Here are 14 articles on medical research study findings from the week of Dec. 7.
1. New research from the Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute shows that use of prophylactic antibiotics for patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia during the first month of treatment can reduce the instance of infections by about 60 percent. Read more.
2. When medical students are present in the emergency department, the patients' ED length of stay increases by approximately five minutes, according to an analysis of more than 1.3 million ED visits published in JAMA. Read more.
3. Researchers from the Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Conn., developed a new vaccine strategy to reduce the risk of flu infections in high-risk myeloma cancer patients. Read more.
4. If your hospital ED is crowded, it may be among the many in the U.S. experiencing crowding because it hasn't adopted strategies and interventions proven to reduce such conditions, according to a study in Health Affairs. Read more.
5. Charlottesville-based University of Virginia researchers identified a trend in heart surgery data: Poor kidney function prior to heart surgery is associated with longer hospital stays, higher costs and worsened outcomes for patients. Read more.
6. There are many high-tech tools on the market designed to improve hand hygiene compliance, but one hospital was able to achieve improved compliance using less conventional methods — exposing workers and visitors to a citrusy smell and imagery of a man's staring eyes. Read more.
7. Clostridium difficile infections increase hospital costs by 40 percent for each case, and also put patients at higher risk for readmission and longer lengths of stay, according to recent research. Read more.
8. While the number of high-isolation beds in the U.S. has grown exponentially since the 2014 Ebola outbreak, other challenges to responding to such an outbreak remain, according to a study in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. Read more.
9. Considerable racial disparities in surgical outcomes exist even in institutions that have sought to avoid race-based variation in outcomes by enrolling in quality improvement initiatives, according to an Annals of Surgery study. Read more.
10. Although flu season is upon us and incidents of the virus are expected to increase rapidly in coming weeks, more than half of U.S. hospitals do not have requirements in place for their clinicians to receive vaccinations. Read more.
11. A study out of Youngstown, Ohio-based Mercy Health found the further postgraduate students get into their education, the less likely they are to experience a needlestick or sharps injury. Read more.
12. A hospital's safety culture — not just a surgeon's skills or the equipment available — has a measurable effect on surgical outcomes, according to a new study. Read more.
13. Though patients who experience cardiac arrest in hospitals have a greater chance of early intervention, less than a quarter of patients survive such incidents. Read more.
14. When general surgery residents receive regular, one-on-one feedback about preventing blood clots in patients, it works better than when they sit in group lectures, according to a study in Annals of Surgery. Read more.