Study shows skipping school as
deadly as smoking!
Estimating the number of deaths that can be linked to
differences in education, researchers have determined that lacking education
may be as deadly as being a current rather than a former smoker. ‘In
public health policy, we often focus on changing health behaviours such as
diet, smoking, and drinking,’ said Virginia Chang, associate
professor of population health at New York Univerity School of Medicine.
The study published in the journal PLOS ONE
Education suggests that education — which is a more fundamental,
upstream driver of health behaviours and disparities — should also be a key
element. The team looked at data on more than a million people from 1986
to 2006 to estimate the number of deaths that could be attributed to low levels
of education in the US.
They studied people born in 1925, 1935, and 1945 to
understand how education levels affected mortality over time and noted the
causes of death, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. The researchers estimated the number of deaths in
the 2010 US population for two scenarios with relevance for policy: having less
than a high school degree, and having some college but not a bachelor’s degree.
They found that 145,243 deaths could be saved in the 2010
population if adults who had not completed high school went on to earn a high
school degree, which is comparable to the estimated number of deaths that could
be averted if all current smokers had the mortality rates of former
smokers. In addition, 110,068 deaths could be saved if adults who had some
college went on to complete their bachelor’s degree.
‘Our results suggest that policies and interventions that
improve educational attainment could substantially improve survival in the US
population,’ Patrick Krueger from the University of Colorado Boulder said.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
11.07.2015
Doctors can now ‘see’ your breath
to zoom in on diseases
Physicians and healthcare workers can now literally see
what your lungs are saying, thanks to Indian scientists who have designed a new
technology that allows lung disorders to be easily spotted through images of
digitally processed lung sounds.
The non-invasive process, almost like an enhanced and
digital version of a stethoscope, allows screening and detection of lung
disorders with precision in a short time. Developed by researchers of the
Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur in collaboration with the Institute of
Pulmocare and Research, Kolkata (IPCR), the embedded system maps closeness to a
disease.
The researchers envisage that in remote settings, the
images can be relayed via mobile phones to a healthcare facility for analysis
of the visual data. ‘The target was to identify certain patterns in the
lung sound which carry distinguishing signatures of normality and abnormality
and present in a visual form for easy identification,’ said pulmonologist P.S.
Bhattacharyya of IPCR here on Thursday.
Its USP lies in the fact that it can collect breathing
sounds and successfully filter out heart rhythms from lung sounds to zoom in on
the disease. The research spanning five years was the focus of an
editorial in the medical journal ‘Respirology’ titled ‘Seeing What
We Hear: An Eye To Help the Ear’ in May.
Signal processing expert Goutam Saha, who helped create
the mapping algorithm to convert digitally-processed lung sounds into pictures
that highlight abnormalities, said the technology is simple enough even for a
layman to use. ‘At the moment, we have completed trials for only one group
of diseases, called interstitial lung diseases. They lead to lung damage and
ultimately loss of the elasticity of the lungs.
‘Once introduced in the market on a large scale, it will
be cost-effective,’ said Saha, a professor in the electronics and electrical
communication engineering department of IIT-Kharagpur. The technology is
likely to be brought into the market in the next three to four years with
further enhancements and the capacity to detect a wide range of diseases, said
IIT-Kharagpur director P.P. Chakrabarti.
‘The core technology has been patented. It has great
potential to be used in medical education and quantification of the extent of
spread of a disease. With cloud computing, the spectrum of diseases that the
technology detects can be broadened.’ Chakrabarti said.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
11.07.2015
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