health tech
Working with the new reality of readily available test results
Adobe
Recent rule changes have allowed many patients to see their test results as soon as they are uploaded to online portals, sparing them long waits for doctors to become available to explain the data. The downside, Katie Palmer reports, is that medical jargon can be confusing for laypeople and cause unnecessary alarm, as medical imaging specialists discussed at this year's meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago.
The solution in the case of radiology reports may be to make them easier to decipher — perhaps with the use of AI to translate medical speech into easily understandable descriptions, or through the use of multimedia aids. "I'm not sure why our reports don't have pictures and arrows that the patient could look at," said Jonathan Mezrich, a lawyer and emergency radiology professor at Yale School of Medicine. Read more.
environmental health
The EPA wants to get rid of America's lead pipes
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to remove essentially all lead pipes in the U.S. in an effort to improve drinking water. The proposed undertaking, estimated to cost $20-30 billion, aims to prevent crises like the one in Flint, Michigan, in which tens of thousands of residents, including up to 12,000 children, were exposed to dangerous levels of lead in drinking water for years. Black Americans are especially vulnerable to the liver damage caused by lead exposure, as they tend to live in areas with a higher concentration of lead pipes.
"Getting the lead out of drinking water will be a big victory for public health as lead is a highly toxic pollutant that affects the IQ and behavior of children and increases the risk of heart attacks and stroke in adults," Elizabeth Southerland, a volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network, an organization of former EPA staffers, said in a statement.
dementia
Being conscientious may reduce risk of dementia diagnosis: Study
Certain personality traits may shape how we deal with cognitive decline. A study published in Alzheimer's & Dementia investigated the link between dementia and the Big Five personality traits: conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, and agreeableness. The research analyzed data on 44,000 people from eight longitudinal studies, of whom 1,700 developed dementia, and compared their personality scores with cognitive test scores and pathology data.
People who were conscientious, extroverted, and more agreeable had a lower risk of a dementia diagnosis compared to their more negative and neurotic peers. But the study found no link between personality traits and the neuropathology results in autopsies on people's brains after death. One possibility, the study's authors suggest, is that traits like conscientiousness help people perform better on cognitive tests, indicative of their ability to cope with the challenges of dementia.
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