October 30th, 2011 by John Mandrola, M.D. in Research
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You don’t want this…
When it comes to the risk of stroke in atrial fibrillation, it pays to be a boy. Sorry, ladies.
An important question came up on my recent post on AF and stroke.
Why does being female give you an automatic point on CHADS2-VASc? I keep seeing it, but I don’t see why that is.
It doesn’t seem intuitive that female AF patients should have more strokes. Why? AF should equal AF.
But it does matter. When it comes to AF and stroke, women are very different.
Here are three references that support the fact that female gender increases the risk of stroke in AF.
–First: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*
September 30th, 2011 by John Di Saia, M.D. in Opinion
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The ladies in this story have had a “new” form of lipo instead of a tummy tuck. Their stomachs do look thinner but their skin in wrinkly. Would they have been better served by having a tummy tuck and then lipo? Is it just their age that has their skin looking that way?
Source: dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1215196/
New-5-000-treatment-claims-melt-away-muffin-top.html
VASER liposuction has been around for a while. I have used it and it is effective. The main question with newer lipo technologies is: “Are they worth the added expense and can they increase problems?”
Many of them (VASER included) make it even easier to take out more and more fat. As we have discussed here before of course more fat removal is not always desirable. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Truth in Cosmetic Surgery*
September 14th, 2011 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Research
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The idea that heart disease mortality rises dramatically at menopause has been one of the truisms of medicine that spawned a generation of hormone use by women and led to the rise and subsequent fall of Prempro in the Women’s Health Initiative, the end-all-be-all study that failed to prove the truism. The truism is still so strongly believed that research to prove it right continues, using different hormone formulations and different cohorts of women, in the hopes that the hormonal fountain of youth was just misbranded and given to the wrong aged cohort.
Now comes a landmark study that suggests that what we’ve thought all along about heart disease and menopause may actually be wrong.
Dhananjay Vaidya and colleagues at Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama have re-analyzed mortality data on men and women in the UK and US and concluded that, contrary to popular belief, heart disease rates and mortality do not increase dramatically with menopause, but rather rise more gradually as a function of age in both men and women.
“Our data show there is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog That Ate Manhattan*
September 11th, 2011 by Happy Hospitalist in Health Policy, Opinion
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Missed Diagnosis Lawsuit and the Dynamics of Age Related to Risk
Years ago I had the opportunity to care for Mr Smith, a 101 year old man who presented to the hospital with chest pain and shortness of breath. Besides having 101 year old heart and lungs that tend to follow their own biological clock, this man also had a massive chest tumor filling 85% of one side of his thorax.
Whoah really? What does that mean in a 101 year old man? Most folks this age have exceeded the normal bell curve distribution of life and disease. When you reach 101 years old, there isn’t a lot of chronic anything you can catch with the expected time you have left on earth.
Every now and then, however, we find patients who are the exception to the rule, such as the 101 year old guy that present with a new cancer diagnosis. That’s where being an internist comes in handy. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*
July 25th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Smartphones and tablets have reached 80% of physicians across all practice types, locations and years in practice, and 25% of users are “Super Mobile” physicians who use both types of mobile devices. This is far beyond the general population’s 50% adoption of smartphones and 5% adoption of tablets.
QuantiaMd, a free, online learning collaborative, released survey results that showed 44% of physicians who do not yet have a mobile device intend to buy one this year.
While younger physicians have higher adoption rates than older ones, current use of mobile devices by physicians longest in practice is above 60%, the survey showed. Among physicians with 30 years or more of practice, almost 20% already use a tablet device for work, and another 25% say they are extremely likely to do so. Physicians in their second decade of practice use Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
