MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Prof. Dr. Bernd Schultes Endocrinology and Diabetes Internal Medicine eSwiss Medical & Surgical Center Brauerstrasse 97 9016 St. Gallen Schweiz MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study? Professor Schultes: Sleep loss promotes the development of obesity and diabetes by metabolic and behavioral mechanism. MedicalResearch.com: Were any of the findings unexpected? Professor Schultes:...
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jill Cameron, PhD
CIHR New Investigator, Associate Professor,
Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy
Graduate Department of Rehabilitation Science
Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
Adjunct Scientist, UHN-Toronto Rehabilitation Institute
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Cameron: In our study with 399 stroke survivor, caregiver dyads, caregivers reported more psychological wellbeing when they provided more assistance to stroke survivors who had fewer symptoms of depression, better cognitive functioning, and who had more severe strokes. In addition, caregivers who maintained participation in valued activities, had more mastery, gained personally providing care, were in better physical health, and were older reported more psychological wellbeing.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with
Dr. Karolina Sjöberg Jabbar, MD,
Medicine Policlinic II, Bla Straket 5, Sahlgrenska University Hospital
Gothenburg, Sweden
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Answer: The main finding of this study is that the presence of mucin proteins in pancreatic cyst fluid, as evaluated by mass spectrometry, can predict with high accuracy (97%) which pancreatic cysts contain premalignant and malignant tumours. This is important, given that pancreatic cystic lesions are an increasingly common incidental finding on imaging. While most of them pose no threat to the patient, a minor proportion has malignant potential, and may be considered precursors to pancreatic cancer.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Pamela Ling, MD MPH
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine
Director, Tobacco Control Policy Fellowship
Center for Tobacco Research and Education
University of California San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143-1390
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Ling: We followed a sample of smokers from a nationally representative panel for one year. We found that there was no difference in the rate of quitting between smokers who used an e-cigarette and those who did not. Put another way, smokers who had used e-cigarettes at the beginning of the study were equally likely to have quit smoking one year later as those who did not use e-cigarettes. There was no relationship between e-cigarette use and quitting even after taking into account measures of tobacco dependence (number of cigarettes smoked per day, how early in the day a smoker has his first cigarette) and intention to quit smoking.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Craig A. Anderson, Distinguished Professor
Director, Center for the Study of Violence
Department of Psychology
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-3180
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Anderson: There are three main findings from this long-term study of violent video game effects.
1. Over time, repeated play and practice of violent video games led to an relative increase in aggressive thought patterns and in physical aggression.
2. As predicted by social-cognitive theoretical models, the violent video game effect on physical aggression was directly linked to the increase in aggressive thought patterns. That is, one key reason why repeated exposure to violent video games increases aggression is because such exposure changes the way children and adolescents think about people and events that occur in their lives. In a sense, their personality changes, so that they perceive more hostility around them and come to view physically aggressive behavior as a proper solution to even minor conflicts and provocations.
3. These effects of repeated exposure to violent video games were quite general across types of people. Boys and girls, younger children and older adolescents, high aggressive and low aggressive children, all showed pretty much the same effects. In other words, no subgroup was immune to the harmful effects of violent video games.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Elizabeth C. Wick, MD
Assistant Professor,Department of Surgery
The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Wick: The main finding is the high variability in physician practice for prescribing steroids and the lack of clear guidance as to best practice in the literature.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with
Melanie Goldfarb MD
Assistant Professor of Surgery, Endocrine Surgery
University of Southern California
Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Goldfarb: Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) who develop thyroid cancer as a secondary cancer are six times more likely to die than AYAs with primary thyroid cancer, though survival with treatment is excellent for both primary and secondary cancers at greater than 95 percent. Additionally, Hispanics, Males, and those of lower socioeconomic status have worse overall survival.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Christian Hampp PhD
Senior Staff Fellow/Epidemiologist at FDA
Office of Pharmacovigilance and Epidemiology, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Hampp: Our study described U.S. market trends for antidiabetic drugs, focusing on newly approved drugs, concomitant use of antidiabetic drugs, and effects of safety concerns and restrictions on thiazolidinedione use.
We found that since 2003, the number of adult antidiabetic drug users increased by approximately 43% to 18.8 million in 2012. During 2012, 154.5 million prescriptions for antidiabetic drugs were filled in outpatient retail pharmacies. Since 2003, metformin use increased by 97% to 60.4 million prescriptions dispensed in 2012. Among antidiabetic drugs newly approved for marketing between 2003 and 2012, the dipeptidyl-peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitor sitagliptin had the largest share with 10.5 million prescriptions in 2012.
Possibly triggered by safety concerns, the use of pioglitazone declined in 2012 to approximately 52% of its peak in 2008, when 14.2 million prescriptions were dispensed in outpatient retail pharmacies and the use of rosiglitazone use decreased to fewer than 13,000 prescriptions dispensed in retail or mail-order pharmacies in 2012.
Roxanne Pelletier, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Division of Clinical Epidemiology
McGill University Health Centre (MUHC)
687 Pine Avenue West, V Building, Room V2.17
Montreal, Qc
MedicalResearch.com: What made you want to study this disparity between men and women and heart attacks?
Dr. Pelletier: Despite enhanced medical treatment and decrease in the incidence of heart diseases, important sex disparities persist in the risk of mortality following a cardiac event: the risk of mortality is higher in women compared to men, and this sex difference is even more important in younger adults. Therefore, we aimed to investigate potential mechanisms underlying this sex difference in mortality.
MedicalResearch.com Interview Invitation with:
Dr. Thomas Imperiale MD
Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine
Research Scientist, Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research
Research Scientist, Center for Health Services Research, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.
Core Investigator, VA HSR&D Center for Health Information and Communication
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Imperiale: The main findings are the performance characteristics of the multi-target test (sensitivity of 92.3%, specificity of 86.6%) and its performance as compared with the commercial FIT: more sensitive for colorectal cancer and advanced precancerous polyps, but less specific.
MedicalResearch.com Interview Invitation
Dr. Christian Fynbo Christiansen
Clinical Associate Professor
Department of Clinical Epidemiology
Aarhus University Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Christiansen: We included 24,179 critically ill nonsurgical patients receiving mechanical ventilation in intensive care units in Denmark, and matched comparison groups of hospitalized patients and the general population. We assessed psychiatric diagnoses and medication prescriptions before and after critical illness.
We found an increased prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses in the 5 year period before critical illness, compared to both other hospitalized patients and the general population.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Shamez Ladhani, MRCPCH PhD
Health Protection Services, Immunisation, Hepatitis, and Blood Safety Department, Public Health England, London
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Ladhani: Pregnancy was associated with an increased of serious infection by a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae which is usually associated with respiratory tract infections. Nearly all the H. influenzae were unencapsulated; that is, they did not have an outer sugar capsule which is often required to make the bacterium more virulent. The encapsulated H. influenzae type b (Hib), for example, was the most common cause of bacterial meningitis in your children prior to routine immunisation. We also found that infection with unencapsulated H. influenzae was associated with poor pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages, stillbirth and premature birth.
Medical Research.com Interview with:
Marc Righini, MD
Division of Angiology and Hemostasis
Geneva University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of this study?
Dr. Righini: The study shows that when compared with a fixed D-Dimer cutoff of 500 ng/ml, the combination of pretest clinical probability assessment with age-adjusted D-dimer cut-off was associated with a larger number of patients in whom Pulmonary Embolism could be excluded, with a low likelihood of recurrent VTE. The benefit was the most important in patients 75 years or older, in whom using the age-adjusted cutoff instead of the 500 ng/ml cutoff increased five-fold the proportion of patients in whom PE could be excluded on the basis of D-dimer measurement.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Yanzhuang Wang, PhD
Associate professor
Dept. of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Dept. of Neurology University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1048
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Wang: We learned how to repair a cellular structure called the Golgi apparatus that is broken in Alzheimer’s disease. This helps us understand how to reduce the formation of the toxic plaques that kill cells in the brain of Alzheimer's patients. The formation of amyloid plaques is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease; but exactly how much the plaques contribute to the disease is still not known. Our study found that the broken Golgi in the disease may be a major source of the toxicity of amyloid plaques. We showed in this study that repairing the Golgi can reduce the formation of the toxic plaques and thus may delay the disease development.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Prof. Lu Qi,
Assistant Professor, Department of Nutrition
Harvard School of Public Health and Channing Division of Network Medicine
Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Lu Qi: In this study, we for the first time provide reproducible evidence from three large cohort studies to show that the association between regular consumption of fried foods and higher BMI was particularly pronounced among people with a greater genetic predisposition to obesity. On the other hand, the adverse genetic effects on BMI were also amplified by consuming more fried foods, the effects among those who ate fried foods more than four times a week was about twice as large compared with those who ate them less than once a week.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Michelle M. Mielke, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Health Sciences Research, Division of Epidemiology
Department of Neurology
Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN 55905
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Mielke: Using a population-based sample of cognitively normal individuals, aged 70-89 at baseline, we found that a medical-record confirmed diagnosis of COPD was associated with an increased risk of mild cognitive impairment, specifically non-amnestic mild cognitive impairment. The risk of mild cognitive impairment increased with a longer duration of COPD such that individuals who had COPD for more than 5 years had a 2.5-fold increased risk of developing non-amnestic mild cognitive impairment.
MedicalResearch.com Interview Invitation with:
Dr. Eliana M. Perrin, MD, MPH
Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, and Director, Office of Research Development
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
Associate Professor
Department of Pediatrics, Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Medicine
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7225
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Perrin: The study included a large, diverse sample of 863 low-income parents of two-month-olds participating in Greenlight, an obesity prevention trial taking place at four medical centers: UNC, New York University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Miami. Among all of the parents, behaviors that are thought to be related to later obesity were highly prevalent. Exclusive formula feeding was more than twice as common (45 percent) as exclusive breastfeeding (19 percent). Twelve percent had already introduced solid food, 43 percent put infants to bed with bottles, 23 percent propped bottles instead of holding the bottle by hand (which can result in overfeeding), 20 percent always fed when the infant cried, and 38 percent always tried to get their children to finish their milk. In addition, 90 percent of the infants were exposed to television and 50 percent actively watched TV (meaning parents put their children in front of the television in order to watch). There were differences in these behaviors by race and ethnicity, and study results show that culturally-tailored counseling should be offered to parents of different backgrounds who may feed and play with their children differently.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Erica P. Gunderson, PhD, MS, MPH
Senior Research Scientist, Cardiovascular and Metabolic Section
Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Northern California
Oakland, CA 94612-2304
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Gunderson: The study found that:
- Gestational diabetes is a pregnancy complication that reveals a woman’s greater risk of future heart disease.
- Women who experience gestational diabetes face an increased risk of subclinical atherosclerosis (early heart disease) even if they do not develop type 2 diabetes or the metabolic syndrome years after pregnancy.
- Study participants with a history of gestational diabetes who did not develop diabetes or metabolic syndrome showed a greater carotid artery wall thickness (marker of early atherosclerosis) compared to those who never experienced gestational diabetes. The vessel narrowing also could not be attributed to obesity or other risk factors for heart disease that were measured before pregnancy.
- Weight gain and blood pressure elevations in women with gestational diabetes were responsible for these differences in the artery wall thickness.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Rajiv Chowdhury MD, PhD
Cardiovascular Epidemiologist
Department of Public Health and Primary Care
University of Cambridge
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Chowdhury: Total saturated fatty acid, whether measured as a dietary intake variable or in the bloodstream as a biomarker, was not associated with coronary disease risk in combining all available prospective observational studies. Similarly, there were non-significant overall associations in the prospective studies that involved assessments of total monounsaturated fatty acids, long-chain omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids.
However, we found diversity in the observational associations between specific circulating long-chain omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids with coronary risk, with some evidence that circulating levels of eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids (ie, the two main types of long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids), and arachidonic acid are each associated with lower coronary risk. Similarly, within saturated fatty acids, there were positive, however, non-significant associations observed for circulating blood composition of palmitic and stearic acids (found largely in palm oil and animal fats, respectively), whereas circulating margaric acid (a milk fat) had a significant inverse association.
Additionally, when we investigated the randomised controlled trials that reported on the effects of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids on reducing coronary outcomes, there was no significant overall association observed.
MedicalResearch.com Interview Invitation with:
Dr. Brian C. Callaghan MD
Department of Neurology
University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Callaghan: The main findings are that we order headache neuroimaging (MRIs and CTs) frequently, this accounts for approximately $1 billion dollars annually, and the number of tests ordered is only increasing with time.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Tahir Hamid MRCP (UK), FESC
Department of Cardiology, Royal Albert Edward Infirmary
NHS Trust, Wigan, UK
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Hamid: Traditionally patients undergoing diagnostic and interventional coronary artery procedures are kept Nil-by-mouth, but until yet there exists neither evidence nor clear guidance about the benefits of this practice in such patients. In our study performed at two National Health Services (NHS) institutes, we demonstrated in our 1916 patients, that such procedures could be undertaken without the need for being 4-6 hours fasting. None of our patients had major complications leading to pulmonary aspiration or emergency cardiac surgery.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Chandra Y. Osborn, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Medicine & Biomedical Informatics
Division of General Internal Medicine & Public Health
Center for Health Services Research
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Nashville, TN 37232-8300
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of your study?
Dr. Osborn: We found that knowing how to take your diabetes medications (e.g., what to do if a dose is missed), believing medications are good for you, and having the appropriate skills to take them regardless of the situation (e.g., when life is busy, when in public) accounts for 41% of why people successfully take their diabetes medications, which, in turn, explains 9% of their glycemic control.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Tobias Teichert
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Teichert:
"Our study provided three main findings:
First, we measured how long it takes subjects to allocate attention to a relevant target and how effectively they can block out the distractors. We found that after 120 msec selective attention is fully engaged and completely blocks out the distractor. Based on this finding, we predicted that subjects should be able to improve decision accuracy by delaying decision onset, and that this should be more effective than simply prolonging the whole decision process.
Most importantly, we found that subjects indeed use this more effective way of improving decision onset: On average, subjects delayed decision onset by about 50 msec when we asked them be as accurate as possible. The good news is that people seem to use this more optimal mechanism automatically, without being told to do so and without being aware of what they do. The bad news is that we don’t seem to be using this skill quite as effectively as we could. In our case, subjects could have improved accuracy even further by delaying decision onset by an additional 50 ms. However, taken together, our findings show that decision onset is to some degree under cognitive control, and that we might be able to devise training strategies to harness its full potential”
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Lynda D. Lisabeth, PhD
Interim Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Epidemiology
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Lisabeth: The main findings were that Mexican Americans scored worse than non-Hispanic whites on all outcomes measured at 90 days following stroke, including neurologic, functional and cognitive outcomes, after adjustment for confounding factors. Further, we found that one-third of Mexican American stroke survivors have post-stroke dementia. Mexican Americans experienced more aphasia than non-Hispanic whites. Levels of functional impairment were substantial, with Mexican Americans on average experiencing moderate functional disability. Mexican Americans reported significantly greater difficulty than non-Hispanic whites with all activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) that were studied.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Prof Samy Hadjadj:
Université de Poitiers, UFR Médecine Pharmacie, Centre d’Investigation clinique,
CHU de Poitiers, Centre d’Investigation clinique, Poitiers, France
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Prof: Hadjadj: The study helps to establish sTNFR1 as a valid biomarker not only for renal outcomes in type 2 diabetes but also for all cause death. Interestingly the addition of sTNFR1 concentration to the UKPDS model outcome equation showed to add some clinical prognostic value to this model for all-cause death.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Primo N. Lara, Jr, MD,
Professor of Medicine, University of California Davis School of Medicine
Associate Director for Translational Research
UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center
Sacramento, CA 95817
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study:
Dr. Lara: “We found that blood markers of bone turnover can be used to predict outcomes in men with advanced prostate cancer with spread to bone. We also found that a small proportion of men could be predicted to benefit from an investigational drug based on these same markers.”