INFORMATION:
Sliding life expectancy poses gender and inequity questions
2021-01-22
(Press-News.org) Questions about why such affluent western societies are facing a reversal in life expectancy are sounding loud alarm bells for Professor Fran Baum, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor and Director of the Southgate Institute for Health, Society and Equity.
Professor Baum is lead author of a study that offers a new perspective on why women live longer than men - noting with concern that while women live longer, many of the recognised social determinants of health are worse for women than men.
The study serves an important reminder of why policy makers need to receive more carefully nuanced research that drills into specific gender data that can best inform public health policy initiatives.
"We need gendered analysis to shape public policy discussion on health inequities - something which is sadly lacking at present in this country," says Professor Baum.
"Shining a gender lens is vital and contributes to more complex understanding of health inequities and how to reduce them."
The new paper - "New Perspective on Why Women Live Longer Than Men: An Exploration of Power, Gender, Social Determinants, and Capitals," by Fran Baum, Connie Musolino, Hailay Abrha Gesesew and Jennie Popay - has been published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18020661)
The paper highlights that since 2006, in all countries in the world, women have lived longer than men, but paradoxically report more illness than men.
Professor Baum says this situation has been amplified during COVID-19, with such high numbers of women around the world engaged in vulnerable frontline health provision and essential work services.
No existing explanations account fully for these differences in life expectancy, although they do highlight the complexity and interaction of biological, social and health service factors.
"We know that poverty is bad for health, although more women live in poverty than men yet are less likely to die younger than men," says Professor Baum.
The paper explores a global picture of gendered life expectancy difference (GLED) using a novel combination of epidemiological and sociological methods - highlighting the equally important differences between average life expectancies in different countries and between different groups within countries. This included comparative case analysis offering explanations for GLED in Australia and Ethiopia.
"The Australian and Ethiopian cases demonstrated the complex economic, cultural, symbolic and social factors underpinning this difference, highlighting how similarities and differences are gendered within and between the countries," says Professor Baum.
The new study sits neatly within a strengthening international women's equity push, with Professor Baum being part of a Lancet-led global commission investigating gender and health, investigating what impacts the effectiveness of different programs.
"We note that the same answer cannot be effectively applied to both genders - and yet that is not being addressed by public health and equity policy," says Professor Baum. "This needs to change - now."
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Navigating uncertainty: Why we need decision theory during a pandemic
2021-01-22
During a pandemic, decisions have to be made under time pressure and amid scientific uncertainty, with potential disagreements among experts and models. With COVID-19, especially during the first wave, there was uncertainty about the virus transmissibility, the disease severity, the future evolution of the pandemic and the effectiveness of the proposed policy interventions, such as wearing face masks or closing schools. Together with a group of epidemiologists and economists, including the Nobel Prize winner Lars Peter Hansen, Bocconi professors Massimo Marinacci, AXA-Bocconi Chair in Risk, and Valentina Bosetti investigated how modern decision theory can help policymakers ...
Covid lockdown loneliness linked to more depressive symptoms in older adults
2021-01-22
Loneliness in adults aged 50 and over during the COVID-19 lockdown was linked to worsening depressive and other mental health symptoms, according to a large-scale online study.
Loneliness emerged as a key factor linked to worsening symptoms of depression and anxiety in a study of more than 3,000 people aged 50 or over led by the University of Exeter and King's College London, and funded by The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) .
Researchers had access to data going back to 2015 for participants of the ...
Do promotions make consumers more generous?
2021-01-22
Researchers from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and University of Hong Kong published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines why and how charitable organizations can increase donations by soliciting consumers after retailers' price promotions.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Do Promotions Make Consumers More Generous? The Impact of Price Promotions on Consumers' Donation Behavior" and is authored by Kuangjie Zhang, Fengyan Cai, and Zhengyu Shi.
Giving Tuesday, a global generosity movement, takes place each year on the Tuesday after US Thanksgiving (immediately after Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales). Charitable donations generally see a big boost on Giving Tuesday. This year, American consumers ...
Combined river flows could send up to 3 billion microplastics a day into the Bay of Bengal
2021-01-22
The Ganges River - with the combined flows of the Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers - could be responsible for up to 3 billion microplastic particles entering the Bay of Bengal every day, according to new research.
The study represents the first investigation of microplastic abundance, characteristics and seasonal variation along the river and was conducted using samples collected by an international team of scientists as part of the National Geographic Society's END ...
New combination of immunotherapies shows great promise for treating lung cancer
2021-01-22
HAMILTON, ON, Jan. 21, 2020 -- McMaster University researchers have established in lab settings that a novel combination of two forms of immunotherapy can be highly effective for treating lung cancer, which causes more deaths than any other form of cancer.
The new treatment, yet to be tested on patients, uses one form of therapy to kill a significant number of lung tumor cells, while triggering changes to the tumor that enable the second therapy to finish the job.
The first therapy employs suppressed "natural killer" immune cells by extracting them from patients' tumours ...
Study suggests coffee temporarily counteracts effect of sleep loss on cognitive function
2021-01-22
A new study exploring the impact of repeated sleep loss during a simulated working week has found that consuming caffeinated coffee during the day helps to minimize reductions in attention and cognitive function, compared to decaffeinated coffee1.
While this effect occurred in the first three-to-four days of restricted sleep, by the fifth and final day, no difference was seen between caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee drinkers. This therefore suggests that the beneficial effects of coffee for people with restricted sleep are temporary1.
It is estimated that over 30% of adult Western populations sleep less than the recommended seven to eight hours on weekday nights and 15% regularly sleep less than six hours2,3. This can ...
The Lancet and The Lancet Oncology: Global demand for cancer surgery set to grow by almost 5 million procedures within 20 years, with greatest burden in low-income countries
2021-01-22
A modelling study suggests that demand for cancer surgery will rise by 52% - equal to 4.7 million procedures - between 2018 and 2040, with the greatest relative increase in low-income countries, which already have substantially lower staffing levels than high-income countries.
A separate observational study comparing global cancer surgery outcomes also suggests that patients in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are four times more likely to die from colorectal or gastric cancer (odds of 4.59 and 3.72, respectively) than those in high-income countries (HICs) currently, and that poor provision of care ...
Children 'not scared' by PPE, says study
2021-01-22
Since the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, it has quickly become apparent that children are extremely unlikely to suffer severe COVID-19 illness. Nevertheless, children have had to adjust to the new world of medical staff dressed in personal protective equipment (PPE) in the same way as all other patients. A new study from one of the UK's leading children's hospitals -Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool - shows that children are not scared by PPE, and can in fact feel reassured by it.
The study was conducted by Drs Charlotte Berwick, Jacinth Tan, Ijeoma Okonkwo and their ...
Study shows number and variety of issues experienced by staff wearing
2021-01-22
The sight of healthcare workers wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect against transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is something the world has become accustomed to. However, a new study analysing the impact of PPE staff shows that the number and variety of issues they experience increases as their time in PPE without a break increases, ranging from tiredness and headaches in the first hour to nausea, vomiting and dizziness as they head towards four hours continuously in PPE.
The study is by Dr Tom Hutley, Dr Lynsey Woodward and Mr Joshua Berrington based at the University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust, Bournemouth, UK, and was presented at the Winter Scientific ...
Gastrointestinal surgery can be a cure for type 2 diabetes finds new long-term study
2021-01-22
The results of a randomised clinical trial with the longest follow up to date show that metabolic surgery is more effective than medications and lifestyle interventions in the long-term control of severe type 2 diabetes.
The study, published today in The Lancet, also shows that over one-third of surgically-treated patients remained diabetes-free throughout the 10-year period of the trial. This demonstrates, in the context of the most rigorous type of clinical investigation, that a "cure" for type 2 diabetes can be achieved.
Researchers from King's College London and the Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS, Rome, Italy report the 10-year outcomes of a trial that compared metabolic surgery with conventional medical and lifestyle interventions in patients ...