Health Care Programs

A new book from the American Diabetes Association is aimed at anyone planning to start or grow a family.

Diabetes & Pregnancy touches on many aspects of healthy pregnancy with diabetes, from controlling blood glucose levels before conception to post-birth care for both mothers and babies. Editor David A. Sacks, MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist, says the book came together after he worked on a clinical book for obstetricians and other medical professionals who deal with pregnancy and diabetes. “[I thought] if we could boil this down into lay language, we could get across a lot of the messages I’ve always wished that my patients had when they walked in the door,” Sacks says. The result is the ADA’S first pregnancy book to cover type 1, type 2, and gestational diabetes all in one volume.
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The Dukan Diet

Kate Middleton made this diet famous when she was reported to be on it before her marriage to Prince William. This high-protein, low-fat, low-carb diet promises permanent weight loss by following four phases, two for weight loss and two for weight maintenance. In phase 1, dieters quickly lose weight by eating 68 high-protein foods. During phase 2, 32 vegetables are added, and the rate of weight loss slows down to about 1 lb every three days. Phases 3 and 4 help dieters maneuver through maintenance issues to ensure they won’t regain lost weight.
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Q: What are the popular fad diets clients will most likely try in 2012?

A: One of the most common New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight. Clients will turn to the trendiest diets their friends or the media promote. As a dietitian, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of each so you can provide sound clinical advice to your clients. Here’s an overview of the top four:
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American diets contain less sugar now than they did a decade ago, a study found. Sugar consumption fell by 25 percent between 1999 and 2008, mostly because of a drop in soda drinking. The researchers suspect that the nation’s growing concern with obesity led Americans to ditch sugary soda for other beverages. Even so, the authors note, sugar intake still exceeds recommendations.
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When the body’s immune system turns bad

FOR TREATING DISEASES CAUSED
by noxious invaders like bacteria or viruses, the target is clear: Kill the foreign enemy. But what if the agent that’s making you sick is also the very thing that normally keeps you healthy? This is the catch-22 posed by autoimmune disorders.

In this class of diseases, a person’s immune system attacks his or her own body, causing a range of maladies. Type 1 diabetes is one of the most common autoimmune diseases, and there are about 80 others. Little is known about their causes, but researchers are urgently trying to understand them, because of one disturbing trend: Autoimmune disorders seem to be on the rise.
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Racing through dinner may cause you to gain weight. A study of both obese and normal-weight men found that how many times they chewed was associated with how much food they consumed. The magic number appears to be 40: People who chewed each bite of food 40 times reduced how much food they ate by 12 percent compared with those who chewed less. Plus, the super chewers consumed fewer calories, had less of a hormone that stimulates appetite, and more of a hormone thought to reduce appetite than the others.
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DISCUSSION

We have presented an expanded vision of how the organizational and technical infrastructure of HIOs could improve the efficiency and quality of public health reporting, facilitate public health investigation, improve emergency response, and enable public health to communicate information to the clinical community. We note that there are significant worries about the financial viability of some HIOs,[53] some notable failures,[54-57] and much concern about developing business models for HIO sustainability.[58] These issues notwithstanding, there were 193 HIE projects at various stages of development in 48 states, including 42 that were operational at the time of a 2009 survey./sup>6] In addition, new models for health information exchange are being developed to augment regional health information organization efforts, such as the Nationwide Health Information Network Direct Project (available at: http://nhindirect.org). The use cases described here provide clear advantages to public health, but each use case also provides benefits to clinical participants, whether by easing the burden of mandated reporting and responding to public health investigations, improved clinical decisionmaking that is based on epidemiologic data, or protecting the ability of the institution to function during public health emergencies.
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POTENTIAL USES OF HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE

Public health in the abstract has frequently been promoted as a potential benefit of HIE.[7,21-23] If HIOs become part of the health care landscape, they could significantly accelerate efforts to automate public health activities. However, except for the research initiatives discussed in this article, there have been very few implementations of these ideas. Also, specific use cases through which public health can be improved with HIE have not yet been described comprehensively in the literature. We formally describe 11 potential use cases in which HIE can improve public health-related activities. The box on page 618 provides hypothetical scenarios illustrating the potential utility of these public health-specific use cases.
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The bodies of people of South Asian origin tend to store fat around the organs, a study found, while in whites fat is generally found right under the skin. These results may explain why people of certain ethnicities, including Indians and Pakistanis, are more prone than whites to developing fat-related diseases even if not considered overweight.
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Public health relies on data reported by health care partners, and information technology makes such reporting easier than ever. However, data are often structured according to a variety of different terminologies and formats, making data interfaces complex and costly. As one strategy to address these challenges, health information organizations (HIOs) have been established to allow secure, integrated sharing of clinical information among numerous stakeholders, including clinical partners and public health, through health information exchange (HIE). We give detailed descriptions of 11 typical cases in which HIOs can be used for public health purposes. We believe that HIOs, and HIE in general, can improve the efficiency and quality of public health reporting, facilitate public health investigation, improve emergency response, and enable public health to communicate information to the clinical community. (Am J Public Health. 2011;101: 616-623. doi:10.2105/AJPH. 2008.158980)
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Curling up with a bowl of ice cream after a tough day makes neurological sense (if not a healthy snack), a study suggests. To test the direct effects of fat on the brain, researchers injected volunteers with a solution of either fatty acids or saline and watched their brains using magnetic resonance imaging. While in the MRI machines, participants listened to classical music.
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