Archive for month: August, 2020

UCSF researchers found that poor HIV-infected individuals living in San Francisco are significantly more likely to visit emergency rooms and to have hospital stays if they lack access to food of sufficient quality and quantity for a healthy life.
‘In the prior three months, a quarter of participants in the study reported an ER visit, and just over a tenth reported a hospitalisation, which shows that we are dealing with a population with high levels of illness. But the food insecure people were even sicker than the food secure, which is consistent with their experiencing higher rates of chronic diseases,’ said the study’s primary investigator, Sheri Weiser, MD, assistant professor of medicine in the UCSF HIV/AIDS Division at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
The study recruited 347 HIV-infected urban poor participants living in substandard housing in San Francisco. To determine levels of food insecurity, the participants were questioned about their anxiety and uncertainty about their food supply, whether they were able to access sufficient quality and variety of food, and their experience of insufficient food intake and the physical consequences. Just over half of the group, 56 percent, was classified as food insecure. The entire cohort of food secure and food insecure individuals was followed for two years, looking at healthcare utilisation as a primary outcome.
‘Compared to food secure participants, the odds were approximately two times higher that a food insecure participant was hospitalised or that a food insecure participant had visited the ER over the study’s time period,’ said Weiser. ‘For a long time we have known that adequate nutrition is crucial for HIV-positive patients to live long healthy lives. Our findings that food insecure individuals are also more likely to use costly services from hospitals and emergency rooms build on our previous work showing that food insecure individuals experience poorer HIV treatment outcomes.’
Food insecurity among HIV-infected homeless and marginally housed individuals in the City is higher than the rate of food insecurity seen nationally in non HIV-infected homeless persons, with about a quarter to a third experiencing food insecurity. For the general population, about one in seven Americans is food insecure.
‘Roughly three quarters of our participants are accessing some form of food aid. Project Open Hand, Glide, and other programs providing food assistance to San Francisco’s urban poor do a phenomenal job, but with falling levels of funding and increasing client loads, their efforts have not been enough to take people out of food insecurity,’ said the study’s senior investigator, Margot B. Kushel, MD, associate professor in the UCSF Division of Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
‘One part of the problem lies in housing,’ she said. ‘While about a tenth of participants had a recent experience of homelessness, most of the rest were housed in single-room occupancy hotels, many of which do not include kitchen facilities. Providing secure housing with functional kitchens is an important part of addressing the problem.’
Surprisingly, said Weiser, less than a fifth of the participants had received federal food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) over the previous year and only about a tenth had received SNAP over the previous month. ‘We were alarmed to see such low numbers accessing SNAP, since presumably this program is intended to serve urban poor who experience food insecurity. But many of our food insecure participants have a monthly income that is slightly above the $1,080 a month SNAP cut-off.’ In other words, SNAP does not seem to be reaching the majority of HIV-infected persons in need of food assistance. EurekAlert

According to a recent study, shift work is associated with an increased risk of a heart attack or stroke. Analysing the results of dozens of studies involving more than two million people, researchers looked at the health impact of evening shifts, irregular or unspecified shifts, mixed schedules, night shifts and rotating shifts. They compared the findings with non-shift workers and the general population. It appeared that heart attacks and strokes were more common among shift workers. Shift work was associated with a 23% increased risk of a heart attack and a 5% increased risk of a stroke. Night shifts were associated with the steepest increase in risk for coronary events. Whether you work nights, evenings or regular office hours, eating healthily, getting active and quitting smoking can make a big difference to your heart health irrespective of whether one works nights, evenings or regular office hours. The study was published in the British Medical Journal.

Stroke is the fourth leading cause of death and a common cause of long-term disability in the United States, but doctors have very few proven treatment methods. Now a new device that mechanically removes stroke-causing clots from the brain is being hailed as a game-changer.
In a recent clinical trial, the SOLITAIRE Flow Restoration Device dramatically outperformed the standard mechanical treatment.

SOLITAIRE, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in March, is among an entirely new generation of devices designed to remove blood clots from blocked brain arteries in patients experiencing an ischemic stroke. It has a self-expanding, stent-like design, and once inserted into a blocked artery using a thin catheter tube, it compresses and traps the clot. The clot is then removed by withdrawing the device, reopening the blocked blood vessel.

‘This new device is significantly changing the way we can treat ischemic stroke,’ said the study’s lead author, Dr. Jeffrey L. Saver, director of the UCLA Stroke Center and a professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. ‘We are going from our first generation of clot-removing procedures, which were only moderately good in reopening target arteries, to now having a highly effective tool.’

Results of the study showed that the device opened blocked vessels without causing symptomatic bleeding in or around the brain in 61 percent of patients. The standard FDA

A study by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center