New Studies Indicate Age is Important in Hormone Therapy Use
Five years ago this summer the National Institutes of Health’s stopped early a major portion of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a large and ambitious study to address the most common causes of death, disability and impaired quality of life in postmenopausal women.
One part of the WHI sought to determine whether hormone therapy has a positive or negative impact on cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. The estrogen-plus-progestin hormone therapy trial for women with their uteruses intact was stopped in July 2002 after investigators found that the associated health risks of the combination hormone therapy outweighed the benefits.
Integrated system, rapid transfer offers lifeline for heart attack victims
Heart attack patients received lifesaving treatment quickly when hospitals and communities used an integrated, rapid transfer system to get patients to a facility equipped to perform artery-opening procedures, according to a report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Our aim was to develop a standardized system of heart attack care, which included timely access to artery-opening treatment for patents presenting to either the major hospital with a cardiac catheterization lab or to any one of 30 community hospitals without a cath lab,” said Timothy D. Henry, M.D., lead author of the report and a cardiologist at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Minn. Abbott Northwestern Hospital is a 619-bed hospital with a cardiac catheterization lab equipped to treat heart attack patients with the artery-opening procedure called percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), also known as angioplasty. A major heart attack is when a complete blockage occurs in a coronary artery.
Shorter heart health programs just as effective in saving lives
Secondary prevention programs for coronary heart disease that contain less than 10 hours contact with health professionals and those provided by family doctors are just as effective in saving lives as more expensive, longer and more specialized hospital-based alternatives, according to cardiovascular researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Dr. Alexander Clark, an associate professor in the U of A Faculty of Nursing and Alberta Heritage Investigator, is lead author on an article published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation.
The matrix of autism
Autistic children are doubly stigmatized. On the one hand, they are often dismissed as “low functioning” or mentally retarded, especially if they have poor speaking skills as many do. Yet when autistics do show exceptional abilities—uncanny visual discrimination and memory for detail, for example—their flashes of brilliance are marginalized as aberrations, mere symptoms of their higher order cognitive deficit. They often earn a dubious promotion to “idiot savant.”
The theoretical justification for this view is that prototypical autistic skills are not true intelligence at all, but really just low-level perceptual abilities. Indeed, in this view autistics are missing the big picture because they are obsessed with the detail.
