Categories
Cardiovascular
Diagnostics
Endocrinology
Health Insurance
Medical Devices
Mental Health
Nutrition
Oncology
Public Health
Sexual Health
Popular Articles

Argenta Discovery And Porsolt Join Forces To Provide Fully-integrated CNS And Pain Contract Drug Discovery Services
Argenta Discovery and Porsolt announced they have entered into an alliance to provide unparalleled CNS and pain drug discovery services and expertise on a fee-for- service basis. The collaboration enables Argenta and Porsolt to undertake fully integrated CNS and pain-focused drug discovery programmes for their clients, from hit identification to development candidate nomination. Both companies bring a wealth of "Big Pharma" industry based experience and know-how in CNS and pain research. This alliance will leverage those key skills for its partners to ensure the rapid generation of high quality development candidates.
generic viagra online
Many U.S. Hospitals Fail To Report Physician Disciplinary Cases To National Databank
Many U.S. hospitals do not take sufficient disciplinary action against physicians for poor conduct or medical incompetence and fail to report such cases to the National Practitioner Data Bank, according to a report released Wednesday by Public Citizen, the Contra Costa Times reports. Congress established the databank in 1990 as a central repository for information about physicians whose hospital privileges had been withdrawn or limited for more than 30 days. The bank is closed to the public (Kleffman, Contra Costa Times, 5/27).For the report, Public Citizen"s Health Research Group analyzed studies by the HHS Office of Inspector General and the Citizen Advocacy Center, as well as medical journal articles and recommendations made during an October 1996 meeting on under-reporting by hospitals (Stark/Hallihan, ABCNews.com, 5/27). According to the report, nearly half of U.S. hospitals did not submit one physician"s name in 17 years to the databank. One purpose of the databank is to provide hospitals with background information about physicians they were considering hiring at their facilities. Under the initial expectations of the databank, federal officials estimated that at least 5,000 disciplinary cases would be reported annually. However, on average, about 650 reports have been made annually since the databank was created, the report found (Contra Costa Times, 5/27). The group on Wednesday sent a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that included recommendations to improve the efficacy of the databank. The letter said that the reporting numbers are "unreasonably low, compared with what would be expected if hospitals pursued disciplinary actions aggressively and reported all such actions." The letter urged Sebelius to ensure that hospitals are conducting necessary peer reviews and oversight of physicians, taking proper disciplinary actions and reporting them to the databank so that physicians" track records are available to all hospital administrators. Penalties also should be established for hospitals that fail to comply with the reporting requirements, the group said.Al Levine, the author of the report, said some hospitals had found ways to avoid their physician reporting responsibilities, such as by limiting restrictions on hospital privileges to fewer than 30 days or giving physicians a "leave of absence" in place of suspending their privileges. Levine said, "Even in states with high levels of reporting," it "seems to be concentrated in a few facilities" (Contra Costa Times, 5/27).In a statement responding to the report, the American Hospital Association said, "The premise that the number of reports received by the National Practitioner Data Bank correlates to jeopardized patient care is inaccurate," adding, "Hospitals are actively involved in a wide variety of efforts to continuously improve care and talk publicly about the care we provide" (ABCNews.com, 5/27).
News of the day
No More Test Tubes On Four Feet? EPA Moves Toward Animal-free Toxicity Tests
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to switch to a new generation of animal-free tests for predicting the toxicity of chemicals to humans, according to an article scheduled for the June 22 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS" weekly newsmagazine.
Cardiovascular

Dramatic Increase In Social Isolation Cited By 2004 General Social Survey Is Disputed

A widely publicized analysis of social network size, which reported dramatically increasing social isolation when it was published in 2006, has sparked an academic debate in the August issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR), the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association. The 2006 report by sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew E. Brashears found a near tripling in reports of Americans" social isolation - the percentage who said they discussed important matters with no one - between 1985 and 2004. The increase in social isolation was reduced markedly by sophisticated modeling of the data, yet a very significant decrease in social connection to close friends and family remained. Data underlying the findings came from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys (GSS), collected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and funded by the National Science Foundation. The GSS has been fielded since 1972. But sociologist Claude S. Fischer of the University of California, Berkeley, calls the research team"s findings highly implausible based on the immense scale of the reported change, anomalies in the GSS data and contrary results in data on other types of network ties. "Results that seem to be too good, too strong or too stark to be true probably are, as seems to be the case in this instance," said Fischer. "The survey question used in 2004 to measure social network size yielded results that were so inconsistent with other data and so internally anomalous and implausible that they are almost surely the product of an artifact." Fischer highlights peculiar statistics such as the soaring percentage (from 1 to 16 percent between 1985 and 2004) of respondents with post-graduate degrees who named no confidants. Fischer also describes several other available surveys which show that there were no meaningful changes in Americans" social connections over the same years. The study in question, "Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades," appeared in the June 2006 issue of ASR and was updated in a December 2008 ASR erratum after NORC announced a coding error affecting 41 responses in the 2004 GSS. The erratum corrected the 2006 findings and provided updated tables and figures, but did not substantially change the study"s conclusions. Responding to Fischer"s comment, the research team of McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears argues that because the survey questions are identical in the two studies, the burden of proof lies with Fischer to show the presence of an artifact. Their statistical analysis, they argue, strongly suggests that Fischer"s proposed artifact is not credible. McPherson and his coauthors point out that Fischer"s so-called anomalies often come from very small sub-samples in the data. For example, the increased percentage of highly educated respondents with no confidants mentioned above results from a shift of just 22 cases in a study of nearly 3,000 respondents In their reply to Fischer, the authors alert scholars to the risks of attempting to oversimplify complex research. According to McPherson, attention to the simple percentages rather than the researchers" statistical models produced an inaccurate picture of American"s most intimate social circles in many media reports. "We are very pleased that Professor Fischer"s reanalysis supports our original contention that the 2004 data overstate the prevalence of social isolation, a caution that was included in the abstract of our original 2006 report," said McPherson. "However, we disagree that the data show no change in social isolation 1985-2004." "Our statistical analysis and those of independent observers continue to find significant change in social isolation as measured in the publicly available GSS data," McPherson said. "Interested readers can easily access those data on several public Web sites (for example, http://www.sda.berkeley.edu and do their own analyses. We eagerly await new network data from the 2010 General Social Survey." Fischer"s comment, "The 2004 GSS Finding of Shrunken Social Networks: An Artifact?," and the reply, "Models and Marginals: Using Survey Evidence to Study Social Networks," by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears appear in the August 2009 issue of the American Sociological Review. Jackie Cooper American Sociological Association


Add your comment:
Name:
Site address: http://
Your message:
Enter today\\\\'s date, 2 digits
(spam protection):

© Copyright 2009