Health-care model improves diabetes outcomes, health |  |
- Health-care model improves diabetes outcomes, health
- New elegant technique used for genomic archaeology
- Notre Dame research reveals brain network connections
| Health-care model improves diabetes outcomes, health Posted: 13 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A health-care delivery model called patient-centered medical home (PCMH) increased the percentage of diabetes patients who achieved goals that reduced their sickness and death rates, according to health researchers. Pennsylvania leads the nation in implementing this new care model that promises to improve health and reduce costs of care. PCMH is based on the chronic-care model (CCM) of care, which attempts to shift health-care delivery from a reactive approach to a focus on long-term problems. PCMH incorporates CCM and provides comprehensive primary care coordinated and integrated across a health-care system by a physician-led team. This arrangement is unique, said Robert Gabbay, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine, Penn State College of Medicine and director, Penn State Hershey Diabetes and Obesity Institute. It brings together multiple insurance payers convened by a state body without regulatory oversight to contract with a diverse range of practices across the state for broadscale implementation of better care leveraged by payment reform. This is one of the largest multi-payer PCMH programs in the country and can serve as a model for how to revitalize primary care and improve the health of patients across the country. The researchers studied the use of PCMH with diabetes patients. They implemented the model for diabetes patients in 25 practices in southeast Pennsylvania encompassing metropolitan Philadelphia. Diabetes is one of the most costly of chronic diseases, accounting for $174 billion in medical care each year in the United States, with the cost of care for patients with diabetes averaging 2.3 times higher than similar patients without diabetes, Gabbay said. Specifically for diabetes, only 7 percent of patients meet evidenced-based goals for the key predictors of morbidity and mortality: hemoglobin A1C, blood pressure, and LDL cholesterol. This model makes physicians look at their patient population in general, not... http://www.rxpgnews.com    |
| New elegant technique used for genomic archaeology Posted: 13 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers have probed deeper into human evolution by developing an elegant new technique to analyse whole genomes from different populations. One key finding from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute's study is that African and non-African populations continued to exchange genetic material well after migration out-of-Africa 60,000 years ago. This shows that interbreeding between these groups continued long after the original exodus. For the first time genomic archaeologists are able to infer population size and history using single genomes, a technique that makes fewer assumptions than existing methods, allowing for more detailed insights. It provides a fresh view of the history of mankind from 10,000 to one million years ago. Using this algorithm, we were able to provide new insights into our human history, says Dr Richard Durbin, joint head of Human Genetics and leader of the Genome Informatics Group at the Sanger Institute. First, we see an apparent increase in effective human population numbers around the time that modern humans arose in Africa over 100,000 years ago. Second, when we look at non-African individuals from Europe and East Asia, we see a shared history of a dramatic reduction in population, or bottleneck, starting about 60,000 years ago, as others have also observed. But unlike previous studies we also see evidence for continuing genetic exchange with African populations for tens of thousands of years after the initial out-of-Africa bottleneck until 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. Previous methods to explore these questions using genetic data have looked at a subset of the human genome. Our new approach uses the whole sequence of single individuals, and relies on fewer assumptions. Using such techniques we will be able to capitalize on the revolution in genome sequencing and analysis from projects such as The 1000 Genomes Project, and, as more people are sequenced, build a progressively finer detail picture of... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Notre Dame research reveals brain network connections Posted: 13 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Research conducted by Maria Ercsey-Ravasz and Zoltan Toroczkai of the University of Notre Dame's Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA), along with the Department of Physics and a group of neuroanatomists in France, has revealed previously unknown information about the primate brain. The researchers published an article in the journal Cerebral Cortex showing that the brain is characterized by a highly consistent, weighted network among the functional areas of the cortex, which are responsible for such functions as vision, hearing, touch, movement control and complex associations. The study revealed that such cortical networks and their properties are reproducible from individual to individual. Ercsey-Ravasz, a postdoctoral associate, and Toroczkai, professor of physics, analyzed 70 man-years' worth of data on macaque brains collected by a large group led by Henry Kennedy in Lyon, France. The Kennedy team injected ink tracers into a portion of the brain and scanned thin brain slices to track the movement of the chemical through the nerve cells' branches, called axons, to the soma of the cells. Kennedy enlisted iCeNSA for its expertise at analyzing networks, which has also been applied to fields as diverse as the spread of disease and the social networks. Their analysis identified the consistency of connectivity among the areas of the brain. Ercsey-Ravasz, in a study of the data that will be included in a later paper, also has demonstrated that the number of connections is greatest between areas that are closest, and the number declines in a consistent pattern as distance increases. The regularity of the patterns from animal to animal suggests that the connections are necessary, and the fewer long-distance connections likely are control switches that coordinate or modulate information exchange amongst the brain areas. The study is part of a broader investigation of brain function and intelligence... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
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