The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) joined with The Advertising Council to launch a national public service campaign designed to raise awareness among middle-aged men about the importance of preventive medical testing.

Men are 25 percent less likely than women to have visited a physician within the past year – and 38 percent more likely than women to have neglected their cholesterol tests. Furthermore, men are 1.5 times more likely than women to die from heart disease, cancer and chronic lower respiratory diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The new campaign encourages men over 40 to learn which preventive screening tests they need to get and when they need to get them. It’s intended to inform men about the importance of prevention and show them that they should work with their health care providers to find out what they should do to stay healthy.

The campaign highlights the work of the AHRQ-sponsored U.S. Preventive Services Task Force – an independent panel of experts in primary care and prevention that reviews the evidence of effectiveness and develops recommendations for clinical preventive services.

Research conducted during the development of the campaign found that despite their increased health risks, men aren’t taking preventive steps and are often only visiting their doctors when they experience symptoms.

As we enter the New Year, many of us have made resolutions – including the goal to slim down. If losing weight is on your 2009 to-do list, consider meeting your goal with a healthy, balanced plan instead of using fads, fasting or other popular diets.

To lose weight and keep it off for a lifetime, begin thinking about an individualized eating plan instead of a “diet.” A plan tailored to personal likes and dislikes will have a better chance of producing sustainable weight loss. Consider the following tips:

Fatty liver disease is running rampant in the American adult population, says Victor J. Navarro, MD, medical director of Liver Transplantation at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

Dr. Navarro is one of three dedicated hepatologists in Jefferson’s Liver Disease and Transplantation Program, in which Jefferson’s Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and Division of Transplantation Surgery in the Department of Surgery collaborate.

“High fat in the liver can cause inflammation, perhaps leading to cirrhosis, liver scarring, cancer and, ultimately, liver failure,” notes Dr. Navarro, who is also clinical associate professor of Medicine at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University.

“Treatment focuses on factors that seem to lead to fatty liver – including obesity and diabetes. But we’re also researching new treatments, a better understanding of the cause and a better way to identify patients at risk for fatty liver and livers disease.

Find out more about the sports medicine changes, challenges affecting today’s high-school athletes.

Each year, more than seven million high-school students participate in interscholastic sports in the United States – with more than 1.6 million sports injuries, according to a 2006 national sports injury survey.

Thanks to growing awareness of the importance of preventing and treating injuries, injury rates among high-school athletes have dropped. However, experts say that the injuries reported today are more serious.

As Peter DeLuca, MD, of the Rothman Institute at Jefferson, explains, many schools simply lack adequate sports medicine resources. He notes that historically, many schools have relied on a general practitioner to provide sports medicine – even though the field requires specialized training.

“Today, we are training more sports medicine physicians, both nonoperative and operative,” he says. “But there are still some communities where there’s only one trainer handling hundreds of student athletes across several highly competitive boys’ and girls’ programs.”

Indeed, national statistics suggest that, on average, secondary schools have one athletic trainer for 300 to 500 children. By contrast, a college football team typically has three or four trainers for a team of 120.
Tight schools budgets are part of the reason, but Dr. DeLuca says another is lack of awareness and understanding about injuries.

A study suggests that spending more money to treat back and neck pain hasn’t equated to better results—but the analysis is fundamentally flawed, say two Jefferson surgeons

In June, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study suggesting that spending more money on back and neck pain from 1997 to 2005 did not actually produce more or better relief for patients.

According to the article, 26 percent of U.S. adults in 2002 reported lower back pain, and 14 percent reported neck pain during the previous three months. What’s more, low back pain accounted for about 2 percent of all visits to a physician’s office – exceeded only by routine exams, hypertension and diabetes.

The study’s authors note that rates of imaging, injections, use of opiates and surgeries related to spine pain have increased. And they set out to answer the question: Have these expenditures resulted in proportional improvements for patients?

The study’s findings
The investigators used data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which sampled individuals around the nation ages 17 and older from 1997 to 2005.