American journal of preventive medicine
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Walk Score® and Transit Score® are open-source measures of the neighborhood built environment to support walking ("walkability") and access to transportation. ⋯ Walk Score and Transit Score appear to be useful as measures of walkability in analyses of neighborhood effects.
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Bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (BCPR) provides an opportunity for decreasing cardiac mortality. Rates of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in which resuscitation was performed vary within cities and across demographics. ⋯ Geospatial analysis can provide important information on the contiguous areas of high OHCA rates and low BCPR rates with the aim of more effectively targeting interventions and ultimately decreasing cardiac deaths.
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Federal law requires certain private insurers to cover and waive patient cost sharing for preventive medical services that receive a grade of B or better from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). The USPSTF recommends that asymptomatic adults who have a blood pressure (BP) higher than 135/80 mmHg be screened for type 2 diabetes. ⋯ The USPSTF screening recommendations result in missing more than half of those who have undiagnosed diabetes, and a substantial proportion of these people have increased low-density lipoprotein and other cardiovascular risk factors.
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Use of data generated through social media for health studies is gradually increasing. Twitter is a short-text message system developed 6 years ago, now with more than 100 million users generating over 300 million Tweets every day. Twitter may be used to gain real-world insights to promote healthy behaviors. ⋯ The approach includes five steps: (1) selecting keywords to gather an initial set of Tweets to analyze; (2) importing data; (3) preparing data; (4) analyzing data (topic, sentiment, and ecologic context); and (5) interpreting data. The steps are implemented using tools that are publically available and free of charge and designed for use by researchers with limited programming skills. Content mining of Tweets can contribute to addressing challenges in health behavior research.
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Neonatal withdrawal syndrome, which is associated most frequently with opioid use in pregnancy, is an emerging public health concern, with recent studies documenting an increase in the rate of U.S. infants diagnosed. ⋯ Diagnosis of neonatal withdrawal syndrome increased significantly in Michigan with infants who had the syndrome requiring a significantly longer LOS compared to those without it.