Research Activities

April 1999, No. 225

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Contents

About Research Activities

Feature Story

Self-management program helps people with chronic diseases improve their health status and avoid hospitalization

Departments

Women's Health
   Changes in health care delivery and financing are needed to meet the unique needs of older women with chronic conditions
   Less than a minute of physician compassion can reduce anxiety in women newly diagnosed with breast cancer
   Three out of four women physicians give high marks for the quality of health care they receive
   Use of age as a threshold for recommending prenatal diagnosis is questioned
   Cocaine and tobacco use during early pregnancy substantially increases the risk of miscarriage
   Researchers examine correlation between length of stay following childbirth and women's satisfaction with care

HIV/AIDS Research
   Antibiotic treatment of chorioamnionitis may have the potential to reduce transmission of HIV from mother to fetus
   Study confirms recommendations for frequency of cervical cancer screening in HIV-infected women
   Wasting dramatically reduces the quality of life of AIDS patients
   Many people with AIDS change their minds about end-of-life care as the disease progresses

Primary Care Research
   Depression can be treated effectively in primary care settings with proper controls and specialty consultation
   Primary care physicians vary widely in how they evaluate and manage osteoarthritis of the knee
   Case management of patients with chronic renal insufficiency did not improve outcomes over usual care
   Both general internists and family physicians provide primary care, but their practice styles and resource use differ

Health Care Costs and Financing
   Researchers examine trends in children's health insurance coverage and the potential impact of SCHIP
   Doctors sometimes compensate for Medicare fee cuts by increasing volume
   Tax-preferred medical savings accounts combined with high deductible catastrophic health plans may be unfair to some

Medical Effectiveness/Outcomes Research
   Teaching hospitals appear to provide better care for two common conditions than nonteaching hospitals

Dental Research
   Adults are as likely as adolescents to have cavities

Elderly Health
   Studies explore the impact of medication use on cognitive functioning among community-dwelling elderly

Heart Disease
   Cardiac arrests do not occur randomly but follow certain temporal patterns

AHCPR News and Notes
   AHCPR issues request for planning ideas
   Nominations invited for AHCPR Child Health Scholar

Announcements
   Research on swallowing problems in the elderly highlights potential for preventing pneumonia in stroke patients
   New MEPS reports are now available

Research Briefs
   Can data-driven benchmarks be used to set the goals of Healthy People 2010?
   A taxonomy of health networks and systems: Bringing order out of chaos
   Validity and utility of patient-reported health measures on hospital admission
   Incidence and duration of hospitalizations among persons with AIDS: An event history approach
   Patient or physician preferences for decision analysis
   Measurement of mammography rates for quality improvement
   Computing population-based estimates of health-adjusted life expectancy
   Reliability and validity of two self-report measures of impairment and disability for MS

AHCPR Publication No. 99-0028
Current as of April 1999

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Internet Citation:

Research Activities newsletter. April 1999, No. 225. AHCPR Publication No. 99-0028. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/research/apr99/

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