News by Subject Business & Economics

Despite guidelines plastered on the walls and floors of grocery and retail stores encouraging customers to maintain six-feet of physical distance during the pandemic, many do not. A new study by researchers at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management identifies two key messaging components that could improve the persuasiveness of those appeals and trigger compliance.

Quality Management in Healthcare calls for reliance on objective data to introduce new insights on why adverse sentinel events such as medication errors keep occurring. It will no longer publish analysis that solely relies on opinions of clinicians to identify the causes of adverse events. It calls for hospital risk analysts and managers to analyze objective data and increase the use of causal networks to improve the objectivity and rigor in understanding error root causes.

Among U.S. patients diagnosed with breast, prostate, lung, or colorectal cancer from 2004 to 2016, those who were uninsured or had Medicare or Medicaid were less likely than privately insured patients to receive surgical care at high-volume hospitals. The findings are published in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society (ACS).

Histopathology in non-neoplastic kidney tissue from 1,347 nephrectomy specimens showed very limited histopathologic changes in subset of older individuals.

A new review of dozens of studies suggests that people may shed virus for prolonged periods, but those with mild or no symptoms may be infectious for no more than about 10 days. People who are severely ill from COVID-19 may be infectious for as long as 20 days, according to the review.

New Nature Medicine study highlights potential global hesitancy to accept a COVID-19 vaccine. Based on data collected with the previously validated COVID-SCORE survey of a sample of over 13,400 individuals from 19 countries that have been hard-hit by the virus, the investigators found that 72 % of participants would likely take the vaccine. Of the remaining 28 %, 14% would refuse, while 14% would hesitate, which translates into tens of millions of potential vaccine avoiders.

A review of heat-not-burn (HNB) tobacco products from LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, reports an association with elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, cell death, and circulatory dysfunction shown by early studies. Additionally, chemicals found in the vapor produced by HNB devices have previously been shown to impair lung function, put users at risk of heart attack and stroke, cause cancers, increase circulating low-density lipoprotein ("bad cholesterol") and more.

'To our surprise, we discovered that while higher executive functions, as measured behaviorally, were dominant factors in weight loss, this was not reflected in patterns of brain connectivity,' says Gidon Levakov, a graduate student, who led the study from the BGU Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. 'Consequently, we found that weight loss is not merely a matter of willpower, but is actually connected to much more basic visual and olfactory cues.'