Wednesday, July 31, 2013

'Safe' Painkiller That is Turning Unsuspecting Women into Drug Addicts

Medindia Health News
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'Safe' Painkiller That is Turning Unsuspecting Women into Drug Addicts
Aug 1st 2013, 06:53


Up until now, the prolonged use of painkillers and other OTC medications was linked to the occurrence of different health issues including gastroesophageal reflux, heart attacks and more. The new review, however, sheds light on yet another serious health issue affecting women who may have overused painkiller during their lives.

According to the review, Co-codamol, a so-called 'safe' painkiller, which contains paracetamol and codeine (an opiate belonging to the same family as morphine and heroin) causes its users to get addicted to it.

Though codeine is an effective painkiller, like other opioids, it does add an effect of calm and wellbeing. When taken for a longer duration, it can prove to be addictive.

"Patients and doctors perceive co-codamol as being the safest of all opioids, but in reality it doesn't mean that it is safe," Glasgow based general practitioner Des Spence, explained.

A few studies also suggest how women in particular, tend to be more addicted to this drug than men. A charity that helps people deal with addiction from the use of OTC and prescription drugs has claimed that around 65 percent of the helpline inquiries came from women.

"Prescriptions of co-codamol have almost doubled in a�decade and that doesn't reflect an increase in pain, but a lack of supervision of prescriptions," Dr Spence added.

"A few years ago, our practice noticed a large number of painkillers on repeat were being over-ordered, patients were having three times the amount they needed because the system wasn't picking up on the orders. So we took all painkillers off repeat so patients had to be reviewed by a doctor when they wanted more."

Since the addiction is basically a gradual process, careful personal monitoring needs to be done on an individual level to help prevent addiction to the drug. Public awareness of the addictive effects of prolonged consumption of painkillers can also help individuals become more aware, and may reduce the numbers of individuals taking painkillers for minor pains.

Source-Medindia

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NGO Says Baby Food Giants Mislead Mothers About Breastfeeding

Medindia Health News
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NGO Says Baby Food Giants Mislead Mothers About Breastfeeding
Aug 1st 2013, 06:53


"Putting profits before children's health, baby food giants like Nestle, Heinz and Abott woo mothers to give their supplementary food through the label on the container and various websites from four months which is unhealthy and unscientific as it can lead to health risks, including diarrhoea," Arun Gupta, co-ordinator of the NGO, Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI), and member of the Prime Minister's Council on India's Nutrition Challenges said.

BPNI said Nestle Nutrition Institute is continuing to organise doctors' meetings despite objections from the government.

Heinz asks new mothers to give cereal food "Oat and Apple" to more than four-month baby through container label and various websites.

Abbott claims brain development and promotes a product 'Similac advance infant formula stage 1" for babies up to six months and "Similac infant formula stage one" for zero to six months babies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that artificial feeding is an established risk factor for child's health, causing diarrhoea, respiratory or newborn infections, allergies as well as obesity and adult health diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

"While attending a workshop during my pregnancy days on labour and delivery organised by my hospital, I was surprised to see promotion of baby feeding products. Such promotions, particularly through web and at hospital settings, affect the choice of young parents and influence them to adopt artificial feeding, harmful for babies," Institute of Home Economics (Delhi University) assistant professor Yuki Azad said.

"In a country like India where clean drinking water is not available, a bottle-fed baby is more likely to die of diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections than breastfeed babies. Why on earth government of India should allow this?" asked Azad.

BPNI also asked the government to strictly enforce the IMS Act (Infant Milk Substitutes, Feeding Bottles and Infant Foods Regulation of Production, Supply and Distribution Act, 1992) and Amendment Act, 2003.

"There should be 'zero tolerance' for misleading mothers in the interest of children's health and survival and the government should ensure that such violations end," BPNI national coordinator J.P. Dadhich said.

The IMS Act bans all kinds of baby food and feeding bottle promotion, including advertisements, inducements on sales, pecuniary benefits to doctors or their associations, including sponsorship, commission to salesmen, and prescribe labelling requirements for babies aged zero to two years.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg. It's high time that government puts effective enforcement machinery in place to monitor and implement IMS Act right at the district and state levels," Gupta said.

Source-IANS

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Bigger Lungs may be Better for Transplants: Study

Medindia Health News
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Bigger Lungs may be Better for Transplants: Study
Aug 1st 2013, 05:53


Currently, in the United States height is used as a surrogate for lung size for transplant candidates. But Michael Eberlein, clinical assistant professor in internal medicine at the UI, and colleagues came up with a new formula, called "predicted total lung capacity ratio," to find out which size lungs matched best with patients who are candidates for transplants.

"An unresolved question in the field of lung transplantation is how the size of the donor lungs relative to the recipient affects transplant success," he explains. "It is commonly believed that transplanting oversized lungs is problematic, but no data were available to substantiate that idea."

The pTLC ratio is calculated using height and gender. Taller people have bigger lungs and a man's lungs are larger than a woman's of the same height. The pTLC-ratio is determined by dividing the donor's pTLC by the patient's pTLC. A ratio of 1.0 is a perfect size match, whereas for example a ratio of 1.3 indicates that the donor lung is significantly larger than the patient's lung.

Eberlein and colleagues used data from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) lung transplant registry for all adult patients (aged 18 years and older) who underwent first-time lung transplantation between May 2005 and April 2010. Of the 6,997 patients included in the study, 4,520 underwent bilateral lung transplant and 2,477 underwent single lung transplant.

For patients undergoing a double-lung transplant, the team found that each 0.1 increase in the predicted total lung capacity (pTLC) ratio was associated with a 7 percent decrease in risk of death a year after the procedure. This decrease was still independently associated with improved survival following additional adjustment to account for any bias to oversizing. For those receiving one lung, each 0.1 increase in pTLC-ratio was associated with a 6 percent decrease in the risk of death a year later; however, this association was not present following the same additional adjustment to account for any bias to oversizing.

"This study shows that lung size matters in lung-transplant procedures," says Eberlein, lead author of the study published Aug. 1 in the journal The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. "We found that oversized allografts, up to a point, were associated with improved survival after lung transplantation. We would hope that recipients, within surgically feasible limits, could be listed for higher donor height ranges and ultimately have a better chance of receiving an acceptable donor lung."

In an editorial in the same issue of The Annals, Seth Force, from Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, praised the work. "The real strength of this study may be in showing that utilizing pTLC allows for a more standardized way of matching donor lungs compared to the height method," Force says. "The data in this manuscript make a compelling argument for the lung transplant community, as well as UNOS, to consider changing to a pTLC method for lung sizing for listed patients."

Source-Eurekalert

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Scientists Discover New Approach for Organ Regeneration and Tissue Repair

Medindia Health News
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Scientists Discover New Approach for Organ Regeneration and Tissue Repair
Aug 1st 2013, 05:53


Tissue regeneration is a process that is not fully understood, but previous research has demonstrated that endothelial cells lining the insides of small blood vessels play a key role in tissue growth. It is also known that these endothelial cells generate chemical messengers called epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs), which stimulate blood vessel formation in response to tissue injury.

In this new research, first author Dipak Panigrahy, MD, an investigator in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Center for Vascular Biology Research, and his colleagues wanted to find out how EETs might participate in organ and tissue regeneration.

To find the answers, they created 7 different mouse models. The models focused on liver, kidney and lung regeneration; wound healing; corneal vascularization; and retinal vascularization.

Panigrahy, an Instructor in Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Administering synthetic EETs spurred tissue growth in the research models, said that the team used genetic and pharmacologic tools to manipulate EET levels in the animals to show that EETs play a critical role in accelerating tissue growth, providing the first in vivo demonstration that pharmacological modulation of EETs can affect organ regeneration.

The team also demonstrated that proteins called soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) inhibitors, known to elevate EET levels, promoted liver and lung regeneration. (sEH is the main metabolizing enzyme of EETs.)

Panigrahy asserted that their results offer a mechanistic rationale for evaluating sEH inhibitors as novel therapeutics for a number of human diseases such as hepatic insufficiency after liver damage and diseases characterized by immature lung development, such as bronchopulmonary dysplasia, adding that the use of topical sEH inhibitors on the skin might also be useful for the acceleration of wound healing.

The researchers suspected that EETs were stimulating tissue regeneration by way of blood vessel formation, specifically by producing vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) to promote vessel growth. As predicted, when the investigators depleted VEGF in the mice, EETs' effects on organ regeneration disappeared.

Mark Kieran, MD, PhD, of the Division of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, said that discovering EETs' role could be of critical importance to help control the repair of liver, lungs and kidneys.

Their findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Source-ANI

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Methamphetamine Increases Susceptibility to Deadly Fungal Infection: Study

Medindia Health News
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Methamphetamine Increases Susceptibility to Deadly Fungal Infection: Study
Aug 1st 2013, 05:53


Researchers found that injected methamphetamine (METH) significantly enhanced colonization of the lungs by Cryptococcus neoformans and accelerated progression of the disease and the time to death in mouse models. C. neoformans is usually harmless to healthy individuals, but METH causes chinks in the blood-brain barrier that can permit the fungus to invade the central nervous system, where it causes a deadly brain infection.

"The highest uptake of the drug is in the lungs," says corresponding author Luis Martinez of Long Island University-Post, in Brookville, New York and of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx. "This may render the individual susceptible to infection. We wanted to know how METH would alter C. neoformans infection."

Thirteen million people in the US have abused METH in their lifetimes, and regular METH users numbered approximately 353,000 in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available. A central nervous system stimulant that adversely impacts immunological responses, recent studies show that injected METH accumulates in various sites in the body, but the lungs seem to accumulate the highest concentrations, says Martinez, which could well impact how the lung responds to invading pathogens.

To study the impact this accumulation might have on pulmonary infection, Martinez and his colleagues injected mice with doses of METH over the course of three weeks, then exposed those mice to the C. neoformans fungus. In humans, C. neoformans initially infects the lungs but often crosses the blood-brain barrier to infect the central nervous system and cause meningitis. In their experiments, METH significantly accelerated the speed with which the infected mice died, so that nine days after infection, 100% of METH treated mice were dead, compared to 50% of the control mice.

Using fluorescent microscopy to examine lung tissue in METH-treated and control mice, the researchers found that METH enhanced the interaction of C. neoformans with epithelial cells in the lining of the lung. Seven days after exposure to the fungus, the lungs of METH-treated mice showed large numbers of fungi surrounded by vast amounts of gooey polysaccharide in a biofilm-like arrangement. METH-treated mice also displayed low numbers of inflammatory cells early during infection and breathed faster than controls, a sign of respiratory distress.

Martinez says this greater ability to cause disease in the lung may be due in part to simple electrical attraction. Their analysis shows that METH imparts a greater negative charge on the surface of the fungal cells, possibly lending them a greater attraction to the surface of the lung and an enhanced ability to form a biofilm that can protect its members from attack by the immune system. The fungus also releases more of its capsular polysaccharide in METH-treated mice, which can help the organism colonize and persist in the lung.

"When the organism senses the drug, it basically modifies the polysaccharide in the capsule. This might be an explanation for the pathogenicity of the organism in the presence of the drug, but it also tells you how the organism senses the environment and that it will modify the way that it causes disease," Martinez says.

But the fungus doesn't stop in the lungs. "The drug stimulates colonization and biofilm formation in the lungs of these animals," says Martinez. "And this will follow to dissemination to the central nervous system by the fungus."

C. neoformans in the lung moved on to the bloodstream and then into the central nervous system. The brains of METH-treated mice had higher numbers of C. neoformans cells, greater quantities of the fungus' polysaccharide, and larger lesions than control mice, indicating that METH has a detrimental effect on the blood-brain barrier, permitting the pathogen to cross more easily from the bloodstream to infect the central nervous system.

"METH-induced alterations to the molecules responsible to maintain the integrity of the blood-brain barrier provide an explanation for the susceptibility of METH abuser to brain infection by HIV and other pathogens," write the authors.

Martinez and his colleagues plan to follow up on the work by investigating how aspects of the immune system might be involved in changes the drug causes to the blood-brain barrier.

Source-Eurekalert

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Research: Most Ward Nurses Say Time Pressures Force Them to 'Ration' Care

Medindia Health News
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Research: Most Ward Nurses Say Time Pressures Force Them to 'Ration' Care
Aug 1st 2013, 05:53


The lower the nurse headcount, the greater the risk, the study shows, prompting the researchers to suggest that hospitals could use episodes of missed care as an early warning sign that nurse staffing levels are too low to provide safe, high quality care.

They base their findings on a survey of almost 3000 registered nurses working in 401 general medical/surgical wards in 46 acute care NHS hospitals across England between January and September 2010.

The questions, which covered five different domains, were designed to gauge the prevalence of missed care�care that nurses deemed necessary, but which they were unable to do or complete because of insufficient time.

Thirteen different aspects of nursing care were included in the survey, ranging from adequate patient monitoring, through to adequate documentation of care, and pain management.

The researchers wanted to find out if there was any association between nurse staffing levels and the number of these episodes, and whether these were linked to overall perceptions of the quality of nursing care and patient safety in a ward.

So they asked nurses to rate the quality of care on their ward, and to indicate how many patients needed assistance with routine activities and frequent monitoring. The researchers also assessed the quality of the working environment using a validated scoring system�the Practice Environment Scale (PES).

The results showed that 86% of the 2917 respondents said that at least one of the 13 care activities on their last shift had been needed, but not done, because of lack of time. On average, nurses were unable to do or complete four activities.

The most commonly rationed of these were comforting and talking to patients, reported by 66% of participating nurses; educating patients (52%); and developing or updating care plans (47%).

Pain management and treatment/procedures were the activities least likely to be missed, reported as not being done by only 7% and 11%, respectively.

Higher numbers of patients requiring assistance with routine daily living or frequent monitoring were linked to higher numbers of missed care activities.

Staffing levels varied considerably across wards, but the average number of patients per nurse was 7.8 on day shifts and 10.9 at night.

The fewer patients a nurse looked after, the less likely was care to be missed or rationed, and the lower was the volume of these episodes. Staffing levels were significantly associated with rationing eight of the 13 care activities.

Nurses looking after the most (in excess of 11) patients were twice as likely to say they rationed patient monitoring as those looking after the fewest (six or fewer). Adequate documentation and comforting/talking with patients also suffered the most.

Staffing levels of healthcare assistants had no bearing on rationing of care. But the quality of the work environment did, with the average number of care activities significantly lower (2.82) in the best than in the worst (5.61).

Around eight care activities were left undone on wards nurses rated as "failing" on patient safety, compared with around 2.5 on wards rated as "excellent."

"Our findings raise difficult questions for hospitals in a climate where many are looking to reduce�not increase�their expenditure on nurse staffing," comment the authors, who go on to say that hospitals would have to reduce the number of patients to seven or fewer per registered nurse to significantly reduce the amount of care left undone.

But they suggest: "Hospitals could use a nurse-rated assessment of "missed care" as an early warning measure to identify wards with inadequate nurse staffing."

Source-Eurekalert

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Female Deaths Much Less Likely to be Reported to Coroner in England and Wales: Research

Medindia Health News
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Female Deaths Much Less Likely to be Reported to Coroner in England and Wales: Research
Aug 1st 2013, 05:53


Furthermore, women's deaths are less likely to proceed to an inquest, and those that do are less likely to result in a verdict of "unnatural" death than men's, with some coroners particularly likely to favour a verdict according to the sex of the deceased, the research shows.

The authors analysed figures from the Ministry of Justice on the numbers and proportions of deaths reported to all 98 coroners, in each of the 114 jurisdictions in England and Wales, between 2001 and 2010.

These figures were then set in the context of official national statistics on the number of deaths registered in England and Wales over the same period.

Doctors are not obliged to report a death to a coroner, and the legal duty to hold an inquest resides with the coroner, usually prompted by a death in unnatural or violent circumstances, or when the death is sudden, of unknown cause, or happens in prison.

The analysis of the figures showed that coroner reporting rates varied widely across England and Wales.

Plymouth and South West Devon topped the league table, with 87% of registered deaths reported to the coroner between 2001 and 2010, while Stamford in Lincolnshire came bottom, with only 12% of deaths reported to the coroner.

There were no obvious explanations to account for such wide differences, which remained stable throughout the decade, suggesting that local demographics or medico-legal practice had a part to play, say the authors.

Similarly, coroners varied widely in their use of verdicts, which again remained consistent over time, the analysis showed. This is likely to reflect the personal decision making style of the coroner rather than any local patterns in deaths, say the authors.

But when they looked at reporting rates according to the sex of the dead person, a striking gender divide emerged.

While jurisdictions with high reporting rates for men also had high reporting rates for women, and vice versa, male deaths were 26% more likely to be reported to the coroner than female deaths.

Higher reporting rates for men were common across all jurisdictions in England and Wales, and in some areas male deaths were 48% more likely to be reported.

Not only were female deaths less likely to be reported, but they were also less likely to proceed to an inquest.

Female deaths were half as likely to proceed to an inquest as men's, with just 8% going to this stage compared with 16% of all male deaths. And even when female deaths did get an inquest, they were more likely to be given a verdict of natural causes than men (28% compared with 22%).

Among verdicts of unnatural deaths, men were overrepresented in occupational diseases and suicide while women were overrepresented in narrative verdicts�where cause of death is given in the form of a narrative rather than as a single "short form" definition�and accidents, implying that sex of the deceased influences the verdict, say the authors.

Furthermore, some coroners were "gendered," in their approach to inquest verdicts, and more likely to favour a particular verdict when dealing with a death, according to the gender of the deceased.

The government is currently reforming the death certification process in a bid to strengthen arrangements and improve the quality and accuracy of causes of death, but there are some concerns that the move will prompt a fall in deaths reported to the coroner from the present national average of 46% to around 35%, say the authors.

Source-Eurekalert

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Health 2.0 Fall, price increase 5pm PT

The Health Care Blog
The Health Care Blog 
Health 2.0 Fall, price increase 5pm PT
Jul 31st 2013, 21:30

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Health 2.0′s 7th Annual Fall Conference is Sept. 29-Oct 2. That’s only eight weeks until the LARGEST showcase in new health care tech with over 150 demos and 200 speakers! More demos, more tightly curated panels, more networking, and more of that Health 2.0 magic you love.

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Just a few of the speakers joining us in Santa Clara include:
Neal Sofian, Premera; Pete Hudson, iTriage; Christine Robin, BodyMedia; Jeff Tangney,Doximity; Bill Davenhall, ESRI; Peter Lee, Covered California; Lloyd Dean,Dignity Health; Colin Hill, GNS Healthcare; Farzad Mostashari, ONC; Joan Kennedy, CIGNA; Ram Gopalan, Argusoft; Susannah Fox, Pew Research Center; Sandy Smolan, Luminous Content; Peter Tippett, Verizon, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, THINK-Health; and J.D. Kleinke,Medical Economist & Author.

Don’t forget our keynotes from Lt. Governor of California Gavin Newsom, and Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana.

Technology demos from:
Lively, QMedic, Nuehealth, Passport Health Communications, PulsePoint, WelVU, Qpid.me, Nuance, Medicast, Health Recovery Solutions, VSee, Kinsa, Blue Marble Game Co., Simplee, Medivizor, Zensorium, GoBlue Labs, GetHealth, Recovery Record, WellWithMe, LoseIt!, HeartMath, HopeLab, PatientsLikeMe, Omada Health, GoodChime, CogCubed, RetraceHealth, Big White Wall, Crescendo Bioscience, CyberDoctor, Amplify Health, Caresync, Syapse, AbiogeniX, Argusoft, HopeLab and more to be announced soon!

Also, new for 2013, we’re offering an extra demo stage in the Exhibit Hall to allow more demos than ever before!

This year also includes more pre-conference sessions including:

  • Health 2.0 EDU with colleagues from UC Berkeley, Michigan and Claremont-McKenna
  • Hospital Roundtable
  • 4th DC to VC Startup Showcase
  • Pharma 2.0
  • Employers 2.0
  • Care for the Underserved
  • Health 2.0 Across the World

Plus special appearances by health tech innovators from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Korea, the UK, and many more!

We now offer a free pass to the entire conference to any qualifying PATIENTS (sorry, no consultants, those running a tech startup, or representatives of a health care organization) or full-time practicing PHYSICIANS. Physicians can apply here and Patients and Caregivers can apply here.

Check out our agenda for even more! PRICES GO UP TODAY AT 5:00PM PDT!

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Hospital Screening Tool for Suicide Risk Among Self-harmers Should be Ditched: Study

Medindia Health News
Medindia largest health website in india. // via fulltextrssfeed.com 
Hospital Screening Tool for Suicide Risk Among Self-harmers Should be Ditched: Study
Jul 31st 2013, 18:53


The technique (SADPERSONS Scale) fails to pick up most of those who require admission to a psychiatric unit, community psychiatric aftercare, or to determine those at risk of self harming again, say the researchers.

The SADPERSONS Scale was developed in the USA in 1983 as a means of assessing suicide risk among patients who had self harmed. It is based on 10 major risk factors, but has changed little since it was first devised, say the researchers.

National guidance in England stipulates that all patients who go to hospital after an episode of self harm should be given a full psychosocial assessment. But current pressures in hospitals to meet waiting time targets, combined with a reduction in the availability of mental health services, mean that emergency care staff are increasingly minded to use rating scales to find out which patients can be discharged without a full psychosocial assessment, say the researchers.

They therefore assessed SADPERSONS scores that had been recorded for 126 patients consecutively admitted to one emergency medicine department in a major general hospital in Oxford during the summer of 2011, to see how accurate it was at predicting how these patients were subsequently managed and treated.

This included admission to a psychiatric unit, a proxy for psychosocial assessment; the provision of community psychiatric aftercare; and bouts of repeated self harm in the following six months.

Self harm was defined as any act of poisoning or injury, irrespective of its purpose. Most of the patients (102; 81%) had taken an overdose; around one in 10 (11%) had cut themselves; and the remaining 10 patients (8%) had inflicted other forms of injury on themselves.

Admission to a psychiatric unit was required in five cases (4%) and community psychiatric aftercare in just over half (55%; 70). One in four patients (24.6%) self harmed again at least once.

The SADPERSONS Scale only picked up 2% of those requiring admission to a psychiatric unit, around 6% of those needing community psychiatric aftercare, and just over 6.5% of those likely to self harm again.

The authors point out that for the purposes of suicide prevention, any technique designed to spot potential suicide risk must have a low rate of false negative results�in other words, it must be accurate and not miss most of those at risk of killing themselves.

While the small numbers of patients in this study don't allow any conclusions to be drawn about the Scale's usefulness in predicting suicide risk, the scores did not pick up very accurately those most at risk of further self harm, which is particularly associated with suicide risk, say the study authors.

Twenty three out of 31 of the episodes of self harm occurred within the first three months of the first visit to emergency care. But only two of these patients had high scores on the SADPERSONS Scale; the rest had low to moderate scores, suggesting they were not at high risk.

"The results clearly show that the SADPERSONS Scale has a very limited role, if any, to play in the assessment of patients presenting to the emergency department following an episode of self harm," write the authors.

"Indeed, arguably, our results show that reliance on the scale for determining who should receive a psychosocial assessment or otherwise using it for prediction is not only misleading, it could be dangerous," they add.

The use of rating scales has become increasingly widespread in response to the need to standardise practice for ever increasing numbers of patients. But these tools often overlook individual dynamics, they say.

"A greater focus on clinical judgement is needed, accompanied by the necessary education, training and supervision, if we are to more accurately fully identify and intervene with those who are at greatest risk following self harm," they conclude.

Source-Eurekalert

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Trends in Back Pain Management Worsening: BIDMC Study

Medindia Health News
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Trends in Back Pain Management Worsening: BIDMC Study
Jul 31st 2013, 18:53


"Back pain treatment is costly and frequently includes overuse of treatments that are not supported by clinical guidelines, and that don't impact outcomes," says lead author John N. Mafi, MD, a fellow in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at BIDMC. "Improvements in the management of spine-related disease represent an area of potential for improving the quality of care and for potential cost savings for the health care system."

Americans spend approximately $86 billion annually on back or neck pain-related health issues. It is ranked as the fifth most common reason for doctor visits, which accounts for more than 10 percent of all appointments made with primary care physicians.

Lost productivity adds approximately another $20 billion per year. It is predicted that expenditures will continue to grow along with the rise of chronic back pain.

Published guidelines for routine back pain advise use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) or acetaminophen and physical therapy. Prior research shows that within three months of these treatments back pain usually resolves.

The guidelines, which have remained consistent since the 1990s, suggest the need for imaging or advanced treatments is typically unnecessary, as most cases of routine back pain improve with these conservative measures. Other discordant recommendations would include prescription of a narcotic or referral to a specialist, presumably for the consideration of a procedure.

However, if acute neurological compromise or other warning signs such as past history of malignancy are connected with the back pain, further steps can be taken to investigate.

The researchers identified 23,918 visits for spine problems, representing 73 million visits annually using nationally representative data from the National Ambulatory Medicare Care and National Hospital Ambulatory Care surveys between 1999-2010. They studied the changes in utilization of diagnostic imaging, physical therapy or referral to other physicians, and the use of medication when treating patients who complained of back pain or were diagnosed with back pain.

"We observed a significant rise in the frequency of treatments that are considered discordant with current guidelines including the use of advanced imaging, such as CT or MRI, referrals to other physicians (presumably for procedures or surgery), and the use of narcotics," says Mafi. "We also have observed a decline in the use of first-line medications such as NSAIDs or acetaminophen, but no change in referrals to physical therapy.

"Although opiate prescriptions increased markedly over this time period, we also observed lower odds of receiving narcotics among female, Black, Hispanic, and other race/ethnicity patients, which may signify the potential disparities in pain management that have also been noted previously."

Unnecessary treatment is not only expensive, but also can come with complications. A meta-analysis concluded that narcotics offer minimal benefit to relieve acute back pain and have no proven efficacy in treating chronic back pain. The data also revealed that 43 percent of the patients had concurrent substance abuse disorders. Researchers believe that the increase in narcotic prescriptions is connected with the rise of narcotic overdose deaths, which is creating a public health crisis.

The steady increase of doctors' request for advanced diagnostic imaging has become a concern as well.

Overuse of imaging may not result in immediate problems but exposure to ionizing radiation can lead to further health complications such as cancer, Mafi notes, adding a study that linked regions with higher MRI use found an increase in back surgeries, which can be a very costly process and require recovery time.

"Increased use of advanced imaging represents an area of particular concern" says senior author Bruce Landon, MD. "Early in the course of back pain, such imaging is almost always wasteful. Moreover, there are almost always some abnormalities, which increases the likelihood that a patient will undergo expensive spine surgery that might not improve their outcomes over the longer term."

"Despite numerous published national guidelines, management of routine back pain increasingly has relied on advanced diagnostic imaging, referrals to other physicians, and use of narcotics, with a concomitant decrease in NSAIDs or acetaminophen use and no change in physical therapy referrals. With healthcare cost soaring, improvements in the management of back pain represent an area of potential cost savings for the healthcare system while also improving the quality of care," says Mafi.

Source-Eurekalert

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Iraqis Still Plagued by Deadly Violence

Medindia Health News
Medindia largest health website in india. // via fulltextrssfeed.com 
Iraqis Still Plagued by Deadly Violence
Jul 31st 2013, 18:53


"He's changed completely. He's always nervous, even hostile. He never feels safe," says Dr Nesif al-Hemiary, a 50-year-old psychiatrist, speaking of his friend, whose identity he will not reveal.

Iraq is still plagued by violence more than 10 years after US-led forces toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, with more than 3,000 people killed since January 1.

On Monday, after a wave of violence killed dozens of people, the interior ministry warned of civil war.

Iraq is faced with "open war waged by the forces of bloody sectarianism aiming to plunge the country into chaos and reproduce civil war", a statement said.

The dentist was kidnapped from his practice in 2007, one of scores of such abductions that marked the height of Iraq's bloody sectarian conflict.

He was freed a few days later after a ransom was paid.

Many Iraqis have experienced similar traumas, that have scarred them for life.

"They kept him chained to a bed, blindfolded. They hit him, they insulted him," and had sex with a woman in front of him, Hemiary says of his friend's ordeal.

"They called his family and threatened to kill him if they didn't pay up. They forced him to plead for his life.

"After several days, the family paid up and he was dumped on a street in a terrible state."

Hemiary said his friend wanted to flee Iraq but his diplomas were not recognised abroad, so he just sent his two children to the United States.

Meanwhile, he became "obsessive-compulsive. He fears contamination. Dirt. He's always afraid. He always takes a different way home."

The dentist refused counselling because "people here don't want to be stigmatised as being mad or possessed," says Hemiary, who teaches at Baghdad University and runs a private practice.

People in Iraq are "anxious, frustrated, tired, depressed, and have no hope in the future," he says, hoping his own children will emigrate.

Iraqis, he says, are like rats in a cage.

"When you put a rat in a cage with different compartments and give it an electroshock, it escapes to the next compartment. But if you keep doing that, it ends up not moving because it has learned there's no escape.

"It's the same thing for Iraqis. Those with the means to leave the country have already done so. The others know there's no way out."

The violence plaguing the country has disrupted Iraqis' lives in many ways, including a marked increase in divorce and domestic violence, says Hemiary.

Some Iraqis, he says, are "just permanently stressed" and will jump at the honk of a car horn or get into arguments at the drop of a hat.

"It's really hard. I'm always on edge, always tired," says Qaisar, a 26-year-old traffic policeman, standing in the midday heat on a busy Baghdad thoroughfare.

"When I get home in the evening, I don't even have the energy to talk to my wife or children. I go straight to bed."

Qaisar, who declined to give his surname, admitted he was constantly afraid of being killed and thought of quitting the force.

Tahisir Khaled, a 28-year-old pharmacist, says many customers want to buy sedatives, "even without prescription."

This is true of young men especially, "because they are on the front line, while women mostly stay at home," she adds.

Khulud, a 45-year-old woman who did not want to give her full name, suffers from high blood pressure.

"I lost my husband in 2006 when I was three months pregnant. He was kidnapped and killed. Since then, I'm always sick and everyone says it's stress-related.

"You get very nervous when you hear explosions, even if you're used to it. Every time that happens, I call my family to check that everyone is okay."

Her seven-year-old daughter, Wadaq, often asks to see a picture of her father and said one day that she wanted to take a taxi "to go and fetch daddy in paradise."

Other than drugs, two things help make Iraqis resilient, Hemiary believes.

"They see themselves as victims. They feel that everything is beyond their control," so there is no feeling of guilt attached to what is going on.

And for Muslims, he adds, it is easier to accept one's fate because "everything is in the hands of God."

Source-AFP

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Despite Published Clinical Guidelines Treatment for Back Pain Varies

Medindia Health News
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Despite Published Clinical Guidelines Treatment for Back Pain Varies
Jul 31st 2013, 18:53


Spinal symptoms are among the most common reasons patients visit a physician and more than 10 percent of visits to primary care physicians relate to back and neck pain, the authors write in the study background.

John N. Mafi, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, Boston, and colleagues used nationally representative data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey to examine the treatment of back pain from January 1999 through December 2010. Researchers assessed imaging, the use of narcotic medications and referrals to physicians, as well as the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications or acetaminophen and referrals to physical therapy.

"Back pain treatment is costly and frequently includes overuse of treatments that are unsupported by clinical guidelines. Few studies have evaluated recent national trends in guideline adherence of spine-related care," the study notes.

Researchers identified 23,918 visits for spine problems. Approximately 58 percent of the patients were female and the average age of patients increased from 49 to 53 years during the study period.

According to the results, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug or acetaminophen use per visit decreased from 36.9 percent in 1999-2000 to 24.5 percent in 2009-2010, while narcotic use increased from 19.3 percent to 29.1 percent. Physical therapy referrals remained unchanged at about 20 percent, but physician referrals increased from 6.8 percent to 14 percent. The number of radiographs remained at about 17 percent, but the number of computed tomograms or magnetic resonance images increased from 7.2 percent to 11.3 percent during the study period, the results indicate.

"Despite numerous published national guidelines, management of routine back pain increasingly has relied on advanced diagnostic imaging, referrals to other physicians, and use of narcotics, with a concomitant decrease in NSAID or acetaminophen use and no change in physical therapy referrals. With health care costs soaring, improvements in the management of back pain represent an area of potential cost savings for the health care system while also improving the quality of care," the study concludes.

Source-Newswise

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Study: Clinicians Should Target Children Vulnerable To Developing PTSD

Medindia Health News
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Study: Clinicians Should Target Children Vulnerable To Developing PTSD
Jul 31st 2013, 18:53


Researchers led by Katie McLaughlin, PhD, of the Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Boston Children's, analyzed data on 6,483 teen-parent pairs from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, a survey of the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders in the United States.

Overall, 61 percent of the teens (ages 13 to 17) had been exposed to at least one potentially traumatic event in their lifetime, including interpersonal violence (such as rape, physical abuse or witnessing domestic violence), injuries, natural disasters and death of a close friend or family member. Nineteen percent had experienced three or more such events.

Risk factors associated most strongly with trauma exposure included:

  • Lack of both biological parents in the home.
  • Pre-existing mental disorders, particularly behavioral disorders like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder.

Of all teens exposed to trauma, 4.7 percent had experienced PTSD under DSM-IV diagnostic criteria. Risk factors for PTSD included:

  • Female gender: Of the total sample, girls had a lifetime prevalence of PTSD of 7.3 percent, and boys 2.2 percent.
  • Events involving interpersonal violence: the lifetime prevalence of PTSD was 39 percent for teens who had been raped and 25 percent for those physically abused by a caregiver.
  • Underlying anxiety and mood disorders (also a risk factor for exposure).

Risk factors for lack of recovery from PTSD included underlying bipolar disorder, exposure to an additional traumatic event, living in poverty and being a U.S. native.

Source-Eurekalert

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New Technology Allows Scientists to Examine Biological Details

Medindia Health News
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New Technology Allows Scientists to Examine Biological Details
Jul 31st 2013, 18:53


"In our study, it took five people about a year to get this model to a point where it was functional, and we only included about 15 structures - muscles, arteries, nerves - in our model. The human hand has at least 35 structures, so we know that it would take a lot of time and effort to build an accurate, functional model of entire biological systems. Once they are completed though, the models can be a fantastic tool to use in the classroom."

Using the technology is simple as Holliday discovered at a recent display for school children. Children as young as 6 and 7 would approach the computer and, within minutes, discover how to manipulate the model and observe the different structures inside an alligator's skull. Holliday says that the technology can be applied to any scientific field where researchers study complex three dimensional structures, such as engineering or plant science.

Source-Eurekalert

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Medicare’s Observation Status-and Why Attempts to Make Things Better May Make Them Worse

The Health Care Blog
The Health Care Blog 
Medicare's Observation Status-and Why Attempts to Make Things Better May Make Them Worse
Jul 30th 2013, 10:55, by Bob Wachter, MD

By Bob Wachter, MD

There are tens of thousands of policies in Medicare's policy manual, which makes for stiff competition for the "Most Maddening" award. But my vote goes to the policy around "observation status," which is crazy-making for patients, administrators, and physicians.

"Obs status" began life as Medicare's way of characterizing those patients who needed a little more time after their ED stay to sort out whether they truly needed admission. In many hospitals, "obs units" sprung up to care for such patients – a few beds in a room adjacent to the ED where the patients could get another nebulizer treatment or bag of saline to see if they might be able to go home. Giving the hospital a full DRG payment for an inpatient admission seemed wrong, and yet these patients really weren't outpatients either. The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS's) original definition of obs status spoke to the specific needs of these just-a-few-more-hours patients: a "well-defined set of specific, clinically appropriate services," usually lasting less than 24 hours. Only in "rare and exceptional cases," they continued, should it last more than 48 hours.

A recent article in JAMA Internal Medicine, written by a team from the University of Wisconsin, vividly illustrates how far the policy has veered from its sensible origins. Chronicling all admissions over an 18-month period, Ann Sheehy and colleagues found that observation status was anything but rare, well defined, or brief. Fully one in ten hospital stays were characterized as observation. The mean length of these stays was 33 hours; 17 percent of them were for more than 48 hours. And "well defined?" Not with 1,141 distinct observation codes.

To underscore just how arbitrary the rules regarding observation are, an investigation by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released today found that "obs patients" and "inpatients" were clinically indistinguishable. Their major difference: which hospital they happened to be admitted to.


The potion that turned this particular policy into a monster was the Recovery Audit Contractor ("RAC") audits, whose existence was authorized by the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Act. RAC auditors can target a hospital, pull a hundred or so charts, and, if they find improper billing, collect a bounty for every dollar they save CMS. With the determination of obs status so amorphous, hospital administrators have adopted a "better safe than sorry" stance, generally deciding that cases that are anywhere near a close call should be called obs. (Just this week, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston forked over $5.3 million to Medicare to settle charges related to admissions that auditors believed were really obs.) The result of all this angsty wheel-spinning: the number of obs cases in the U.S. went up by 50 percent between 2006 and 2011, with a more-than-400 percent (!) increase in Medicare patients staying more than 48 hours under observation.

If this mess were only about the question of money for Medicare, hospitals, and auditors, it would be plenty maddening but not miasmal. Unfortunately, patients and their families are unwitting victims, collateral damage.

Picture this: your mother is sitting in a hospital bed, with a band on her wrist, an IV in her arm, nasal prongs in her nose, and EKG squiggles skipping across a telemetry monitor. Luckily, she does reasonably well and is discharged to a skilled nursing facility after a three-day stay. OK, your family thinks, at least we know that Medicare will pay for the SNF since she's crossed CMS's magic three-day threshold to trigger SNF coverage.

Only later do you learn that her hospital stay doesn't count, because she was on obs the whole time. Or you get a co-pay bill for several thousand dollars because, while inpatient medications are covered under Medicare, "outpatient" medications are not. While she sat in her hospital bed, you see, she was really an outpatient.

In my editorial accompanying the Wisconsin paper, I cite the case of a 78-year-old woman who received a $16,000 bill for an uncovered nursing home stay following a four-day observation stay in the hospital. "I thought it was surely a mistake," she said. "Nobody ever said I wasn't admitted."

In a brochure that could have been written by Franz Kafka, Medicare tries to explain the unexplainable. "REMEMBER," it says, the capital letters designed to make you fully alert for the nonsense that follows, "Even if you stay overnight in a regular hospital bed, you might be an outpatient." Huh?

I hope you'll take a look at both the Wisconsin paper and my editorial. In this blog, I'd like to extend the discussion to the fix, which didn't seem like a bad idea to me when I first penned the editorial, but which I'm coming to learn might – hard as it is to believe – make things worse.

On April 16, 2013, CMS proposed a new rule that would, using a time-based criterion, clarify which patients should be on observation. Patients who stay for less than two midnights ("one Medicare day") will be assumed to be obs; those staying longer than two midnights would be inpatients. Medicare apparently believes that turning all these two-day or more stays from obs into inpatient admissions will cost the agency money, since they have proposed a 0.2% cut in hospital reimbursement to compensate for these projected increased costs.

Yet CMS has not released any financial models that might help predict what the impact of this change is likely to be. And, whatever Medicare's projections may be, many hospital administrators believe that the new policy will cost them huge amounts of money. How can this be? While hospitals will now receive a full DRG payment for some longer-stay patients who previously would have been observation (a win), these administrators believe that their losses – particularly on short-stay surgical patients who will now be observation, despite high resource use – will far outstrip the gains. I've seen some preliminary data that supports their fear.

Moreover, there is a widespread panic that, rather than soothing the RAC auditors, the new policy will be fresh meat for them. After all, with the two-midnight rule, it's likely that RAC auditors will be suspicious (potentially with some justification) that hospitals will keep some patients an extra midnight. You might call it an inverse Cinderella effect, as patients are not sent home before midnight in order to capture an inpatient reimbursement and spare the patient the costs associated with an observation stay. So the unproductive and maddening cat-and-mouse game will continue, albeit within slightly less arbitrary boundaries.

A watchdog organization, the Center for Medicare Advocacy, recently highlighted this concern. Theynoted that the new policy calls for an inpatient admission when…

the patient is expected to be in the hospital for at least two midnights. The physician "expectation [of a two-midnight stay]. . . should be based on such complex medical factors as patient history and comorbidities, the severity of signs and symptoms, current medical needs, and the risk of an adverse event." These factors "must be documented in the medical record in order to be granted consideration." In other words, the physician certification that he or she expects the patient will need to stay for more than two midnights is not enough: [RAC auditors] can scour the medical record and if they don't see evidence, they can deem it an improper hospitalization.

Richard Rohr, a seasoned hospitalist leader who is now a consultant, echoed this fear, adding in a note to me:

The basic problem with observation stays is the disconnect between functional status and medical necessity. Many elderly patients who are not able to care for themselves and need more help than a family can perform come to the hospital because it is the social service agency that is open at night and on weekends and does not turn anyone away. These patients often do not have medical needs as defined [by Medicare]. Having stepped away from clinical hospital medicine to focus on medical necessity work, I talk regularly with hospitalists and other physicians, who struggle with the distinction between functional needs and medical needs in caring for patients.

A rather dense (and, at times, impenetrable) editorial in this week's New England Journal of Medicine also questions whether the proposed policy is an advance. The authors don't think so. They recommend that patient co-pays be capped, that the costs of medications the patient is already on at home be covered, and that obs days count toward the 3-day requirement for SNF eligibility.

While these are reasonable recommendations, they don't go far enough to stem the madness. Rather, the line of the old song comes to mind: "Let's call the whole thing off." It's time to restore obs to its original meaning. Medicare should develop a new payment code for those patients who need several, perhaps up to 24, hours of very specific therapy, in a physical observation unit, to determine whether they need admission: nebulizers, fluids, maybe a unit or two of blood. For everyone else admitted to a regular bed on a hospital ward, they are (and it seems silly to have to say this) admitted to the hospital, and the reimbursement system should reflect this. Utilization Review can look to see if there was medical or social justification for admission – if not, the day or days can be denied. Isn't that simpler?

While the policy around obs is important and frustrating, there are larger issues at play. As I wrote in my editorial, Medicare is in the process of transforming itself from a "dumb payer" into an active shaper of the medical marketplace, through policies such as public reporting, "no pay for errors," and value-based purchasing. On balance, that's a good thing. But when Battleship CMS turns, it sends out giant wakes, some of which are unanticipated, even by the organization itself. Policies like the one related to obs status risk capsizing a lot of boats.

Whether the problems with the new observation policy will represent unintended consequences, a lackluster analysis, or a purposeful cost-cutting strategy will doubtless be in the eyes of the beholder. But whatever the motivation, it will be crucial for interested parties (AHA, SHM, and others) to thoroughly vet the proposed changes and push back hard on CMS if they truly are wanting. It's a sad reality that CMS may well be in the process of turning a vague but maddening policy into one that is less vague but equally problematic.

Robert Wachter, MD, professor of medicine at UCSF, is widely regarded as a leading figure in the patient safety and quality movements. He edits the federal government's two leading safety websites, and the second edition of his book, "Understanding Patient Safety," was recently published by McGraw-Hill. In addition, he coined the term "hospitalist" in an influential 1996 essay in The New England Journal of Medicine and is the former chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine.  His posts appear semi-regularly on THCB and on his own blog, Wachter's World.

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