Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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The 10th anniversary of the mapping of the human genome

By Robert Klitzman
“It’s like Star Wars,” a woman with the Huntington Disease mutation recently told me. This lethal gene had killed her relatives in every generation for hundreds of years, but she could now test her embryos to ensure that her children did not get it. “I don’t understand it all,” she told me, “but the peace of mind is huge.”

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Living alone and ‘bouncing back’ after bereavement

By Juliet Stone
Is living alone in later life bad for your health? As we get older, the likelihood that we will be living on our own increases. We live in an ageing population and data from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2010, nearly half of people aged 75 and over were living on their own. So the experiences and concerns of older people living alone are increasingly relevant to policy-makers and to society at large.

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Can a low-sodium diet endanger patients with heart problems?

A Q&A with Dr. Jean Sealey. Patients suffering from cardiovascular disease are treated with drugs known as a renin-angiotensin system (RAS) blockers, which have been proven to reduce mortality in large clinical trials of patients with hypertension, heart disease, or diabetes. Now, a new study published this week in the American Journal of Hypertension has shown that some such patients are concurrently salt depleted and may not benefit from the RAS blocking drugs; in fact, RAS blockers may endanger their health.

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Television viewing time and mortality

By Jose Recio-Rodriguez
Americans spend about five hours daily in front of a television set according to official statistics. Prolonged television viewing is one of the most common behaviors associated with a sedentary lifestyle and public health authorities consider physical inactivity a major problem. Clinical trials have revealed a dose-response relationship between sitting time and mortality, including from cardiovascular disease.

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Alcohol advertising, by any other name…

By Steve Pratt and Emma Croager
Most adults won’t be familiar with the music video You Make Me Feel by Cobra Starship, as it has much greater appeal to young people. There is little doubt however that the overwhelming majority of adults would quickly identify the product placement in the video. The commercial intent of the product placement in this example is self-evident.

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The historical arc of tuberculosis prevention

By Graham Mooney
In Tijuana, Mexico, 43-year-old tuberculosis patient Maria Melero takes her daily medicines at home while her health worker watches on Skype. Thirteen thousand kilometers away in New Delhi, India, Vishnu Maya visits a neighborhood health center to take her TB meds. A counselor uses a laptop to record Maya’s fingerprint electronically. An SMS is then sent to a centralized control center to confirm that Maya has received today’s dose.

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World TB Day

By Helen Bynum
March 2013 is a busy month. For the ladies, various countries celebrate Mother’s Days and globally International Women’s Day fell on the eighth. At the end of the month Passover and Easter are special periods of celebration for two of the world’s leading religions. Easter is a major opportunity for a chocolate fest whatever you believe.

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What is ‘the brain supremacy’?

Q: What is the brain supremacy? A: I use the phrase ‘the brain supremacy’ to describe the increasing relevance of neuroscience. It foresees an era – whose birth is already well underway – when the balance of power within the sciences will shift from the natural to the life sciences, from physics and chemistry to the fast-moving sciences of the mind and brain.

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Hypnosis for chronic pain management

By Mark P. Jensen
How can hypnosis affect pain management? The results from three lines of research have combined to create a renewed interest in the application of hypnosis for chronic pain management. First, imaging studies demonstrate that the effects of hypnotic suggestions on brain activity are real and can target specific aspects of pain. Hypnosis for decreases in the intensity of pain result not only in significant decreases in pain intensity, but also decreases in activity in the brain areas that underlie the experience of pain intensity.

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Medical law and ethics: portrait of a partnership

In many textbook titles and university courses, ‘medical law’ and ‘ethics’ are spoken of in the same breath, as one might speak of Darby and Joan. It’s often assumed that there’s a solid, uncomplicated marriage, in which each partner knows his or her function; or at least an efficiently commercial partnership governed by a clearly drafted document. But, like most real relationships, it’s not so simple.

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Six facts about physiology

The Mayo Clinic Scientific Press suite of publications is now available on Oxford Medicine Online. To highlight some of the great resources, we’ve pulled together some interesting facts about physiology from James R. Munis’s Just Enough Physiology.

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Medical Law: A Very, Very, Very, Very Short Introduction

By Charles Foster
By the standards of most books, the Very Short Introduction to Medical law is indeed very short: 35,000 or so words. As every writer of a VSI knows, it is hard to compress your subject into such a tiny box. But I wonder if I could have been much, much shorter. 88 words, in fact.

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Medical apocalypse

By Richard Gunderman, MD PhD
When many people hear the word apocalypse, they picture four remorseless horsemen bringing death and destruction during the world’s final days. In fact, the Greeks who introduced the word over 2,000 years ago had no intention of invoking the end times. Instead the word apocalypse, which is composed of the roots for “away” and “cover,” means to pull the cover away, to reveal, and to see hidden things.

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Two parents after divorce

By Simone Frizell Reiter
According to Statistics Norway, around 10,000 children under the age of 18 experience divorce every year. These numbers do not take into account non-married couples that split up. Therefore, in reality far more children experience parental separation.

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Psychological adaptive mechanism assessment and cancer survival

By Thomas P. Beresford, M.D.
Psychological treatment studies that did not measure the maturity of psychological adaptive mechanisms in cancer patients have reported conflicting cancer survival results. Widely publicized studies noted increased survival rates among cancer patients who underwent psychotherapeutic treatment. However, more recent multicenter study could not replicate improved survival after behavioral treatment, and other studies have reported similarly conflicting results.

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World Cancer Day 2013: The Best of British

There is a tendency to point out deficiencies when it comes to cancer campaigns and treatment, but I think it is time to commend the British campaigns and innovations in treatment. They have proven to be some of the best in the world and have had a major impact in the fight against cancer.

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