Highlight HEALTH

NIHSeniorHealth.gov Adds Topic on Anxiety Disorders in Older Adults

December 8, 2010 | by NIH Newsbot

Anxiety caused by stressful events like moving or losing a job is a normal part of life. Anxiety disorders, on the other hand, are characterized by persistent, excessive and disabling fear and worry and get progressively worse if left untreated. It is estimated that anxiety disorders affect between 3 and 14 percent of older adults in a given year. To provide an older audience with additional information, NIHSeniorHealth, the health and wellness website for older adults from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has added a topic about anxiety disorders.

Visitors to the website can learn about the risk factors, symptoms and treatments for generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and specific phobias such as fear of flying or fear of public speaking. Anxiety disorders can severely affect a person’s life, and they are often overlooked in older adults.

[Continue Reading]

Grand Rounds: the Impact of Healthcare Reform

December 7, 2010 | by Walter Jessen

Welcome to Grand Rounds: the Impact of Healthcare Reform.

There’s a revolution occurring on the Web: those “authoritative” articles written on traditional, static websites are being replaced with blogs, wikis and online social networks. In the sphere of health, medicine and information technology, this “real-time Web” consists of many who are professionals in the field; their posts are listed below. In the digital age, these are the characteristics of new media: recent, relevant, reachable and reliable.

For this edition of Grand Rounds, Vol. 7 No. 11, we’re focusing on the impact of healthcare reform: what are the changes to healthcare delivery, utilization, quality, costs (either as a provider or a patient) and outcomes. After all, these changes affect everyone, whether you’re a patient, a healthcare provider or a biomedical researcher.

[Continue Reading]

Health in 200 Countries Over 200 Years in 4 Minutes

December 5, 2010 | by Walter Jessen

Hans Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute, one of Europe’s largest medical universities, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation, a non-profit venture that promotes sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by the increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

Rosling’s lectures combine huge quantities of public data with a sport commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Here, he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers — in just four minutes.

Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Rosling shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

References

The Joy of Stats. BBC. Accessed 2010 Dec 4.

The National Database for Autism Research Announces its First Data Release

December 2, 2010 | by NIH Newsbot

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) researchers now can use data from over 10,000 participants enrolled in ASD studies. The National Database for Autism Research (NDAR), created by the National Institutes of Health, recently made the data available. Researchers can now use the NDAR portal to perform queries that simultaneously yield results from multiple datasets. The portal was designed to provide tools to define and standardize data collected by different laboratories under different protocols. It was also built to ensure a collaborative approach and open data access to the whole ASD research community.

[Continue Reading]

Funding for State Tobacco Prevention Programs at Lowest Level Since Tobacco Settlement

November 30, 2010 | by Walter Jessen

According to a report recently released by a coalition of public health organizations, states in the U.S. have decreased funding for programs to reduce tobacco use to the lowest level since 1999, when they first received tobacco settlement funds [1].

The coalition includes organizations such as the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, American Heart Association, American Lung Association and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Since the November 1998 multi-state tobacco settlement, these organizations have issued annual reports assessing whether states are keeping their promise to use a significant portion of their settlement funds to address the enormous public health problems posed by tobacco use in the United States.