There may have been a time when hospitals, like libraries, were quiet, restful places. But no more. With public address systems paging physicians every few minutes, modern hospitals sound more like train stations than havens for rest and healing.
”Noise is a major patient complaint, and it`s also distracting to the staff,” said Kathy Pischke-Winn of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Medical Center in Chicago.
Her hospital is testing a wireless commuications system that`s a spinoff from fast-food restaurants. It allows nurses to communicate with staff members by using small clip-on speaker/microphones instead of making announcements over a public address system.
”By decreasing intercom noise, we think we can improve the quality of a patient`s hospital stay,” Pischke-Winn said.
COMPUTER BUG MAY BE HARDWARE EROSION When your computer goes on the blink, it could mean a software bug, but it also could be subatomic hardware erosion. It seems the wondrously tiny microcircuits that make computer chips run have become so small that the electric current they carry can erode them, like a river rerouting its own channel.
As computer chip makers crowd more and more tiny circuits into less space, electromigration, as subatomic erosion is called, becomes a greater threat to chip function, said Bill Livesay, a research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
”When even small electric current is run through these minuscule metal conductors, high current densities are built up within their narrow confines,” Livesay said. ”This causes atoms within the metal films to move out of place or migrate, causing degradation and ultimate failure of the device.”
Learning precisely how molecules are moved by electron flow should help Livesay and his colleagues devise material combinations best suited to minimize the problem, he said.
WAY FOUND TO REDUCE RECURRING NIGHTMARES Anxiety and stress caused by recurring nightmares may be reduced with relatively simple treatments, a study by researchers at the University of New Mexico suggests.
Volunteers who had experienced recurring nightmares for several years were taught relaxation techniques or taught to rehearse their dreams and change the endings. The training by researchers consisted of only a single session. Seven months after the training, all the volunteers reported improvements.
Their bad dreams occurred less often and were less frightening. Four of 23 patients stopped having nightmares altogether, the researchers report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
STUDY LINKS HEALTH TO EDUCATION That old question, ”If you`re so smart, why aren`t you rich?” should, perhaps, be rephrased to, ”If you`re so smart, how come you`re sick?” A report in the American Journal of Public Health suggests that education is strongly connected to good health.
The study of nearly 2,400 California residents, conducted by Stanford University researchers, tried to separate effects on health attributed to education from those connected to income levels and job prestige.
”Certainly, income tends to increase with education,” said Marilyn Winkleby, a Stanford epidemiologist heading the research, ”but in this study, we separated the two areas and found that it was the education level that was important. Wealthy people with modest education tended to have more health risks than low-income people with advanced education, for example.”
The study focused on factors such as smoking, cholesterol levels and blood pressure that are associated with disease. It found, for instance, that among all age groups, 39 percent of people with less than a high school education smoked, compared with 13 percent of college graduates.
”We found it particularly interesting that for whatever reason, risk factors decreased progressively with each year of education attained,”
Winkleby said. ”For example, persons with three years of college did better than persons with two years of college.”
ECONOMIC SLUMP INTENSIFIES JOB STRESS Workers are feeling America`s economic slump not just in their pocketbooks, but also deep in their psyches, a survey by Northwestern National Life Insurance Co. found. Among 1,300 workers questioned, 46 percent said they are worried about their jobs and feel pressured to prove their value on the job.
Four out of 10 said their jobs are very stressful and 39 percent said they wish they could quit.
”Stress is running like a fire through the American workplace and the recession is adding fuel to it,” said Peggy Lawless, research director for the insurance firm. ”Over-stressed employees are less able to perform their jobs and more afraid to leave them.”
NARCOTIC PAINKILLERS POSE RISK TO ELDERLY Elderly people who take narcotic painkillers may run a risk of becoming disoriented, falling and breaking their hips, a new study suggests.
Writing in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, Dr. Ronald Shorr and colleagues at Vanderbilt University analyze information on 4,500 hip fractures among people over age 65.
They found a strong association between the fractures and the use of two common narcotic painkillers: codeine and propoxyphene. The evaluation also suggests that when people start taking these medications, their risk is greatest. In general, the analysis found that older people taking codeine or propoxyphene were 60 percent more likely to break their hips than people who didn`t take painkillers.
But in the period when people begin taking the painkillers, their risk was 120 percent higher than for others who didn`t take the drugs. If 1 million older people in the U.S. take these drugs, which the Vanderbilt researchers said is a plausible figure, the analysis suggested that 4,000 fractured hips may be related to this therapy.
Shorr and his colleagues urged physicians to carefully evaluate questions of efficacy and toxicity when they consider prescribing these painkillers for elderly patients.
NEW WAY TO DETERMINE WHITE CELL COUNT An intriguing method for anemic people to estimate their white blood cell level has been devised by a group of Midwest researchers.
When a healthy person gazes at a clear blue sky, he will see what looks like little comets darting through the air. Those little stars are actually white blood cells coursing through the eye`s retina, and there are so many of them in a healthy retina, it would be futile to try to count them.
But anemic people with low white blood counts may be able to use this technique to estimate how low their count is.
Researchers from Northwestern University and Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Medical Center in Chicago and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison report testing 52 people with AIDS by having them stare at a blue screen and then compare the ”comets” they saw to seven color plates with varying star densities.
Blood tests taken later show a high correlation between white blood counts and the color plates selected by the patients.
Such a thing could be useful at estimating blood counts without taking blood for testing, a procedure that can be painful when done frequently with severely ill people.
”We hope to develop an inexpensive, reliable system that will help alleviate some of the suffering, risk and expense associated with the care of these patients,” said Dr. Thomas A. Deutsch, a researcher affliated with Northwestern and Rush.
1 SKIN CANCER RAISES RISKS OF ANOTHER While most skin cancers are easily treatable, Dartmouth Medical School researchers have some bad news for the 600,000 Americans a year who develop these cancers: They have a 50 percent chance of developing the same kind of cancers in the next five years.
Following 1,805 patients who had basal cell cancer or squamous cell cancer since 1983, the researchers found that they had a 35 percent risk of developing similar tumors in three years and a 50 percent risk in five years. ”Those with a history of multiple non-melanoma skin cancers and those with more severe solar skin damage and sun-sensitive skin . . . are among the patients who appear to require closest scrutiny,” Dr. Margaret Karagas reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
SEX EDUCATION FOUND EFFECTIVE AGAINST AIDS World Health Organization officials are taking heart from a report showing that mass-media campaigns, creative condom marketing and word-of-mouth messages are significantly changing people`s sexual behavior and reducing their risk of becoming infected with the AIDS virus.
In Zaire, which has a population of 30 million, condom sales soared from 100,000 in 1987 to 18 million last year, and in Switzerland condom sales nearly doubled from 7.6 million in 1986 to 13.8 million in 1991.
”Rather than throw our hands up in despair at the million who still risk infection, we must ensure that countries around the world have the know-how and funds to implement these approaches of proven effectiveness now,” said Dr. Michael Merson, director of WHO`s global program on AIDS.
In the U.S., similar results were reported in the May-June issue of Family Planning Perspectives. A study of the 1986 National Survey of Adolescent Males found that AIDS education and sex education reduced sexual activity, including fewer sexual partners and less frequent intercourse, and increased condom use among teenage males.
VITAMIN E FIGHTS ATHEROSCLEROSIS Large doses of vitamin E may reduce the risk of heart disease, according to researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
In tests with 12 healthy volunteers, half of whom were given 800 international units of vitamin E and the other half a placebo, those who got the vitamin had 50 percent less oxidative damage to their low-density lipoprotein, the so-called bad cholesterol.
It is this oxidative damage that scientists now believe triggers the atherosclerotic process in which fatty deposits build up in coronary arteries. Vitamin E and other compounds act as anti-oxidants to prevent such damage.
”Dietary micronutrients with anti-oxidant properties, such as vitamins E and C, could have a major role in future strategies for atherosclerosis prevention,” said Dr. Ishwarlal Jialal. Jialal and Dr. Scott Grundy, director of Southwestern`s Center for Human Nutrition, published their findings in the June issue of the Journal of Lipid Research.
