Older women can benefit from chemotherapy to treat breast cancer
... 1999. These trials compared more aggressive with less aggressive chemotherapy regimens. A total of 6, 487 women with lymph node-positive breast cancer were included in the trials; 542 (8 percent) of the patients were 65 years or older and 159 (2 percent) were 70 years or older. " smaller tumor size, f...Acting techniques may help doctors empathize with their patients
...doctors have greater professional satisfaction and less professional burnout when they practice deep acting, but may have to rely on surface acting when genuine empathy seems impossible. Surface acting may be needed, for example, in situations in which the doctor's values or beliefs are entirely different...Exercise tolerance is good screening test for chest pain patients
...sicians' criteria were able to be evaluated by the less costly method of exercise treadmill testing. Those who weren't candidates for this testing could be admitted to the hospital and didn't benefit very much from more costly stress imaging testing in the emergency department. The evaluation of patients ...Fewer false alarms when mammographers have greater experience screening healthy breasts
...tives for cancer, when compared to physicians with less experience or those who don't have the same focus,...perly identified cancer, they also were 50 percent less likely to falsely characterize a mammogram as abnormal. In addition, the study found dramatic variab...African-Americans receive less aggressive heart attack treatment
...ical Center, African-Americans continue to receive less aggressive treatment for heart attack than whites. Alain G. Bertoni, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of medicine at Wake Forest Baptist, and his colleagues found that nearly 60 percent of every 100 white patients received cardiac catheterization fo...NYU'S Duster cautions against FDA approval of 'race-based' pharmaceutical
... Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States show less disparity in hypertension rates than do whites fro...mericans was attributed to the latter group having less access to medical and other resources in the United States. "The ability to use genomic knowle...Patient knows best when it comes to ulcerative colitis, U-M study finds
...h very ill inpatients and healthy outpatients with less active disease, a range that is representative of ...isease activity was nearly as good (only 3 percent less accurate) without the endoscopic information. The St. Mark's Index and the UCDAI endoscopy items cor...Inpatient smoking cessation counseling is associated with early differences in mortality
...nd comorbid conditions, those counseled were still less likely to die in the first year. Writing in the article, Thomas K. Houston, MD, MPH, explains, "The positive association of smoking cessation counseling with survival that we observed provides evidence for an association suggested, but not directly d...Study examines harm reduction among injection drug users
... in Baltimore and who reported injecting drugs for less than five years. They were questioned about their drug injection habits, including from whom and where they acquired their syringes and how they disposed of used syringes. "Safe sources" were the Baltimore syringe exchange program or pharmacies. "Saf...Adverse drug events in nursing homes are far more common than previously identified
...losely for drug side effects. Adverse events were less commonly associated with errors in drug dispensing...p new approaches for making the use of medications less prone to errors and risk for older patients in nursing homes." In addition to improvements in techno...A safer route to school makes children more likely to walk and bike, study shows
...ing to school by car or bus, behavior changes were less marked. Although projects funded by the Safe Routes to Schools program produced measurable increases in the walking and bicycling habits of affected children, the researchers found that overall, fewer students were walking and bicycling to school, su...Cartilage repair techniques shown to restore patient mobility and reduce pain
...owth, recovered more knee function and experienced less pain after the procedure. Prior to these results, ...dure, which is more commonly used in patients with less knee damage, involves drilling small holes in the knee to induce bleeding, clotting, and thus tissue...UCLA study shows that people drink less alcohol as they age
A new UCLA study shows that people drink less alcohol as they age--but drinking among those who ... who were born more recently reduce their drinking less as compared with people who were born earlier." Researchers used data from the first National Health...Referrals to palliative care come too late to improve quality of life for cancer patients
...ted late or very late referrals were significantly less likely to report having discussions with physicians about end of life care (55%), compared to those who thought referral time was appropriate (79%). Of the families who did not have such conversations, factors included family unwillingness (14%), pa...Insurance incentives might help smokers quit, study says
...ving financial barriers to treatment would lead to less motivated smokers using treatment services, such that quit rates would go down," according to smoking cessation researcher Sue Curry. In light of this, "the finding in the review that full financial benefits actually increased cessation rates is quit...Can routine commercial cord blood banking be scientifically and ethically justified?
...probability of needing an autologous transplant is less than one in 20,000, although commercial providers quote figures at least an order of magnitude higher." Fisk and Roberts also say that private cord blood banks target parents at a vulnerable time. "Such banks have been said to raise hopes of utopia...Migraine linked to risky heart health
...dered 43 percent more likely to be smokers, though less likely to consume alcohol. People with migraine with aura symptoms were 43 percent more likely to have high cholesterol (240 or greater) and 76 percent more likely to have high blood pressure. They were also nearly four times as likely to report a hi...Psychiatric disorders greatly underdiagnosed in hospital emergency departments
...aucasians, the tendency of African Americans to be less trusting and less willing to disclose emotional problems to people of different racial groups, and physician bias. The...Hyperactive kids three times as likely to be removed from their families
...s to be a major risk for family break-down is much less well known. They base their conclusions on 201 children, all of whom were patients at one child psychiatry clinic. The children's average age was 8, and three quarters of them were boys. Half the children had either been diagnosed with emotional or ...Slow growth in infancy signals poor economic prospects in adulthood
...Growth after the first 12 months seemed to be much less important. The taller a boy was at the age of 1 ye... 2 cm of height. And a child who had been 72 cm or less in height at the age of 1 was twice as likely to be doing manual work in adulthood as a boy who had ...