News by Subject Medicine & Health

A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine provides detailed insights on the increased risk of self-directed violence that patients aged 15-29 years visiting the emergency department (ED) for medical complaints subsequently experience. This underscores the importance of EDs in suicide prevention. The broad number of physical health conditions associated with an increased risk of self-directed violence may serve to support expanded or broader screening among teens and young adults.

For patients who receive emergency department care for heart failure, early follow-up by a physician within seven days after emergency department discharge is associated with lower rates of death or admissions to hospital, according to research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

A team of Rutgers scientists have taken an important step toward the goal of making diseased hearts heal themselves -- a new model that would reduce the need for bypass surgery, heart transplants or artificial pumping devices.

Stethoscopes carried by health care practitioners are loaded with diverse bacteria, including some that can cause healthcare-associated infections, according to a study published today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. The research also reviewed the effectiveness of cleaning methods, finding a standardized approach to be superior for removing bacteria compared with various approaches employed by health care practitioners.

Female military veterans who have traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder or depression long after their service may be more likely to later develop dementia than female veterans without those conditions, according to a study published in the Dec. 12, 2018, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

New research on children exposed to Zika during their mothers' pregnancies finds that by age 12 to 18 months, significant problems were present in 6.25 percent of children who were evaluated for eye abnormalities, 12.2 percent of children evaluated for hearing problems, and 11.7 percent of children evaluated for severe delays in language, motor skills and/or cognitive function who also had brain imaging. In all, 14.5 percent had at least one of the three abnormalities.

Researchers from the George Washington University (GW) have examined the care that women and men with heart attack symptoms receive from emergency medical services (EMS) after a 911 call and found that women were less likely to receive aspirin, be resuscitated, or be transported to the hospital in ambulances using lights and sirens.

Australian emergency medicine clinician-researchers are leading a large new study to understand how patients with sepsis are treated in emergency departments. The study is the next step for the research team, following a successful pilot trial in which the team compared two treatments at the opposing end of a spectrum of accepted practice for sepsis,

Pathologists at Houston Methodist developed a real-time website to track flu cases, just in time to assist physicians, the CDC and patients for the fall 2018 flu season.

In a Journal of Bone and Mineral Research study that examined trends in the incidence of infections following hip fracture surgery in Denmark, the risk of postoperative infections (at 15, 30, 90, and 365 days) increased between 2005 and 2016.