Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
While it is believed that about one in 50 Americans harbor a brain aneurysm, most will never know it, and their aneurysm will never cause a problem. But rarely, the arterial wall of an aneurysm can become so thin that it bursts, spilling blood over the brain’s surface. This is the most feared outcome of a brain aneurysm and is what drives the urgency in treating many brain aneurysms, even if found accidentally.
The arrival and dramatic spread of the Zika virus in Brazil and other Latin American and Caribbean countries alarmed public health authorities and the scientific community. This prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare ZIKV a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 1 February 2016. In response to this emergency, research on ZIKV was intensified, and within a few months, large amounts of data and outstanding results have been produced.
Alcohol and drug abuse costs Americans approximately $428 billion annually. Despite this enormous cost—which, we must remember, is just the economic face of a community, family, and individually life-shattering problem—the vast majority of those with an alcohol or substance use problem do not receive treatment, and even fewer are likely to achieve long-term sobriety.
Amy Griffin, associate head coach of women’s soccer at the University of Washington in Seattle, first began to wonder about artificial turf and cancer in 2009. “We had two goalies from the neighborhood, and they had grown up and gone to college,” Griffin said. “And then they both came down with lymphoma. “And we were all sitting there chatting—both of them were bald—and they were like, ‘Why us?’
The recent confirmation that Zika virus is spreading in the southern states of the United States has been met with considerable public anxiety. Infectious diseases strike a particular primal fear in populations, not least because they are perceived to be unfamiliar, strike suddenly and unpredictably, and have strong cultural associations with filth, contagion, or nuisance vectors such as mosquitoes.
With rising health care expenses, we are all trying to solve the paradoxical dilemma of finding ways to develop better, more comprehensive health care systems at an affordable cost. To be successful, we need to tackle one of the most expensive health problems we face, alcohol and drug abuse, which costs us approximately $428 billion annually. Comparatively, the expenses of health care services, medications, and lost productivity for heart disease costs $316 billion per year.
Many clinical decisions are based on laboratory test results. The rapidly expanding number and complexity of these tests present physicians with many challenges in accurately and efficiently ordering and interpreting diagnostic tests. Diagnostic errors affect 5% of US adults who seek outpatient care each year, and contribute to approximately 10% of patient deaths and 6 to 17% of hospital adverse events.
Modern medicine has done well in helping Western citizens live longer. So have other changes like improved diets, better public hygiene, and less smoking. Dementia, which is primarily though not entirely age-related, has come to prominence in part as other lethal diseases have diminished. It recently surpassed heart disease as the number one killer in England and Wales (overall and in women, according to the UK Office for National Statistics).
Universal screening for breast and colorectal cancers are currently recommended as methods to reduce the mortality associated with these diseases. Mammography is capable of detecting cancer before it has the opportunity to invade into lymph nodes or other organs, and colonoscopy is able to not only detect early stage cancers, but by removing precancerous polyps, prevent cancer from developing.
His syndrome was a variant of Capgras syndrome, where a patient develops the delusion that a family member has been replaced by an identical imposter. Knowing what to look for, I began finding more and more cases: a man with Alzheimer’s who believed his daughter was an imposter, a woman with a right frontal lobe stroke who believed her house was a replica of her real house.
So what is it like being a doctor? What are the hardest decisions doctors have faced in the field? Andrew Baldwin, Nina Hjelde, and Charlotte Goumalatsou share their experience and insight, answering questions on making difficult decisions, time constraints, juggling learning the latest medical knowledge and workload, as well as what being a doctor really means to them.
Rushing seems to be about speed. But is it? There is the juxtaposition of what we see on the outside and what is going on in the inside, the movement over time of our understanding of another person’s experience, the various ways in which we grow into our own existential understanding, the ways in which we learn how we age into illness or into health, the ways in which we come to see how we move.
Surgeons have been facing an ever increasing crisis in finding a suitable material that can replace failing organs and blocked vessels safely and effectively. The worldwide shortage of organs causes almost 30% of patients who need replacement organs to die on the waiting list. Certain procedures such as bypass surgery and certain types of large incisional hernia repairs have a high success rate when performed using natural material such as the patient’s own veins.
Conversation starters are questions and prompts intended to get people talking. Although often thought of in the context of a dinner party or professional meeting as a way to initiate dialogue with a stranger, conversation starters can also be thought of as ideas that stimulate discussions or impact you in a way that helps you grow both personally and professionally.
How often is cancer transmitted between animals? In the past few years researchers have discovered more transmissible cancers in nature. Initially thought to be contained within a respective host species, new research shows that sometimes even cross-species cancer transmission can occur. With transmissible cancer, instead of remaining in the singular organism or host, the cancer transfers between animals.
Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) millions of Americans were able to buy commercial health insurance and millions more who were fortunate to live in states that elected to expand Medicaid were enrolled – sometimes for the first time in their lives – and gained access to subsidized healthcare. To be sure, the ACA was far from perfect: its haphazard implementation, the failure of the tax penalties to enforce mandated insurance purchasing amongst the young and healthy leading to skewed and potentially collapsing insurance markets, and the Supreme Court’s decision to vacate the requirement to increase the Medicaid rolls, all led to not enough people being covered and the return of inexorably rising healthcare costs.