The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently published its proposed rule on the 2011 Medicare fee schedule, and I wanted to draw your attention to three important aspects. First, CMS is projecting a 6.1% cut to all services in 2011 based on the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula. Since the regulation is based on current law, the proposed rule assumes no action by Congress to block the 23 ...

How fast you can judge whether a person of the opposite sex is looking at you depends on how masculine or feminine they look, according to a new study. The researchers speculate that there may be an evolutionary advantage to quickly noticing when a good looking person looks at you. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. ...

Women who are physically active at any point over the life course (teenage, age 30, age 50, late life) have lower risk of cognitive impairment in late-life compared to those who are inactive, but teenage physical activity appears to be most important. This is the key finding of a study of over nine thousand women published today in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society .... ...

Highly variable sleep schedules predict an elevated risk for suicide independent of depression in actively suicidal young adults, according to a research abstract that will be presented in San Antonio, Texas, at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC. Results indicate that a sample of actively suicidal undergraduate students had a delayed mean bedtime of 2:08 ...

BMED Report will soon go "under construction!" Our last major design update occurred about 1.5 years ago. These previous changes served us well as evidenced by huge increases in readership. However, it is time for a fresh new look. Over the next few days, readers can expect to see a completely (and we mean completely!) revamped look for The Behavioral Medicine Report. The primary goal is to streamline the l ...

Dartmouth Linguistics Professor Lewis Glinert and Jon Schommer, the associate head of the Department of Pharmaceutical Care and Health Systems at the University of Minnesota, have examined the corporate websites dedicated to the 100 best-selling prescription drugs. They found a startling lack of consistency in an industry where advertising standards are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). ...

A large international consortium of researchers, including scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have announced new discoveries that could help clarify the genetics of autism. Their findings published online June 9th in the journal Nature, support an emerging consensus among scientists that autism is caused by many “rare variants” or genetic changes found in less than one percent of ...

A glimpse into how medicine is often based on habit, not hard data, is provided in a new research published in this month’s Journal of the American College of Surgeons. The article describes results from an international survey that asked endocrine surgeons how they decide whether or not to prescribe antibiotics in advance of removing all or part of the thyroid or parathyroid glands. Typically, these glands ...