Don’t have a weekend stroke
Strokes treated on the weekend are more deadly than those attended to on a weekday, Canadian researchers report. The best guess is that the difference in outcome might be even worse in the United States, said Dr. Gustavo Saposnik of the University of Toronto and lead author of a report. “Here we have universal health insurance with no co-payment,” he said. “With all the different plans in the United States, it might be a little worse.”
A quarter of the 26,700 people studied went to hospitals on Saturdays or Sundays. Researchers found that people admitted on a weekend had a 14 percent higher risk of dying within seven days than those treated on weekdays.
The reasons for the difference are not clear, Saposnik said. “There may be some differences in resources in different hospitals on weekends,” he said. “We are doing another study trying to address the underlying mechanism for our findings.”
Coo-coo parents benefit babies
If you have ever felt silly cooing “baby talk” to your infant, relax. New research suggests you are giving your child just what he or she needs to begin developing language skills and to bond with you, with every “goo-goo, ga-ga” you utter.
The study was designed by Japanese researchers who examined how newborns respond to adult-directed speech (ADS) and to infant-directed speech (IDS) and found that the frontal area of the babies’ brains become more active in response to “baby talk.”
“When the neonates heard IDS rather than ADS, [the result was increased oxygenation] in the frontal area of the brain,” said the study’s lead author, Yuri Saito of Hiroshima University. “This result suggests that the emotional tone of maternal utterances could have a role in activating the brains of neonates to attend to the utterances, even while sleeping.”
Immigrant medical burden
Almost all Emergency Medicaid expenditures in North Carolina go to cover undocumented immigrants’ pregnancy and labor complications, a trend probably occurring in other states, a new study found. The findings appear to question the monetary costs of excluding undocumented immigrants from routine health care, especially prenatal care.
Undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants who have been in the United States less than five years are generally excluded from Medicaid benefits. But they can receive emergency medical care (known as Emergency Medicaid) if they are children, pregnant women, families with dependent children, elderly or disabled.
In their study, researchers at the University of North Carolina analyzed administrative claims data for Emergency Medicaid, which showed that 48,391 people in the state received emergency care from 2001 through 2004.
Within that group, 99 percent of patients were undocumented immigrants.
