Dorothy A. Andriole, M.D., and Donna B. Jeffe, Ph.D., of Washington University, St. Louis, conducted a study to identify demographic variables prior to medical school acceptance associated with outcomes for medical school students. The study used data from a 1994-1999 national cohort of 97,445 students accepted to medical school who were followed up through March 2009 and had graduated, withdrawn, or were dismissed. The authors found that "lower scores on the Medical College Admission Test, nonwhite race/ethnicity, and premedical debt of at least $50,000 were independently ...

Susan M. Kies, Ed.D., of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Urbana, and colleagues conducted a study to assess whether the order in which third-year core clerkships are completed affects student performance. Anecdotal experience has suggested that third-year medical students whose first clerkship is internal medicine may have superior performance throughout the academic year. The researchers reviewed the clerkship performance records of medical students at all four campuses of the University of Illinois College of Medicine who completed their third-year core ...

Heart patients with the "distressed" (Type D) personality profile may face a higher risk of future cardiovascular problems, according to a summary article published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. An analysis of previous reports involving more than 6,000 patients found an association between the Type D personality and future cardiovascular issues among heart patients. The personality classification system that identified "Type A" decades ago more recently defined Type D as a personality marked by chronic negative ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A Mayo Clinic study involving seven major medical schools shows a majority of medical students surveyed suffer from burnout and that those students were more likely to cheat or be dishonest in relation to patient care. The findings appear in this week's issue of JAMA. The study was based on anonymous responses from 4,400 students. Just over half (53 percent) the students responding were found to have burnout. Academic cheating was relatively rare, but roughly 40 percent of third- and fourth-year students admitted to some form of unprofessional conduct ...

Doctors can be taught to listen better to individual circumstances that may affect patient care, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. The findings are reported in the Sept. 15 issue of JAMA. In a previous study the investigators had shown that doctors are not good at picking up clues to details in their patients' personal lives that may affect their treatment -- what the researchers call "context." The current study was designed to see if doctors could be taught to think about context when examining patients. Fourth-year ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found a new mechanism that explains why a certain gene mutation causes craniofrontonasal syndrome (CFNS), a disorder that causes cleft palate and other malformations in the face, brain, and skeleton. Cleft palate affects one of every 1,000 newborns. The research is published in the September 15 issue of Genes & Development. Previous research has shown that a mutation in a gene called ephrin-B1 caused abnormalities in facial development, but researchers were uncertain of how. Philipe M. Soriano, PhD, Professor, Developmental ...

Washington, DC — Honey bees removed from their usual roles in the hive quickly and drastically changed their biological rhythms, according to a study in the Sept. 15 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The changes were evident in both the bees' behavior and in their internal clocks. These findings indicate that social environment has a significant effect on the physiology and behavior of animals. In people, disturbances to the biological clock are known to cause problems for shift workers and new parents and for contributing to mood disorders. Circadian rhythm, the ...

PITTSBURGH— Despite heightened awareness about the undue influence that gifts from pharmaceutical companies can have on doctors' prescribing practices, and despite expanding institutional conflict-of-interest policies and state laws targeted at preventing such practices, companies continue to reward doctors for prescribing their drugs with gifts ranging from pens and paper, to free dinners and trips. A new study by two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, helps to explain how doctors rationalize acceptance ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. --- Medical students experience depression at a higher rate than the general population and attach high levels of stigma to the mental illness, according to U-M research to be published Sept. 15 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study showed that 53.3 percent of medical students who reported high levels of depressive symptoms were worried that revealing their illness would be risky. Almost 62 percent of the same students said asking for help would mean the student's coping skills were inadequate. Those with moderate to severe ...

"People's views of their neighbourhood can influence major decisions such as moving house and choice of school. A neighbourhood can also acquire a reputation as a 'good' or 'bad' area. It is therefore important to understand what these views are based on," says Dr Liz Twigg, University of Portsmouth, who led the research. "Previous research has suggested that diverse communities are less cohesive and suffer from problems associated with anti-social behaviour, crime and lack of trust," she explains. "Our research suggests that this is not true. In general, what people ...

REM sleep disturbances constitute an early marker of neurodegenerative diseases. This was demonstrated by the Multidisciplinary Sleep Disturbances Unit of the Hospital Clínic, in an article published in 2006. A new study published by the same team in Lancet Neurology applies neuroimaging techniques to identify patients with REM sleep disturbances who will develop neurodegenerative disorders over the short term. The first signing author of both papers is Dr. Àlex Iranzo, a physician belonging to the Neurology Department of the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, who is also an ...

BOSTON, Mass.—With the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year, a new cost-effective rabies therapy developed by MassBiologics at the University of Massachusetts and the Serum Institute of India took an important step forward with positive results from a Phase 1 study. The recently completed study showed that a new monoclonal antibody (RAB-1) resulted in protective antibody levels in the serum of treated subjects equal to the current standard of treatment, which is often not available in the areas of the world hit hardest by rabies. Details of the study ...

Medical students and residents should receive much more thorough and realistic instruction about the economic forces affecting health care and their own clinical decisions so that they can better serve patients' well-being and the nation's economic welfare, says a commentary published today in a theme issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which focuses on improving medical education. The commentary is written by Samuel Y. Sessions, MD, JD, a Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) investigator, and Allan S. Detsky, MD, PhD, Departments ...

Existing evidence from randomised controlled trials does not support routine population screening for prostate cancer, concludes a study published on bmj.com today. However, a second study also published today suggests that a single test at age 60 could identify men who are most likely to develop and die from prostate cancer. These men could then be monitored more closely, while others could be exempt from further screening. Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men worldwide. Screening is widely used in many countries, but it remains controversial ...

It is widely known that a healthy lifestyle that includes not smoking, limiting alcohol intake, and maintaining a proper weight reduces disease risk. In the journal PLoS Medicine, Wei Zheng, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center now report results from a large study quantifying the impact of combining healthy lifestyle factors. They found that a healthy lifestyle pattern – being normal weight, having low belly fat, participating in regular physical activity, limiting exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke, and consuming higher ...

Washington, DC, (September 14, 2010) — A new study released today by the American Lung Association, and conducted by researchers at Penn State University, finds that helping smokers quit not only saves lives but also offers favorable economic benefits to states. The study, titled Smoking Cessation: the Economic Benefits, provides a nationwide cost-benefit analysis that compares the costs to society of smoking with the economic benefits of states providing cessation (quit-smoking) coverage. The study comes at an important time, as important cessation benefit provisions ...

Antibiotics can work miracles, knocking out common infections like bronchitis and tonsillitis. But according to the Center for Disease Control, each year 90,000 people in the U.S. die of drug-resistant "superbugs" ― bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a deadly form of staph infection resistant to normal antibiotics. Although hospital patients are particularly susceptible as a result of open wounds and weakened immune systems, the bacteria can infect anyone. Dr. Micha Fridman of Tel Aviv University's Department of Chemistry is now developing the next generation ...

NEW YORK (Embargoed until September 14, 2010: 5:00 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time)— A new peer-reviewed paper by the Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups reveals an ominous finding: most of the world's last remaining tigers—long decimated by overhunting, logging, and wildlife trade—are now clustered in just six percent of their available habitat. The paper identifies 42 'source sites' scattered across Asia that are now the last hope and greatest priority for the conservation and recovery of the world's largest cat. The securing of the tiger's remaining source sites ...

Did I turn off the stove, or did I just imagine it? Memory isn't always reliable. Psychological scientists have discovered all sorts of ways that false memories get created, and now there's another one for the list: watching someone else do an action can make you think you did it yourself. The team of psychological scientists who found the new way to create false memories weren't setting out to make a big discovery. They were trying to learn more about imagination, another way that false memories get created. But then in an experiment, they found that people who had watched ...

NASA satellites provide infrared images to forecasters that show temperature, and today's imagery of powerful Hurricane Igor showed the storm's perfect form and the warm ocean waters around it that are keeping it fueled. NASA's infrared data also revealed a huge difference of 170 degrees between the cold cloud tops in Hurricane Igor and the warm sea surface temperatures powering it below. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Igor on Sept. 14 at 14:47 UTC (10:47 a.m. EDT) the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured icy cold cloud top temperatures in ...

New research findings from the Université de Montréal reveals that children as young as four are able to understand and use irony. This study, published recently in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, may impact the way parents communicate with their family. "Previous studies concluded that irony wasn't understood before the age of eight or ten," says Stephanie Alexander, a postdoctoral student at the Université de Montréal's Department of Social and Preventive Medicine and senior author of the study. "However, these studies were mostly done in a laboratory ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Sept. 14, 2010 -- As industries and consumers increasingly seek improved battery power sources, cutting-edge microscopy performed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is providing an unprecedented perspective on how lithium-ion batteries function. A research team led by ORNL's Nina Balke, Stephen Jesse and Sergei Kalinin has developed a new type of scanning probe microscopy called electrochemical strain microscopy (ESM) to examine the movement of lithium ions through a battery's cathode material. The research, "Nanoscale mapping ...

(Garrison, NY) The most politically charged feature of the health reform law is the mandate that legal residents have health insurance. Within weeks of the law's passage, twenty states had filed lawsuits charging that the mandate is unconstitutional because it gives the federal government more power than it actually has. The state lawsuits are widely expected to reach the Supreme Court next year. Legal scholar Lawrence O. Gostin writes that the health insurance mandate rests on firm legal ground. Under the mandate, which goes into effect in 2014, the federal government ...

Students who enter medical school with high debt levels, low scores on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) or who are non-white are more likely to face difficulties that may prevent graduation or hinder acceptance into a residency program if they do graduate, according to a nationwide study of students enrolled in MD programs. The research, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is reported Sept. 15 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study of more than 84,000 students who entered U.S. medical schools from 1994-1999 showed ...

Data and research on what it really takes for seniors to make ends meet in each of California's 58 counties will be released today at the state Capitol in Sacramento. The release is the latest update of the Elder Economic Security Standard Index (Elder Index), a tool that measures the actual costs of basic necessities for older adults. The Elder Index is quickly replacing federal poverty level (FPL) guidelines as a new standard for evaluating and meeting the needs of seniors across California. "This year, the federal government officially acknowledged it's time ...