November 21st, 2011 by Carolyn Schatz in Health Tips
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No matter how sick my grandmother got or what her doctors said, she refused to go to the hospital because she thought it was a dangerous place. To some degree, she was right. Although hospitals can be places of healing, hospital stays can have serious downsides, too.
One that has been getting a lot of attention lately is the development of delirium in people who are hospitalized. Delirium is a sudden change in mental status characterized by confusion, disorientation, altered states of consciousness (from hyperalert to unrousable), an inability to focus, and sometimes hallucinations. It’s the most common complication of hospitalization among older people.
We wrote about treating and preventing hospital delirium earlier this year in the Harvard Women’s Health Watch. In the New York Times “The New Old Age” blog, author Susan Seliger vividly describes her 85-year-old mother’s rapid descent into hospital delirium, and tips for preventing it.
Although delirium often recedes, it may have long-lasting aftereffects. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
November 12th, 2011 by JessicaBerthold in Research
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“Wow, Celexa?”
“Yeah, who knew?”
I overheard this conversation in the ladies’ room immediately after a session speaker advised treating agitation and aggression in dementia with citalopram. Indeed, there was a bit of a murmur in the audience when Dr. Aleta Borrud made the suggestion during her talk at the Mayo Update in Hospital Medicine 2011 course.
Part of the reason for the reaction may be– as a physician I spoke with noted– that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
October 26th, 2011 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Research
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If you want to create an outcry of indignation, just inform people that certain screening tests are of no value and do not increase time on this earth. People love the idea that if they do all the right things and get all the medical tests at the right time, they can prevent disease ( ….uh…no, tests don’t prevent anything) or catch cancer early and cure it.
The furor over the lack of benefit for men of the screening Prostate Specific Antigen test (PSA) is still being heard. It seems everyone knows someone who was “saved” by getting a PSA and don’t try to tell me there is evidence to suggest otherwise, dammit!
There is a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
October 12th, 2011 by Paul Auerbach, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
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There were no real surprises for me in the article entitled “Television Viewing and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease, and All-Cause Mortality” by Anders Grøntved and Frank B. Hu that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 2011;305(23):2448-2455). As stated in the abstract: “Prolonged television (TV) viewing is the most prevalent and pervasive sedentary behavior in industrialized countries and has been associated with morbidity and mortality. However, a systematic and quantitative assessment of published studies is not available.”
The authors performed an analysis of eight previously published studies to determine the association between TV viewing and risk of type 2 diabetes, fatal or nonfatal cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality.
The risk of all-cause mortality appeared to increase with TV viewing duration of greater than Read more »
This post, Risk Of Type 2 Diabetes And Cardiovascular Disease: Don’t Be A Couch Potato, was originally published on
Healthine.com by Paul Auerbach, M.D..
Distracted Driving: Studies of driving while talking on a cell phone may have overestimated the risk of car crashes, new research suggests, Amy Norton reports for Reuters Health.
