Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Daniel ‘pump those knees’ Parker and Debbie ‘fists of fury’ Sims
Pull on your lycra, tie up your shoelaces, pin your number on your vest, and join us as we run the Virgin London Marathon in blog form. While police and security have been stepping up after Boston, we have been trawling Oxford University Press’s online resources in order to bring you 26 miles and 375 yards of marathon goodness. Get ready to take your place on the starting line.
By P.A.J. Waddington
I often think that we learn more from the experiences of those whose lives are different from our own than we do from those who share our experiences. Distance often confers clarity and gives a greater appreciation of context, enabling similarities and differences to become visible. This occurred to me recently as the news of the increasing measles epidemic in Swansea began to grow more alarming.
By Mattis Ranthe
Sudden cardiac death is internationally defined as sudden, unexpected death due to natural unknown or cardiac causes, with an acute change in cardiovascular status within one hour of death or, in unwitnessed cases, in a person last seen functioning normally within 24 hours of being found dead. In young people it is most often caused by undiagnosed heart problems that may be hereditary, indicating that there may be genetic mutations causing the condition.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.