News by Subject Medicine & Health

Research is an important component of academic medicine, but many family medicine departments have struggled with barriers ranging from departmental culture to the lack of resources needed to advance the field. A paper published in Family Medicine reports that key factors to boost the creation of knowledge include leadership commitment to research and building a team approach to research that is relevant to family medicine.

A Cleveland Clinic genetic analysis has found that obesity itself, not just the adverse health effects associated with it, significantly increases the risk of Type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease. The paper was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open.

While it is well known that physical activity is important for heart health, neither research nor recommendations consistently differentiate between the benefits of different types of physical activity. New research, presented at the ACC Latin America Conference 2018 in Lima, Peru, found that while all physical activity is beneficial, static activities -- such as strength training-- were more strongly associated with reducing heart disease risks than dynamic activities like walking and cycling.

A new 'buddy system' of nursing education -- in which two students work together as one nurse to share ideas, set priorities and make clinical decisions for patient care in the 'real world' of nursing -- is effective, according to a study by Baylor University's Louise Herrington School of Nursing. It was published in the Journal of Nursing Education.

Parents and their adolescent children actually agree with each other about preventive care and confidential medical services, except for abortion. Doctors, however, disagree.

A team of researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Berkeley School of Public Health at UC Berkeley recently conducted a study designed to better understand how patient engagement and activation (PAE) practices are being integrated into clinical practice. What they found was a great deal of positive sentiment about PAE among the healthcare professionals surveyed, but much less understanding and implementation of PAE tools and approaches.

A new study has found that older patients who were hospitalised were 72 percent more likely to be given a potentially inappropriate prescription after their hospital admission, independent of other patient factors.

I wanted to alert you to two interesting papers from our researchers on opioid use. One focuses on overdoses among Massachusetts adolescents while the other is a data analysis that found prescription opioids dispensed to children/adolescents have steadily decreased since 2012.

As prescriptions for psychotropic drugs increase, researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that prescribed access to anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medications may make it easier for some patients to use the drugs in attempted suicides.

Nearly two thirds of Americans (65 percent) say antibiotic resistance is a public health problem and a strong majority (81 percent) say they are concerned that antibiotic resistance will make more infections difficult or impossible to treat and even deadly, according to a national public opinion survey commissioned by Research!America in collaboration with the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA).