PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Link between hunger and health care costs

2015-08-10
(Press-News.org) Low-income people who struggle to put food on the table also use the health care system more, which means higher health care costs, according to new research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

"We know that people who have trouble affording the food they need have poorer health in general as well as more chronic disease," states Dr. Valerie Tarasuk, Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario.

The term "food insecurity" describes inadequate or insecure access to food because of financial constraints. In Canada in 2012, almost 13% of households had some level of food insecurity, the highest rate since 2007, when national monitoring began.

The study looked at data on the household food insecurity of 67 033 adults in Ontario aged 18 to 64 years who had participated in the Canadian Community Health Survey in 2005, 2007/08 or 2009/10. The researchers assessed food insecurity with an 18-point scale (also used in the United States for the same purpose). They linked food security status to data from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) on participants' direct health care costs, including emergency department visits, acute and psychiatric hospital stays, physician visits, day surgeries and home care over a 1-year period. They also considered the costs of prescription drugs that are covered by the province for people receiving social assistance.

Of the total sample, 12.2% lived in food-insecure households. When food insecurity status was considered, 3.9% lived in marginally, 5.2% in moderately and 3.1% in severely food-insecure households -- a measure of extreme deprivation.

People with higher severity of food insecurity used more health care services and incurred higher health care costs.

"We found that health care costs were 23% higher for adults in marginally food-insecure households, 49% higher for those in moderately food-insecure households and 121% higher for those in severely food-insecure households, compared with adults in food-secure households," Dr. Tarasuk states. "Our findings suggest that food insecurity takes a significant toll on health care spending."

Canada has a universal, publicly funded health care system in which all Canadians have access to health care regardless of ability to pay. However, prescription drugs are not provided universally to Canadians, although drug costs for people receiving social assistance may be covered by provincial plans, as in Ontario.

"Household food insecurity was a potent predictor of health care costs incurred by working-age adults in Ontario, independent of other well-established social determinants of health," states Dr. Tarasuk. Because there are no public programs designed to address food insecurity in Canada, health care professionals are limited in their ability to help patients who are struggling to put food on the table.

"To date, no provincial or federal intervention has been introduced with the explicit goal of reducing household food insecurity, but our study findings suggest that such intervention would offset considerable public expenditures on health care and improve overall health," write the authors.

INFORMATION:

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Toronto, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, ICES, Toronto, Ontario, and the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. This research was funded by a Programmatic Grant in Health and Health Equity from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

As California wildfires burn, southern plant species are shifting northward

As California wildfires burn, southern plant species are shifting northward
2015-08-10
As California wildfires burn tree canopies and the forest floors they support, the plants that are replacing the understory are increasingly those found in more southern areas of the West, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. "The plants we're finding underneath our forests are becoming more like those seen in Mexico and Southern California," said lead author Jens Stevens, a postdoctoral scholar with the UC Davis John Muir Institute of the Environment. "Under climate change, we're seeing species from drier, warmer areas increasingly taking over. ...

Education intervention with residents improves understanding of transgender issues

2015-08-10
BOSTON-The term "transgender" has made its way into mainstream media thanks to Caitlyn Jenner, previously known as Bruce Jenner, who came out as a transgender woman earlier this year. But for many physicians, or physicians-in-training, who do not typically treat transgender patients for issues specific to their gender identity, it's still a mystery. Joshua Safer, MD, FACP, endocrinologist at Boston Medical Center and associate professor of medicine and molecular medicine at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), and his colleague Dylan Thomas, MD, conducted an ...

Seniors at high risk for readmission after ambulatory surgery

2015-08-10
Taking four pain pills an hour instead of four pills a day Need improved, understandable discharge instructions More than 9 million ambulatory surgeries performed annually on seniors CHICAGO --- Patients 65 and older who have ambulatory surgery are much more likely to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days than younger patients, regardless of their health before surgery, reports a new, large national Northwestern Medicine study. The likely cause, based on previous research, is difficulty understanding medication dosing and discharge instructions, as well ...

Life is but a DREAM

2015-08-10
Results of a 2013 DREAM Challenge - a crowdsourcing initiative for systems biomedicine - have been published in Nature Biotechnology; Hundreds of scientists from around the world pooled their efforts to test how accurately they could predict the effect of toxic compounds in different individuals, or across a population; Combined results achieved a rough estimate of population effects, and methods emerged that may be able to provide real-world benefit in the hazard assessments of new compounds. 10 August 2015 - An international study published in Nature Biotechnology ...

Severe droughts could lead to widespread losses of butterflies by 2050

2015-08-10
Widespread drought-sensitive butterfly population extinctions could occur in the UK as early as 2050 according to a new study published today in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change. However, the authors conclude that substantial greenhouse gas emission reductions combined with better management of landscapes, in particular reducing habitat fragmentation, will greatly improve the chances of drought-sensitive butterflies flying until at least 2100. The study was led by Dr Tom Oliver from the UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in collaboration with colleagues ...

Mass. General-led team identifies first gene that causes mitral valve prolapse

2015-08-10
An international research collaboration led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has identified the first gene in which mutations cause the common form of mitral valve prolapse (MVP), a heart valve disorder that affects almost 2.5 percent of the population. In a paper receiving advance online publication in Nature, the research team reports finding mutations in a gene called DCHS1 in affected members of three families in which MVP is inherited. "This work provides insights into the pathways regulating valve growth and development and implicates a previously ...

New computational method predicts genes likely to be causal in disease

2015-08-10
A new computational method developed by scientists from the University of Chicago improves the detection of genes that are likely to be causal for complex diseases and biological traits. The method, PrediXcan, estimates gene expression levels across the whole genome - a better measure of biological action than single mutations - and integrates it with genome-wide association study (GWAS) data. PrediXcan has the potential to identify gene targets for therapeutic applications faster and with greater accuracy than traditional methods. It is described online in Nature Genetics ...

Package of articles, podcast focus on end-of-life, physician-assisted suicide

2015-08-10
JAMA Internal Medicine will publish a package of articles, along with an author interview podcast, focused on end-of-life, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The original investigation, research letter, special communication and commentaries are detailed below. In the first article, Marianne C. Snijdewind, M.A., of the VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, and coauthors1 looked at outcomes of requests for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide received by a clinic founded in 2012 to provide the option of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide for patients ...

Kids, teens win when mental health providers team with pediatricians, family doctors

2015-08-10
For the past decade, cutting-edge health care providers and researchers have increasingly pushed to integrate care for mental health and substance use problems within primary medical care for children and adolescents. Their hope is that children and teens who suffer from mental and behavioral disorders would fare better if their pediatricians or family doctors took an active role in linking them with mental health care, particularly when these doctors team up with mental health clinicians to help meet the needs of their young patients. Now, a team of UCLA researchers ...

New hydrogel stretches and contracts like a heat-driven muscle

New hydrogel stretches and contracts like a heat-driven muscle
2015-08-10
In research published in Nature Materials, a team led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan has developed a new hydrogel that works like an artificial muscle--quickly stretching and contracting in response to changing temperature. They have also managed to use the polymer to build an L-shaped object that slowly walks forward as the temperature is repeatedly raised and lowered. Hydrogels are polymers that can maintain large quantities of water within their networks. Because of this, they can swell and shrink in response to changes in ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Post-LLM era: New horizons for AI with knowledge, collaboration, and co-evolution

“Sloshing” from celestial collisions solves mystery of how galactic clusters stay hot

Children poisoned by the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has risen in the U.S. – eight years of national data shows

USC researchers observe mice may have a form of first aid

VUMC to develop AI technology for therapeutic antibody discovery

Unlocking the hidden proteome: The role of coding circular RNA in cancer

Advancing lung cancer treatment: Understanding the differences between LUAD and LUSC

Study reveals widening heart disease disparities in the US

The role of ubiquitination in cancer stem cell regulation

New insights into LSD1: a key regulator in disease pathogenesis

Vanderbilt lung transplant establishes new record

Revolutionizing cancer treatment: targeting EZH2 for a new era of precision medicine

Metasurface technology offers a compact way to generate multiphoton entanglement

Effort seeks to increase cancer-gene testing in primary care

Acoustofluidics-based method facilitates intracellular nanoparticle delivery

Sulfur bacteria team up to break down organic substances in the seabed

Stretching spider silk makes it stronger

Earth's orbital rhythms link timing of giant eruptions and climate change

Ammonia build-up kills liver cells but can be prevented using existing drug

New technical guidelines pave the way for widespread adoption of methane-reducing feed additives in dairy and livestock

Eradivir announces Phase 2 human challenge study of EV25 in healthy adults infected with influenza

New study finds that tooth size in Otaria byronia reflects historical shifts in population abundance

nTIDE March 2025 Jobs Report: Employment rate for people with disabilities holds steady at new plateau, despite February dip

Breakthrough cardiac regeneration research offers hope for the treatment of ischemic heart failure

Fluoride in drinking water is associated with impaired childhood cognition

New composite structure boosts polypropylene’s low-temperature toughness

While most Americans strongly support civics education in schools, partisan divide on DEI policies and free speech on college campuses remains

Revolutionizing surface science: Visualization of local dielectric properties of surfaces

LearningEMS: A new framework for electric vehicle energy management

Nearly half of popular tropical plant group related to birds-of-paradise and bananas are threatened with extinction

[Press-News.org] Link between hunger and health care costs