Studies and Analyses

Screening newborns for a rare but treatable genetic disease benefits families and society, according to a team of pediatricians and health care economists who analyzed patient records and data from mass screening programs in several states. The study appears in the November issue of Pediatrics.

The researchers, from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, analyzed the cost-effectiveness of screening for medium-chain acyl-CoA-dehydr

Just in time for Halloween, a new study of the use of virtual reality to treat spider phobia indicates that touching the fuzzy creepy-crawlers can make the therapy twice as effective.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology (HIT) Lab measured aversion and anxiety responses of students, some of whom had a clinical phobia of spiders, before and after undergoing VR therapy. During the therapy, some of the subjects touched a realistic model of a large spide

Hospital patients isolated for infection control experience more preventable adverse incidents and report greater dissatisfaction with their treatment, says a new study by University of Toronto and Harvard University researchers.

“Isolated patients were twice as likely as control patients to experience adverse events during their hospitalization,” says Professor Donald Redelmeier of U of T’s Department of Medicine. “Our most significant finding showed that they did not receive adequate

The developing areas of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa account for more than two million neonatal deaths annually, according to research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Worldwide, there are an estimated five million deaths, with 98 percent of these deaths taking place in developing countries. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa represent 40 percent of all neonatal deaths, which are infants who die in their first 28 days of life. The study, “The burden of disease from neonat

Imaging studies yield a potential core marker for reading problems, underscore neurological basis of difficulties

Researchers have additional evidence that reading problems are linked to abnormal sound processing, thanks to high-precision pictures of the brain at work. In a recent study, when children without reading problems tried to distinguish between similar spoken syllables, speech areas in the left brain worked much harder than corresponding areas in the right brain, whose funct

A common drug administered in the first hours following trauma to patients deemed to be at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reduced the occurrence of PTSD, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Lille, France.
While the study involved a small number of subjects, its results are encouraging, says its senior author, Charles Marmar, MD, associate chief of staff for mental health at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and professor and vice chair of psy