Author Interviews, Social Issues / 04.01.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Grandparents” by Tim Wilson is licensed under CC BY 2.0Allison Flamion, Doctorante Unité de Psychologie de la Sénescence Département Psychologies et cliniques des systèmes humains Université de Liège LIEGE Belgique MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Ageism—stereotypes that lead to prejudice and discrimination against older people— occurs frequently in young adults and can even be seen in children as young as 3. Ageism has deleterious consequences on older people in our aging Western societies. However, the factors influencing this phenomenon in the young are not well known. To answer this question, we have asked 1151 Belgian children and adolescents to provide their views of the elderly, using especially designed questionnaires and open questions. We found four main influences on their views of the elderly: gender and age of the child, quality of contact with grandparents, and grandparents’ health. Girls had slightly more positive views than boys. Ageist stereotypes fluctuated with age, with 7- to 9-year-olds expressing the most prejudice and 10- to 12-year-olds expressing the least. This finding mirrors other forms of discrimination (e.g., those related to ethnicity or gender) and is in line with cognitive-developmental theories. For example, acquiring perspective-taking skills around age 10 reduces previous stereotypes. With regard to ageism, prejudice seemed to reappear when the participants in this study reached their teen years: 13- to 16-year-olds had higher levels of ageism compared with younger children. Moreover, youths who described their contact with grandparents as good or very good had more favorable feelings toward the elderly than those who described the contact less positively. Finally, children and adolescents with grandparents in poor health were more likely to hold ageist views than youths with grandparents in better health. (more…)
Author Interviews, Social Issues / 22.12.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Lidl Shopping Trolley” by Jeff Djevdet is licensed under CC BY 2.0Alexander P. Henkel, PhD Business Intelligence and Smart Services (BISS) Institute / Open University, The Netherlands MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: As consumers, we are frequently bombarded with a myriad of marketing tactics. One tactic regularly employed by thrift-oriented brands is to highlight low prices, discounts, and sales promotions. When consumers encounter these low-price signals, they may adopt a price conscious mentality, that is, a singular focus on getting the cheapest deal. A price conscious mentality is likely beneficial for consumers, as it helps them save money. However, it is also possible that it has negative implications, particularly for how consumers perceive and interact with other human beings in the marketplace, such as customer service employees. We investigated this question in a collaboration project between the Business Intelligence and Smart Services (BISS) Institute (founded by the Open University and Maastricht University, both Netherlands) and the University of British Columbia in Canada. (more…)
Author Interviews, Social Issues / 22.12.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Marriage” by sowrirajan s is licensed under CC BY 2.0Dr Akanksha Marphatia and co-authors, Dr Alice Reid and Dr Gabriel Amable Cambridge, UK MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Although the total prevalence of girls marrying below the UN prescribed minimum age of 18 years has decreased over time, this is mostly due to a decrease in child marriages, <15 years. Marriages during adolescence, between 16-17 years, have increased. Women marring just after 18 years may also experience some of the consequences of those marrying under-age. These patterns are important to recognise because the predictors and consequences of marriage in these age groups are likely to differ. The aim of our review was to summarise research evidence on why women’s marriage age, independent of early child-bearing, is a major public health issue. In the four South Asian countries of our review, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, marriage precedes reproduction. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Social Issues / 22.12.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “working class” by arileu is licensed under CC BY 2.0Igor Grossmann, Ph.D. Director, Wisdom and Culture Laboratory Associate Professor of Psychology University of Waterloo, Canada Associate Editor, Emotion MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Our Wisdom & Culture laboratory studies the concepts of wisdom and cultural factors. For wisdom, we specifically focus on pragmatic reasoning that can help people to better understand and navigate uncertain contexts – strategies that philosophers for millennia discussed as “epistemic virtues.” In our prior work, my colleagues and I have observed that wisdom tends to be lower in situations when self-interests are salient, and higher when one adopted an socially-sensitive interdependent mindset. In other work by myself and several other labs, consistent finding emerged showing that lower social class tends to be more socially interdependent, whereas middle class (both in the US, Russia, and even China) tends to be more self-focused. This led to the present research, which combines prior insights to examine how wise reasoning varies across social classes. Because lower class situation involves more uncertainty and more resource-scare life circumstances, we questioned whether these situations would also evoke more wise reasoning from people who are in them. Higher class situations are assumed to provide conditions that benefit people in every way. But in so doing, they may also encourage entitlement, self-focus and thereby intellectual humility and open-mindedness – key features of a wise thought. As such, our studies show that it turns out that middle class conditions are not beneficial in at least one way – they may discourage reasoning wisely. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care, Social Issues / 06.12.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Homeless” by Sonny Abesamis is licensed under CC BY 2.0Sarah Hunter, PhD Senior Behavioral Scientist, RAND Corporation Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School Santa Monica, CA 90401-3028 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: In 2014, RAND was contracted by Brilliant Corners in collaboration with the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and Los Angeles County Department of Health Services to conduct an evaluation of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services’ Housing for Health (HFH) program.  The HFH program began in 2012 with the goal of providing permanent supportive housing for frequent utilizers of county health services who were experiencing homelessness.  (more…)
Aging, Author Interviews, Heart Disease, Lancet, Social Issues / 26.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Prof Kazem Rahimi FRCP The George Institute for Global Health Oxford Martin School University of Oxford, Oxford MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: We decided to investigate this topic because disease incidence data is very important for public health bodies; for example, for the allocation of healthcare resources or for the design and assessment of disease prevention measures. When we reviewed the literature, we found that estimates of heart failure incidence, temporal trends, and association by patient features were scarce. Studies often referred to restricted populations (such as relatively small cohorts that may or may not be representative of the general population), or limited data sources (for example, only including patients hospitalized for their heart failure and not considering those diagnosed by clinicians outside of hospitals). Few studies reported comparable, age-standardized rates, with the result that the rates reported varied considerably across the literature. (more…)
Author Interviews, Gender Differences, Social Issues / 12.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Francesco Acciai PhD Postdoctoral Research Associate Food Policy and Environmental Research Group School of Nutrition and Health Promotion Arizona State University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: In 2015 life expectancy at birth (e0) in the United States was lower than it was in 2014. In the previous 30 years, a reduction in life expectancy at the national level had occurred only one time, in 1993, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The decrease in life expectancy observed in 2015 is particularly worrisome because it was not generated by an anomalous spike in a specific cause of death (like HIV/AIDS in 1993). Instead, age-adjusted death rates increased for 8 of the 10 leading causes of death—heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney disease, and suicide, according to the CDC. (more…)
Abuse and Neglect, Author Interviews, Cancer Research, ENT, JAMA, Smoking, Social Issues / 10.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Nosayaba Osazuwa-Peters, BDS, MPH, CHES Instructor, Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Saint Louis University School of Medicine Member, Saint Louis University Cancer Center St Louis, Missouri  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Several studies have shown that there is an adverse effect of smoking on head and neck cancer survival; however, there are studies that show no effect between smoking and head and neck cancer. We wanted to investigate this problem using a single institution’s cancer dataset. Additionally, we wanted to understand the role of marital status in the smoking behavior of head and neck cancer patients, and to understand if smoking played any role in head and neck cancer survival. Our study confirmed that head and neck cancer patients who were smokers at the time of diagnosis had lower survival rates than nonsmokers. We also found that married head and neck cancer patients were less likely to be smokers and more likely to survive longer than those unmarried. (more…)
Author Interviews, Pediatrics, Social Issues, Weight Research / 09.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Jianghong Li, Senior Research Fellow WZB Berlin Social Science Center Berlin, Germany Telethon KIDS Institute, The University of Western Australia West Perth, Western Australia MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Over the last three to four decades, the prevalence of child overweight/obesity and maternal employment has both increased worldwide. This co-occurrence has drawn much attention to the connection between these two trends. Previous studies, predominantly based on US samples and cross-sectional data, has linked longer working hours to children’s higher body mass index (BMI), suggesting that any maternal employment was a risk for child health. (more…)
Author Interviews, Orthopedics, Rheumatology, Social Issues / 07.11.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Susan M. Goodman, MD Director of the Integrative Rheumatology and Orthopedics Center of Excellence Hospital for Special Surgery  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: We have previously reported that African Americans who have poorer health outcomes, may be disproportionately impacted by community factors. For African Americans undergoing knee replacement, no difference in pain and function was seen compared to whites in communities with little poverty, while in poor communities, African Americans had poorer outcomes. We wondered if this was generally true or if this only applied to knee replacements. We found similar results; African Americans in richer neighborhoods have comparable outcomes to whites, but as poverty increases- in this study measured as percent with Medicaid coverage- outcomes worsen in a step wise fashion. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Pediatrics, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 31.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Angeline Lillard PhD Professor of Psychology University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Montessori education was developed in the first half of the last century, but has been subject to little formal research. Prior research on its outcomes was problematic in using poor control groups, very small samples, demographically limited samples, a single school or classroom, or poor quality Montessori, or data from just a single time point and limited measurements. This study addressed all these issues: it collected data 4 times over 3 years from 141 children, experimental children were in 11 classrooms at 2 high quality Montessori schools at which the control children were waitlisted and admission was done by a randomized lottery, family income ranged from $0-200K, groups were demographically equivalent at the start of the study, and many measures were taken. (more…)
Aging, Author Interviews, BMJ, Cost of Health Care, Exercise - Fitness, Social Issues / 27.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Scarlett McNally Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeo Eastbourne D.G.H. MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: There are vast differences between older people in their abilities and their number of medical conditions. Many people confuse ageing with loss of fitness. Ageing has specific effects (reduction in hearing and skin elasticity for example) but the loss of fitness is not inevitable. Genetics contributes only 20% to diseases. There is abundant evidence that adults who take up physical activity improve their fitness up to the level of someone a decade younger, with improvements in ‘up and go’ times. Physical activity can reduce the severity of most conditions, such as heart disease or the risk of onset or recurrence of many cancers. Inactivity is one of the top four risk factors for most long-term conditions. There is a dose-effect curve. Dementia, disability and frailty can be prevented, reduced or delayed. The need for social care is based on an individual’s abilities; for example, being unable to get to the toilet in time may increase the need for care from twice daily care givers to needing residential care or live-in care, which increases costs five-fold. Hospitals contribute to people reducing their mobility, with the ‘deconditioning syndrome’ of bed rest, with 60% of in-patients reducing their mobility. The total cost of social care in the UK is up to £100 billion, so even modest changes would reduce the cost of social care by several billion pounds a year. (more…)
Author Interviews, OBGYNE, Social Issues / 20.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jennifer Buher Kane PhD Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology University of California, Irvine 92697-510  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: It’s not uncommon for new parents to relocate in search of neighborhoods with better schools, safer streets and healthier, more kid-friendly activities. But our new study found that living in such neighborhoods before a baby is born protects against the risks of poor birth outcomes. Published online this month in SSM – Population Health, the research shows that having highly educated, wealthy neighbors reduces an expectant mother’s risk of delivering a low-weight or preterm baby – health markers that can be associated with neurodevelopmental problems, language disorders, learning disabilities and poor health later in life. Our study is the first to look at how both the level of affluence and disadvantage — two sociologically distinct attributes of neighborhoods — affect newborn health; past studies have only explored the impact of neighborhood disadvantage. Neighborhood disadvantage signals factors such as poverty, unemployment, or underemployment. On the other hand, neighborhood affluence is thought to signal the presence of locally-based community organizations that can meet the needs of all residents – health-related and otherwise – regardless of one’s own socioeconomic resources. (more…)
Accidents & Violence, Author Interviews, Gender Differences, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 11.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Thekla Morgenroth Preferred pronouns: They/them/their Research Fellow in Social and Organisational Psychology Psychology University of Exeter Washington Singer Laboratories, Exeter UK  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Risk-taking is often seen as an important trait that leads to economic success - for example when it comes to investing money - and career success. For example, we often hear that leaders need to be willing to take risks. Risk-taking is also strongly associated with masculinity, which leads to the idea that maybe gender differences in economic and career success can be explained by the fact that women are just too risk averse. When you look at the risk-taking literature, it appears that there is support for this idea with many studies showing that men do indeed take more risks than men. Our research questions these ideas. We show that current measures of risk-taking are biased. They focus only on stereotypical "masculine" risk taking behaviors such as betting your money on the outcome of a sporting event or going whitewater rafting, and ignore the many risks that women take, such as going horseback riding or donating a kidney to a family member. When this bias is addressed, gender differences in risk-taking disappear or even reverse. (more…)
Author Interviews, Gender Differences, Social Issues / 09.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Rebecca Horne, MSc, PHEc MSc graduate in Family Sciences from the University of Alberta Professional human ecologist PhD student in Psychology at the University of Toronto Research area in intimate relationships MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Although several studies have argued that time, money, and gender are important factors that shape the division of household labour, we know little about how these factors impact housework at different stages of the life course. Specifically, are time, money, and gender-related variables equally important for explaining housework involvement at different life stages? In our study, we compared men’s and women’s housework contributions at different life stages and explored how work hours, income (relative to one’s partner), marital status, raising children, and gender impacted housework at these distinct stages. We drew on data from the Edmonton Transitions Study, which has tracked the school-to-work and adolescence-to-adulthood transitions of nearly 1,000 Canadians for over three decades. We analyzed survey data from participants who had romantic partners during three developmental periods: the transition to adulthood (age 25; assessed in 1992), young adulthood (age 32; assessed in 1999), and midlife (age 43; assessed in 2010). We found that regardless of age or life stage, women performed more housework than men. In addition, lower housework involvement was most reliably predicted by earning a greater share of income and being male at age 25; working longer hours and raising children (for men only) at age 32; and earning a greater share of income, working longer hours, and being male at age 43. Importantly, gender was the strongest predictor of housework responsibility earlier and later in life. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Gender Differences, Mental Health Research, Sexual Health, Social Issues / 03.10.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Oliver Ferlatte PhD Men's Health Research Program University of British Columbia Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Suicide, like many other health inequities, is unevenly distributed among the population, with marginalized groups being most affected. In Canada, suicide has been found to particularly affect gay and bisexual men, aboriginal people and people living in rural and remote communities. While the populations affected by suicide are not mutually exclusive – for example someone can be a bisexual Aboriginal man living in a remote community – much of the suicide prevention literature tends to treat these groups as such. Moreso, very little attention is given in suicide prevention research to diversity within groups: for example, we know very little about which gay and bisexual men are most at risk of attempting suicide. This situation creates a vacuum of knowledge about suicide among gay and bisexual and deprives us of critical information for the development of effective suicide prevention activities. We therefore investigated in a survey of Canadian gay and bisexual men (Sex Now Survey), which gay and bisexual men are at increased risk of reporting a recent suicide attempt. The large sample of gay and bisexual men with 8493 participants allows for this unique analysis focused on the multiple, intersecting identities of the survey participants. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 08.09.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Gili Freedman, PhD Postdoctoral Researcher Dartmouth College MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Social rejection is a common, everyday interpersonal interaction, and most people have been on both ends: being rejected and doing the rejection. There has been a lot of research on how rejection impacts targets (the people being rejected), but we know less about the point of view of the rejector. In this set of studies, we wanted to understand how frequently rejectors include apologies in rejections and what effect apologies have on targets of rejection. Using both college and community samples, we found that approximately 40% of people spontaneously included an apology when trying to reject in a good way. However, rejections with apologies were associated with more hurt feelings and higher levels of aggression than rejections without apologies. In response to viewing rejections with apologies, participants felt obligated to express forgiveness but did not actually feel forgiveness. Taken together, our results indicate that apologies may not be helpful in softening the blow of a social rejection. (more…)
Annals Internal Medicine, Author Interviews, Cleveland Clinic, Heart Disease, Social Issues / 30.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jarrod Dalton PhD Department of Quantitative Health Sciences Cleveland Clinic , Cleveland MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Accurate risk assessment is critical for identifying patients who are at high risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes. We evaluated the performance of a widely-used risk assessment tool against the socioeconomic position of patients’ neighborhoods of residence. This tool, called the Pooled Cohort Equations Risk Model, or PCERM, was developed in 2013 jointly by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC/AHA). We found that the PCERM model accurately characterized risk among patients from affluent communities, but performed more poorly among patients from disadvantaged communities. In particular, for these patients, major cardiovascular events occurred at rates that were as much as 2-3 times than predicted from the PCERM model. (more…)
Addiction, Annals Internal Medicine, Author Interviews, Social Issues / 23.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Beth Han, MD, PhD, MPH From Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, Maryland National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bethesda, Maryland and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Washington, DC.  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Using the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), this is the first study examining the prevalence of overall prescription opioid use in addition to misuse, use disorders, and motivations for misuse in the U.S. adult population. The 2015 NSDUH collected nationally representative data on prescription opioid use, misuse, use disorder, and motivations for misuse among the U.S. civilian, noninstitutionalized population aged 12 or older. In 2015, NSDUH started to collect data on overall prescription opioid use as well as data on motivations for prescription opioid misuse. This study found that in 2015, 91.8 million (37.8%) U.S. civilian, non-institutionalized adults used prescription opioids, 11.5 million (4.7%) misused them, and 1.9 million (0.8%) had a prescription opioid use disorder. Among adults who used prescription opioids, 12.5% reported misuse and, of those reporting misuse, 16.7% reported a prescription opioid use disorder. The most common reported misuse motivation was to relieve physical pain (63.4%). Misuse and use disorders were most commonly reported in adults who were uninsured, were unemployed, had low income, or had behavioral health problems. Among adults with misuse, 59.9% reported using opioids without a prescription, and 40.8% obtained prescription opioids free from friends or relatives for their most recent misuse. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 15.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Allison Mueller, A.B.D. Ph.D. Program Department of Psychology University of Illinois at Chicago  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: In our study, we explored how people react to public figures who bend the truth. We predicted that people’s own moral conviction for a political issue—their strong and absolute belief that this position is right or wrong, moral or immoral—would cloud their judgments of public figures who lie for that cause. We reasoned that when a strong moral conviction is at stake, the transgressiveness of specific kinds of advocacy for the cause may be trivialized. To test this idea, we first assessed people’s views on a political issue—in this case, whether they supported or opposed federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and the extent to which they viewed the issue as a moral imperative. They were then presented with a political monologue supporting Planned Parenthood that they believed was previously aired over public radio. After reading the monologue, they were randomly assigned to learn that the monologue was deemed true (or false) by several fact-checking organizations. We measured their reactions to hearing this news, including the extent to which they believed the speaker was justified in delivering the monologue and their judgments of the speaker’s moral character. We found that people’s perceptions of the speaker’s transgressive advocacy were uniquely shaped by their own moral conviction for the cause. Although honesty was positively valued by all respondents, transgressive advocacy that served a shared moral (vs. nonmoral) end was more accepted, and advocacy in the service of a nonpreferred end was more condemned, regardless of its truth value.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Occupational Health, Social Issues / 10.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Professor Tarani Chandola Cathie Marsh Institute and Social Statistics www.cmist.manchester.ac.uk University of Manchester Co-director of the National Centre for Research Methods International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society & Health MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The study examined the common perception that “any job is better than no job” to see whether this was true in terms of chronic stress levels. It followed up a group of unemployed adults representative of adults living in the UK, and compared their health and stress levels in terms of those who remained unemployed and those who became re-employed in poor and good quality work. (more…)
AHA Journals, Author Interviews, Heart Disease, Pediatrics, Social Issues / 10.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Lead author, Dr Richard Liu, MCRI Ph.D. student and Senior author - Professor David Burgner PhD The Child Health CheckPoint Investigator Group Murdoch Children’s Research Institute The Royal Children’s Hospital Parkville, Victoria, Australia MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The socioeconomic gradient in cardiovascular disease is well recognised in adults. The more disadvantaged someone is, the higher their risk of heart attack and stroke. The mechanisms by which this occurs are not well understood, but we know the pathological process underlying this, thickening of the arteries, or atherosclerosis, begins very early in life. Our current understanding of the early development of atherosclerosis has previously been limited mainly to autopsy studies. Non-invasive imaging is increasingly being used to examine the early development of atherosclerosis. We wanted to determine if there was an association between socioeconomic disadvantage and the thickness of the carotid artery wall in mid-childhood, which in adults is a proxy for atherosclerosis and indicates higher risk for heart attack and stroke in later life. We analysed both family and neighbourhood socioeconomic position data from 1477 Australian families, which included data on income, education and occupation of parents, as well as the relative socioeconomic status of the immediate neighbourhood. (more…)
Author Interviews, Psychological Science, Social Issues / 09.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Mirkka Danielsbacka PhD, D.Soc.Sci Senior researcher University of Turku MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Relations between family generations are widely studied in disciplines such as family sociology and demography. However, relations between in-laws are often neglected in family studies of contemporary societies. Especially conflicts have been surprisingly little investigated. We were especially interested in how parenthood is associated with relations to in-laws in a contemporary Western society. Using nationally representative survey data from Finland with over 1,200 respondents, we studied conflicts that spouses reported having with their own parents and their in-laws. Overall, Finns more often reported having had any conflict with their own parents than with their in-laws. Compared to childless couples, couples with children were as likely to report conflicts with their own parents. However, couples with children were more likely to report conflicts with their parents-in-law. Our results took into account how frequently family members were in contact with each other and how emotionally close they felt, as well as other sociodemographic factors. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care, JAMA, Social Issues / 07.08.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Arlene S. Ash, PhD Department of Quantitative Health Sciences University of Massachusetts Medical School Worcester  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: State Medicaid programs (and other health care purchasers) often contract with several managed care organizations, each of which agrees to address all health care needs for some of their beneficiaries. Suppose a Medicaid program has $5000 to spend, on average, for each of its 1 million beneficiaries. How much should they pay health plan “A” for the particular 100,000 beneficiaries it enrolls? If some group, such as those who are homeless, is much more expensive to care for than the payment, plans that try to provide good care for many such people will go broke. We describe the model now used by MassHealth to ensure that plans get more money for enrolling patients with greater medical and social needs. In this medical-social model, about 10% of total dollars is allocated by factors other than the medical-morbidity risk score. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cannabis, Social Issues / 31.07.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Carrie Cuttler, Ph.D. Clinical Assistant Professor Washington State University Department of Psychology Pullman, WA, 99164-4820 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: One of the most common reasons cannabis users report using cannabis is to cope with stress. In support of this, previous research has shown that acute administration of THC or cannabis dampens affective responses and subjective stress ratings. This has made strains of cannabis popular for use for stress and other ailments with some online outlets, like high thc having reviews such as the og kush strain review to perpective users. However, our study is the first to compare the stress response of sober cannabis users to non-users. More specifically, we randomly assigned 42 non-cannabis users and 40 cannabis users (who abstained from using cannabis for at least 12 hours prior to the study) to either a stress or no stress condition. Participants in the stress condition were required to perform multiple trials of placing their hand in ice water and counting backwards from 2043 by 17s. Each time they made an error they were given negative feedback and told to start again. Further, they were being video recorded and their image was displayed in front of them. Participants who were assigned to the no stress condition were simply required to perform multiple trials of placing their hand in lukewarm water and counting from 1 to 25. They were not given feedback or recorded. Participants were asked to rate their level of stress and to provide a saliva sample, from which the stress hormone cortisol was measured. The results showed that, as expected, non-users in the stress condition had higher cortisol levels and higher self-reported stress than non-users in the no stress condition. In contrast, cannabis users in the stress condition demonstrated the same levels of cortisol as cannabis users in the no stress condition and their increase in self-reported stress was smaller than that of the non-users. (more…)
Author Interviews, Social Issues, Technology / 07.07.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Leon Sütfeld The Institute of Cognitive Science University of Osnabrück  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Self-driving cars, and especially future fully autonomous cars, pose a number of ethical challenges. One of these challenges is making the "right" decision when it comes to a so-called dilemma situation, in which a collision is unavoidable (or highly probable), but a decision can be made as to which of multiple different collisions to choose. Our study assesses the behavior of human participants in such dilemma situations and evaluates algorithmic models that are trained on this data to make predictions. Our main findings are that in a controlled virtual reality environment, the decisions of humans are fairly consistent and can be well described by simple value-of-life models. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Heart Disease, JAMA, Social Issues / 14.06.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Yasuhiko Kubota, MD, MPH Visiting Scholar Division of Epidemiology and Community Health School of Public Health University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Educational inequality is one of the most important socioeconomic factors contributing to cardiovascular disease. Since education is usually completed by young adulthood, educational inequality may affect risk of cardiovascular disease early in the life course. We thought it would be useful to calculate the lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease according to educational levels in order to increase public awareness of the importance of education. Thus, our aim was to evaluate the association of educational attainment with cardiovascular disease risk by estimating the lifetime risks of cardiovascular disease using a US. biracial cohort. Furthermore, we also assessed how other important socioeconomic factors were related to the association of educational attainment with lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease. (more…)
Author Interviews, Heart Disease, JAMA, Race/Ethnic Diversity, Social Issues / 09.06.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Ayodele Odutayo MD MSc DPhil(pending) Centre For Statistics in Medicine, University of Oxford Resident Physician (PGY1), Post-Doctoral Fellow, Applied Health Research Centre St. Michael’s Hospital, University of Toronto   MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Previously published studies have reported increasing gaps in life expectancy among adults belonging to different socioeconomic strata and suggested that much of this gap was mediated through behavioural and metabolic risk factors. In this study, we found that from 1999-2014, there was an increasing gap in the control of cardiovascular risk factors between high income adults compared to adults with incomes at or below the poverty line. The proportion of adults at high cardiovascular risk (predicted risk of a cardiovascular event ≥20%), the mean systolic blood pressure and the percentage of current smokers decreased for high income adults but did not change for adults with incomes at or below the poverty line. Notably, the income disparity in these cardiovascular risk factors was not wholly explained by access to health insurance or educational attainment. Trends in the percentage of adults with diabetes and the average total cholesterol level did not vary by income. (more…)
Allergies, Asthma, Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Social Issues / 31.05.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS Associate Professor of Pediatrics Harvard Medical School Director, Asthma Clinical Research Center Boston Children's Hospital Asthma, Allergy and Immunology Boston, MA 02115 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Observational studies have limitations in their ability to examine disparities in asthma, as these studies have relied on self-reported measures of medication use, asthma diagnosis, severity, outcomes, and access to care. Using data collected from a randomized controlled trial, we found that subjects with lower income had a significantly higher number of asthma treatment failures and asthma exacerbations, independent of race, BMI, education, perceived stress, baseline lung function, hospitalizations, inhaled corticosteroid adherence, inhaled corticosteroid dose, environmental allergen sensitization, and second-hand smoke exposure. (more…)