Nearly one in ten prescriptions written at hospitals may contain errors, according to research conducted by the U.K.’s General Medical Council (GMC). In a study of nearly 125,000 prescriptions written over seven days at 19 different hospitals throughout northwest England, researchers found that more than 11,000—or nearly 9%—contained
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Preliminary research presented this week at the Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research conference in Houston, reveals promising findings about the role that exercise and coffee could play in the fight against prostate cancer. An analysis of activity levels among 2,686 prostate cancer patients showed that men who jogged, played tennis or
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Childhood obesity rates are through the roof. In the past 30 years, the percentage of overweight kids has nearly tripled in every age group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Obesity in children is defined as a body mass index, BMI, at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex.) The …
Around 1.5 million preventable medication errors occur in the American health system each year at a cost of over $4 billion annually, according to a new report released yesterday by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The report’s release marks the start of a new effort to reduce those numbers.
The FDA’s “Safe Use” …
A long-held view among HIV researchers is that overlapping multiple sexual partners (aka concurrency) fuels the spread of HIV in Africa. But the authors of a new paper published in the journal AIDS and Behavior are questioning the strength of the supporting evidence. “This theory, which we accept as fact, is really just the strong …
For two decades, the public-health message has been that cancer screening saves lives. In some cases, especially with cancers of the cervix and colon, screening does, in fact, work as it should: sniffing out disease at its earliest and most curable stages. But for breast and prostate cancers—two of the most widespread in the U.S.—the …
Between 1990 and 2006, overall numbers of burn injuries among children dropped by 31%, according to a study published in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics. Yet while that decrease is cause for celebration—for parents and pediatricians alike—authors of the large scale study, which analyzed some two million burn injuries
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Some 100,000 kids end up in U.S. emergency rooms each year because they’ve accidentally been poisoned. No, they’re not all raiding the cupboard full of cleaning supplies. Close to 70% of those visits are from are overdoses of everyday over-the-counter drugs or prescription medications, according to a recent study by researchers at the …
Most people grossly overestimate the benefits of cancer screening, according to a new survey of 10,228 Europeans. A whopping 92% of women believe the life-expectancy benefit from breast-cancer screening is at least ten times bigger than it really is, or say that they don’t know how much benefit screening provides. (On average …
