News by Subject Social & Behavior

A social prescribing initiative, designed to improve patients' well-being and quality of life by connecting them to non-medical resources, did not prove effective overall.

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina found that children with asthma who had access to school-based telehealth were 21% less likely to visit the emergency department than those without access to telehealth. This finding, published in JAMA Pediatrics, illustrates the potential benefits of school-based telehealth for children with chronic illnesses, particularly in rural areas lacking pediatric care.

Researchers found that workers with flexible work time enjoyed a 24.8 percent increase in retirement savings compared to those without the benefit; workers with paid sick leave had retirement savings 29.6 percent higher than those workers who lacked paid sick leave benefits; and workers with six to 10 paid sick leave days and workers with more than 10 paid sick leave days annually had a statistically and significantly higher amount in their retirement savings (30.1 percent and 40.7 percent, respectively).

Anti-immigrant remarks from the White House are taking a substantial toll on Latino patients' perceptions of their personal safety and are affecting their access to emergency health care, researchers report in a new study led by emergency medicine physicians at UC San Francisco.

Research being presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2019 National Conference & Exhibition shows that US children living in counties with the highest poverty level are more than one-third more likely to die by suicide than those living in the least impoverished counties. The association is most pronounced for suicide by firearms.

For approximately a decade, research has examined whether trauma or poverty is the most powerful influence on children's cognitive abilities. To address this question, a new study compared adolescents in Jordan -- refugees and nonrefugees -- to determine what kinds of experiences affected their executive function (the higher-order cognitive skills needed for thinking abstractly, making decisions, and carrying out complex plans). The study concluded that poverty worsened refugee youth's working memory.

The study examined the length of time between stopping work and dying among people in England and Wales born before 1951. It found that people in 'unskilled' occupations lived the longest after retiring, while professional workers -- the other end of the social scale -- had the shortest retirements on average.

Available research on the impact of a person's socioeconomic status during childhood suggests that the circumstances one grows up in matter a great deal for adult health. The results of a new IIASA study supports the notion of a 'long arm of childhood conditions' that remains invisible beyond mid-life but can affect health satisfaction later in life.

Researchers analyzed data from everyone born in Denmark from 1980-2000 to look at associations between parental income until children are 15 and the risk of schizophrenia later in life for children.