Why are Canadians having problems accessing physicians despite historic highs in physician numbers? Factoring in changing demographics and physician work trends can help with physician workforce planning, according to a new analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.221239. "[T]he increasing [health care] needs of an aging population have been empirically important since around 2005, while the supply of physician service hours has simultaneously declined in a manner that is largely unrelated to the evolving age–sex composition of the physician workforce," writes Dr. Arthur Sweetman, ...

Pregnant and postpartum people with schizophrenia have a more than threefold increase in the risk of an emergency department visit for interpersonal violence, compared with those without schizophrenia, according to a new study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.220689. Interpersonal violence can include physical, sexual and psychological abuse by a family member, intimate partner, acquaintance or stranger. "Though we found a threefold increased risk for individuals with schizophrenia, we also found that ...

Getting tested for levels of HDL (the good) and LDL (the bad) cholesterol is part of the annual physical exam. But emerging research is showing that these standard tests may not be the most accurate way to test for heart disease risk. Instead, emerging data suggest that testing for levels of Apolipoprotein B-100 (ApoB), a protein that carries fat molecules, including LDL cholesterol – the so-called “bad cholesterol” – around the body, may be a more accurate risk predictor of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which occurs ...

An automated system that flags which patients could most benefit from an underused yet life-saving cardiology drug more than doubled new prescriptions, according to a pilot program test by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “Our findings suggest that tailored electronic notifications can boost the prescription of life-saving drugs,” said study lead author and cardiologist Amrita Mukhopadhyay, MD, a clinical instructor in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Health. “By compiling key information in one place, the system may help providers to spend less time searching through medical records during a visit ...

About The Study: In this study of nearly 13,000 U.S. adults ages 20 to 44, diabetes and obesity increased from 2009 to March 2020, while hypertension did not change and hyperlipidemia declined. The data from this study show a high and rising burden of most cardiovascular risk factors in young U.S. adults, especially for Black, Hispanic, and Mexican American individuals. Authors: Rishi K. Wadhera, M.D., M.P.P., M.Phil., of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit ...

Transcatheter mitral valve repair for heart failure patients with mitral regurgitation can reduce the long-term rate of hospitalizations by almost 50 percent, and death by nearly 30 percent, compared with heart failure patients who don’t undergo the minimally invasive procedure. These are the breakthrough findings from a new study led by a researcher from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. This multi-center trial is the largest trial to examine the safety and effectiveness of transcatheter mitral-valve repair in a heart failure population using Abbott’s ...

Even patients with mild COVID-19 infections can suffer from health complications for months, even years, post infection. Nearly 19% of U.S. adults who had previously tested positive for COVID-19 report having “Long COVID,” where they experience signs and symptoms for four weeks or more after the initial phase of infection. In an effort to quantify what Long COVID means now, and could mean in the future for these patients, researchers from Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City studied nearly 150,000 ...

“We are living in an extraordinary moment in history,” says Didier Queloz, who directs ETH Zurich’s Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life and the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe at Cambridge. While still a doctoral student Queloz was the first to discover an exoplanet - a planet orbiting a solar-type star outside of Earth’s solar system. A discovery for which he would later receive a Nobel Prize in physics. Within a generation, scientists have now discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets and predict the potential existence of trillions more in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Each ...

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted just about every part of people’s lives. Quarantining, social distancing, societal disruptions and an ever-shifting, uncertain landscape of rules and restrictions and variants created stress and isolation that impacted the mental health of millions of Americans. Now, in a new study of nearly 136,000 patients from Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City, researchers found that depressive symptoms and severity of depression was significant among all patients in the study, regardless ...

University of Houston researchers are developing a program to teach small-scale, underserved and limited resources (SULR) farmers how to improve their crop production by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing carbon removal. The work is supported by a nearly $5 million grant from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service. Researchers will partner with colleagues from Prairie View A&M University, Texas A&M University and Michigan Aerospace Corp. to study how best to implement a Climate-Smart ...

On Mar. 2, the first evening of the Our Ocean Conference in Panama City, Panama, a distinguished group hosted by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), the Bezos Earth Fund, Re:wild and Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy gathered at Panama’s BioMuseo to celebrate their commitment to conserve a sustainable and resilient Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean (ETP).    The event recognized significant contributions by the public sector—especially the governments of Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador; the private sector; civil society, the scientific sector; together with generous philanthropists, ...

Sea level rise this century may disproportionately affect certain Asian megacities as well as western tropical Pacific islands and the western Indian Ocean, according to new research that looks at the effects of natural sea level fluctuations on the projected rise due to climate change. The study, led by scientists at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and University of La Rochelle in France and co-authored by a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), mapped sea level hotspots around the globe. The research team identified several ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Obese fruit flies are the experimental subjects in a Nature Communications study of the causes of muscle function decline due to obesity. In humans, skeletal muscle plays a crucial role in metabolism, and muscle dysfunction due to human obesity can lead to insulin resistance and reduced energy levels. Interestingly, studies in various animal models have shown that time-restricted feeding — a natural non-pharmaceutical intervention — protects against obesity, aging and circadian disruption in peripheral tissues such as skeletal muscle. However, the mechanisms underlying those ...

A ball, a saddle, or a flat plate. The curvature of biomaterials inhibits or stimulates bone cells to make new tissue. This is what TU Delft engineers show in research published on Friday, 3rd of March in Nature Communications. This study of geometries could be an important step in research into repairing damaged tissues. Living cells can perceive and respond to the geometry of their environment. ‘Cells sense and respond to the geometry of the surfaces they are exposed to. Depending on their curvature, surfaces can either encourage cells to create new tissue or prevent them from doing so,’ says Amir Zadpoor, ...

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates among eligible veterans and active-duty military are half that of their civilian peers, putting them at greater risk of HPV-related cancers. That’s according to a new study published today in JAMA Oncology that provides the first national estimate of HPV vaccination rates in this population. “Our findings should serve as a call to action to the Department of Defense and the Veterans Health Administration to advocate that their service members get vaccinated,” said senior author José P. Zevallos, ...

Over the past decade, human papillomavirus (HPV) has increasingly been identified as a significant cause of certain head and neck cancers – for example, evidence suggests it causes 70% of oropharyngeal cancers in the United States. Further, over the past three decades, incidence of HPV-driven cancers has increased substantially worldwide and in the U.S. While there are well-established screening tools, as well as vaccines, for HPV-driven cancers such as cervical cancer, there are fewer resources for HPV-driven head and neck cancers. As a result, researchers are working with a sense of urgency to develop innovative ...

**Note: the release below is a special early release from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2023, Copenhagen, 15-18 April). Please credit the conference if you use this story** Compared to adults who did not have COVID in the first wave (March to September 2020), adults infected with COVID-19 in that first wave were 40% less likely to become infected during the first six months of Omicron activity (December 2021 to May 2022), concludes a new Canadian study to be presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark (15-18 April).  The study was led ...

Infrared spectroscopy is a non-invasive tool to identify unknown samples and known chemical substances. It is based on how different molecules interact with infrared light. You may have seen this tool at airports, where they screen for illicit drugs. The technique has many applications: liquid biopsy, environmental gas monitoring, contaminant detection, forensic analyses, exoplanet search, etc. But the traditional infrared spectroscopy methods provide low (temporal) resolution data. They are usually only applied for static samples because spectral data acquisition is a slow process. Detecting fast-changing phenomena ...

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have successfully threaded atoms of indium metal in between individual fibers in bundles of transition metal chalcogenide nanofibers. By steeping the bundles in indium gas, rows of atoms were able to make their way in between the fibers to create a unique nanostructure via intercalation. Through simulations and resistivity measurements, individual bundles were shown to have metallic properties, paving the way for application as flexible nanowires in nanocircuitry.   Atomic wires of transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs) ...

Mason Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, Ramin M. Hakami has received a total of $35,000 in grants from Intellifoods Labs, LLC to continue examining methods to reduce the time to detect the presence of bacteria in food samples. Numbers and types of foodborne disease occurrences have increased over time and are a major global public health concern. Hakami and his team seek to reduce the time to identify both live and dead bacteria in food samples using fluorescence detection. The team aims to optimize the detection ...

Healthcare providers (HCP) at three Miami hospitals during the height of the Covid crisis, who practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM), showed a rapid and highly significant reduction in stress-related burnout symptoms such as somatization, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and emotional exhaustion, as well as significant improvement in mental well-being, compared to a parallel matched lifestyle-as-usual group (LAU), according to a new study published today in PLOS ONE. A total of 65 healthcare providers at the three Miami hospitals (Baptist, ...

The first piece of a series of concrete structures was lowered into the water off the coast of Miami Beach on Wednesday morning, a massive crane on the deck of a floating barge hoisting the unit into the air and sinking it to the seabed.  During the next six hours, crewmembers aboard the barge would repeat that process until the structures, some stacked on top of each other, were settled on the seafloor, 14 feet below the surface.  To casual observers onshore, the daylong operation might have seemed routine. But this maritime activity was hardly run-of-the-mill.  In ...

A scientist from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) will premiere a new piece of music at the SXSW EDU festival that has been created using data beamed back to Earth from interstellar space. On Thursday, 9 March, Dr Domenico Vicinanza will be joined on stage in Austin, Texas, by Dr Alyssa Schwartz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Flute and Musicology at Fairmont State University, to perform music shaped by scientific readings collected by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. Dr Vicinanza, a Senior Lecturer in ARU’s School of Computing and Information Science, is a leading expert ...

Oil palm trees are the most productive oil crop and global demand is increasing. However, their productivity is due to conventional management practices including high fertilizer usage and herbicide application, resulting in severe environmental damage. A new study by an international, multidisciplinary research team led by the University of Göttingen, shows that shifting to mechanical weeding and reducing fertilizer usage lead to significant increases in both ecosystem multifunctionality and profit. The scientists compared different environmental measures and economic indicators in mechanical weeding, herbicide application, and combinations of these with high and reduced fertilizer ...

A team of researchers has developed a machine learning model that draws from the contents of news articles to effectively predict locations that face risks of food insecurity. The model, which could be used to help prioritize the allocation of emergency food assistance across vulnerable regions, marks an improvement over existing measurements.  “Our approach could drastically improve the prediction of food crisis outbreaks up to 12 months ahead of time using both real-time news streams and a predictive model that is simple to interpret,” says Samuel Fraiberger, a visiting researcher at ...