM) have utilized a machine-learning process and clinical natural language processing (CNLP) to diagnose rare genetic diseases in record time. This new method is speeding answers to physicians caring for infants in intensive care and opening the door to increased use of genome sequencing as a first-line diagnostic test for babies with cryptic conditions.

Close to 20% of elderly adults who have suffered a heart attack will be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days. Performance on a simple mobility test is the best predictor of whether an elderly heart attack patient will be readmitted, a Yale-led study reports.

Patients with cancer requiring emergency department care had better outcomes at their original hospital or a cancer centre hospital than at alternative general hospitals, found research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

'Tummy tuck' surgery (abdominoplasty) can be safely performed in obese patients, with no increase in complications compared to non-obese patients, reports a study in the April issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

Offering universal late pregnancy ultrasounds at 36 weeks would benefit mothers and babies and could be cost saving. A new study shows that an additional routine ultrasound could eliminate undiagnosed breech presentation of babies, lower the rate of emergency caesarean sections, and improve the health of mothers and babies.

Many patients who suffer a type of heart attack known as an ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) are treated in the intensive care unit (ICU), despite a relatively low risk of developing a complication requiring ICU care, according to a new study published in JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions.