BUSM study shows patient navigations improve mammography rates in minority women
2010-10-22
(Press-News.org) (Boston) – A new research study conducted by Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) shows that patient navigation services significantly improve biennial mammography screening rates among inner city women. The results, published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, indicate the importance of patient navigation in reducing health disparities in vulnerable patient populations.
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women, with 40,170 deaths in the United States in 2009. Lower mammography screening rates among minority and low income women contributes to the increased morbidity and mortality from breast cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 5,320 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed and an estimated 780 women will die from breast cancer in Massachusetts during 2010.
The study was conducted over a nine-month period and involved 3,895 Boston Medical Center (BMC) general internal medicine primary care practice female patients between the ages of 51-70. Patient navigation services consisted of phone calls and reminder letters to identify the barriers to care and aid in directly scheduling mammograms. At the end of the nine-months, mammography adherence rates increased to 87 percent in those that received patient navigation with no change from the baseline adherence rates of the non navigated group (76 percent). Patient navigation also increased adherence rates across all languages, races, insurance and education groups.
"Primary care-based patient navigation is a valuable intervention to help reduce health care disparities, especially in vulnerable patient populations served by safety net hospitals like BMC," said Christine Phillips, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at BUSM and a physician in the department of general internal medicine at BMC, who led the study. "We need to explore ways to help sustain such programs in resource-poor communities and integrate them into our current Medical Home in order to provide the highest quality of care for patients."
INFORMATION: END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2010-10-22
COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Offshore wind power offers a feasible way for Maryland to help meet its renewable energy goals, but presents some economic and political hurdles, concludes a new study by the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Environmental Research (CIER).
The study, "Maryland Offshore Wind Development," is the most in-depth feasibility assessment to date of developing and operating wind farms in Maryland's Atlantic coastal waters, the researchers say.
Among the study's key findings, offshore wind development will have to address two serious hurdles to ...
2010-10-22
(PHOENIX, AZ) -- Scientists at Barrow Neurological Institute have recently made discoveries about a type of cell that may limit inflammation in the central nervous system (CNS) – a finding that could have important implications in the treatment of brain disorders such as multiple sclerosis. The research, led by Barrow's Fu-Dong Shi, MD, PhD, was published in the August 2010 issue of The Journal of Experimental Medicine, and simultaneously highlighted in Nature.
Dr. Shi directs the Neuroimmunology Laboratory and Flow Cytometry Core Facility at Barrow. One of his research ...
2010-10-22
WHAT: Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found that the major malaria-transmitting mosquito species, Anopheles gambiae, is evolving into two separate species with different traits, a development that could both complicate malaria control efforts and potentially require new disease prevention methods. Their findings were published in back-to-back articles in the October 22 issue of the journal Science.
A. gambiae is the most common vector of human malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, where rates of the disease are highest. The researchers compared the ...
2010-10-22
Vegetation plays an unexpectedly large role in cleansing the atmosphere, a new study finds.
The research, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., uses observations, gene expression studies, and computer modeling to show that deciduous plants absorb about a third more of a common class of air-polluting chemicals than previously thought.
The new study, results of which are being published this week in Science Express, was conducted with co-authors from the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Arizona. ...
2010-10-22
A study led by a researcher at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine indicates that parent-only treatments for childhood obesity work equally as well as plans that include parents and child, while at the same time more cost effective and potentially easier for families.
The results were published today in the advanced online edition of the journal Obesity.
Kerri N. Boutelle, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at UC San Diego and Rady Children's Hospital, San Diego, and colleagues set out to assess whether parent-only groups are ...
2010-10-22
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 – A team of scientists at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs have examined the energy consumption trends of communications equipment in use today and determined that gains in energy efficiency are not keeping pace with traffic growth. One consequence is that energy is going to become an increasingly important problem for communication networks.
In one unabated, business-as-usual scenario, the scientists estimate that power consumed per user could increase by seven-fold over the next 10 years. Based on these findings, Bell Labs has developed several technology ...
2010-10-22
LA JOLLA, CA, October 21, 2010 — A multi-institutional consortium led by The Scripps Research Institute scientists, the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), is the sole focus of a special issue of the journal Acta Crystallographica Section F. This is the first time in the history of the monthly journal, which publishes peer-reviewed crystallography and structural biology articles, that an entire issue is devoted to the works of a single scientific center.
The issue contains 35 articles grouped into sections that highlight different aspects of the JCSG high-throughput ...
2010-10-22
CORAL GABLES, FL (October 21, 2010)--Researchers from the University of Miami (UM) and the University of Connecticut (UConn) have published a 2010 report on the American Jewish population, as part of a new North American Jewish Data Bank Report series.
The new report called Jewish Population in the United States-2010 shows a greater number of Jews in the U.S. than in Israel. While the article puts the total number of Jews in the U.S. at around 6.5 million, the authors recognize there may be some double counting in the methodology and believe the number to be fewer than ...
2010-10-22
The landscape of Central Africa 65 million years ago was a low-elevation tropical belt, but the jury is still out on whether the region's mammals browsed and hunted beneath the canopy of a lush rainforest.
The scientific evidence for a tropical rainforest at that time is weak and far from convincing, says paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Fossil pollen from Central and West Africa provide no definitive evidence for communities of rainforest trees at the beginning of the Cenozoic, says Jacobs, an expert in the paleobotany of Africa ...
2010-10-22
The availability of highly nutritious forage is one of four factors linked to the presence of elk populations in western Oregon and Washington, according to a modeling study recently completed by scientists from the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station. Findings from the two-year study will be used to update land management planning for the ecologically and economically important ungulate in the region.
"Habitat models like the one we developed are critical to managing elk populations, particularly since current management practices are based ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] BUSM study shows patient navigations improve mammography rates in minority women
