Beer is the beverage of choice for most adult binge drinkers, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The beverage preferences of excessive drinkers are important to public health because binge drinking is a common problem in the United States and because binge drinkers ? and those around them ? are especially vulnerable to alcohol-related problems, said lead study author Timothy Naimi, M.D.
By the time they reached adulthood, graduates of an intensive early childhood education program for poor children showed higher educational attainment, lower rates of serious crime and incarceration, and lower rates of depressive symptoms than did non-participants in the program, reported researchers in a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.
As part of its broad commitment to improving access to medicines, GlaxoSmithKline announced it has given consent through Canada?s Access to Medicines Regime to enable a Canadian company (Apotex) to manufacture a generic fixed dose combination (FDC) antiretroviral (ARV), containing two molecules over which GSK has patent rights (zidovudine and lamivudine) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS in Rwanda.
School closures and other community strategies designed to reduce the possibility of spreading disease between people during an epidemic can save lives, particularly when the measures are used in combination and implemented soon after an outbreak begins in a community, according to a new study based on public records from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.
In the August 7, 2007, issue of PLoS One, researchers show how a poorly understood and previously unsuspected mechanism may be the key to understanding how life-style associated forms of oxidative stress, such as exposure to cigarette smoke, damage cells in the lungs.
Starting statin therapy as young as age 8 safely and effectively delays the early artery damage caused by familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), according to a Dutch study reported in the Aug. 7th print issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Practising physicians are nowadays presented with official guidelines on the treatments they should give their patients. In an article published in PLoS Medicine, researchers have attempted to grade the quality of evidence used in drawing up the recommendations contained in guidelines for the treatment of patients with diabetes, high blood pressure and dyslipidemia (abnormal levels of fats in the blood).
Mothers of babies born with some structural birth defects?including missing limbs, malformed hearts and underdeveloped spinal cords?appear more likely to be obese prior to becoming pregnant than mothers whose children are born without such defects, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
The long-term risk of suicide is tripled for women who have undergone cosmetic breast implant surgery, concludes a study in the August Annals of Plastic Surgery, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. This long-term study further confirms the link between breast implants and a strikingly high risk of suicide and other related causes of death.
Although physicians have imposed quarantine orders since at least 1374, when the Port of Venice officially isolated foreigners and shippers for 40 days to keep out infectious scourges, there has been no definitive evidence that public health measures like quarantining the sick and isolating people after exposure to ill people would save lives during an influenza pandemic.