Sources: The British Journal of Psychiatry; BBC Health News Notwithstanding the belief that smoking can relieve stress, a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry has found that smokers who successfully quit feel less anxious than their smoking peers. Researchers found a "significant" decrease in anxiety levels among the 68 smokers who had quit after [...]
Sources: US Food & Drug Safety Administration; MedScape Pertuzumab ( Perjeta, Genentech/Roche), has been approved in the United States. Perjeta targets HER2-positive breast cancer. About 1/4 of all cases of breast cancer are HER2-positive. It is indicated for use in patients with metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer who have not received previous treatment with either chemotherapy or [...]
Sources: Surgery, December, 18, 2012; MedScape Surgical Malpractice is more common than we think. More than 4000 surgical "never events" occurred each year between 1990 and 2010 in the United States, according to the findings of a retrospective study of national malpractice data. Winta T. Mehtsun, MD, MPH, from the Johns Hopkins University School of [...]
Sources: Archives of Surgery 2010;145:978-984; MedScape Hospitals continue to experience wrong-site and wrong-patient surgeries, which are more common than the medical community might care to admit. Investigators have found that clinicians in both surgical and nonsurgical disciplines share equal responsibility for the unacceptable errors. Dr. Stahel and colleagues in Colorado and at the Geisinger Medical Center in [...]
Sources: Medical News Today; Thomas Jefferson University An inter-institutional team effort, initiated by Thomas Jefferson Unversity's Michael A. Augello of the Department of Cancer Biology at Thomas Jefferson University, has found a potential biomarker for determining who will get the metastatic (and lethal) form of prostate cancer, which is usually contained or containable if caught in [...]
Sources: New England Journal of Medicine; American Cancer Society THE LATEST study on the the controversial guidelines for mammography in the U.S., issued in 2009, calling for screening every two years rather than annually for women over 50 years old, suggests that breast cancers may be missed. The study assessed the impact of revised guidelines issued [...]
Source: Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Volume 215, Issue 3 , Pages 322-330, September 2012 Hospital Malpractice Hospital Malpractice continues to be a problem. An article published recently in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons sheds some rare light on hospital care and legislation aimed at reimbursing Medicare and Medicaid for [...]
Sources: Kaiser Health News; Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Is Hospital Malpractice a problem? The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services thinks so. It wants hospitals to curb its patient re-admissions starting this fall, or pay the price, Kaiser Health News reported. CMS will hope to recoup about $280 million in payments from about 2,200 [...]
Sources: Journal of Alzheimer's Disease; Medscape Dementia is a loss of brain function that occurs with certain diseases. Alzheimer's disease (AD), is one form of dementia that gradually gets worse over time. It affects memory, thinking, and behavior. One of it's hallmarks is the presence of amyloid plaques which show up on imaging of the [...]
Source: Public Citizen Report -Congress Watch Division (Public Citizen is a national non-profit consumer organization with more than 300,000 members and supporters). Medical malpractice payments were at their lowest level on record in 2011 In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of annual avoidable adverse events (and tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths) that [...]