JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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To assess the vitamin D status in homebound, community-dwelling elderly persons; sunlight-deprived elderly nursing home residents; and healthy, ambulatory elderly persons. ⋯ Despite a relatively high degree of vitamin supplementation in the United States, homebound elderly persons are likely to suffer from vitamin D deficiency.
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To assess the short-term outcomes of incidental appendectomy through analysis of hospital administrative data and determine the consistency and plausibility of the observed results. ⋯ These findings suggest that incidental appendectomy is associated with a small but definite increase in adverse postoperative outcomes. However, plausible and consistent findings were only obtained after restricting the analysis to low-risk subgroups in which unmeasured differences in patients' baseline characteristics were less likely to confound adjusted outcome comparisons. This exercise highlights the potential pitfalls in nonrandomized outcomes comparisons using data sources with limited clinical detail, such as hospital discharge abstracts.
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Using data from a recent case-control study, a woman's risk of having a child with a neural tube defect (NTD) was found to be associated with early pregnancy red cell folate levels in a continuous dose-response relationship. These findings were used to calculate the reduction in NTD cases that would be expected under two different strategies to raise folate levels. Targeting high-risk individuals has a small effect on the population prevalence but can substantially change an individual's risk. ⋯ The current guidelines for the prevention of NTD are for an increased folic acid intake of 0.4 mg per day. This would result in a 48% reduction in NTDs, which may be near optimal. The two intervention strategies should be considered complementary in prevention of NTDs.
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To determine the ability of patients to complete successfully basic reading and numeracy tasks required to function adequately in the health care setting. ⋯ Many patients at our institutions cannot perform the basic reading tasks required to function in the health care environment. Inadequate health literacy may be an important barrier to patients' understanding of their diagnoses and treatments, and to receiving high-quality care.