Developmental Origins of Cardiovascular Disease: Understanding High Mortality Rates in the American South.

While many social scientists view heart disease as the outcome of current conditions, this cannot fully explain the significant geographic disparities in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality rates in the USA. The developmental origins hypothesis proposes that CVD vulnerability is created by poor conditions in utero that underbuilds major organs relative to those needed to process lush nutrition later in life. The American South underwent an economic transformation from persistent poverty to rapid economic growth in the post-World War II era.

The hidden cost of moving up: type 2 diabetes and the escape from persistent poverty in the American South.

Objectives: The paper tests the thrifty phenotype hypothesis, according to which nonharmonious growth trajectories are costly for adult health.

Methods: The American surge in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes is concentrated in the South, a region characterized by a long history of poverty followed by rapid economic growth beginning in the 1960s. Civil rights legislation further accelerated income growth for African-Americans in the region.

The History of European Health Project: a history of health in Europe from the late Paleolithic era to the present.

The United States National Science Foundation has recently funded a large collaborative project on "A History of Health in Europe from the Late Paleolithic Era to the Present," whose goal is to measure and analyzes the evolution of skeletal health by combining data from human remains with information gathered from sources in archaeology, climate history, geography, and history. The goal of this international collaborative project is to create a series of database that will allow researchers to reinterpret the history of human health in Europe from the late Paleolithic era to the early twentieth century. During this period, human health and welfare were transformed enormously by the transition from foraging to farming; the rise of cities and complex forms of social and political organization; European colonization; and industrialization.

Biological measures of the standard of living.

When economists investigate long-term trends and socioeconomic differences in the standard of living or quality of life, they have traditionally focused on monetary measures such as gross domestic product--which has occupied center stage for over 50 years. In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly recognized the limitations of monetary measures while seeking useful alternatives. This essay examines the unique and valuable contributions of four biological measures--life expectancy, morbidity, stature, and certain features of skeletal remains--to understand levels and changes in human well-being.

Young adult mortality following severe physiological stress in childhood: skeletal evidence.

Numerous studies report that early childhood biological stress impairs health in later adulthood. Overwhelmingly these studies are based on modern data, when health conditions are quite good by historical standards. Potentially much can be learned by examining the relationship within populations that lived under enormous pressure, enduring life expectancies less than one-half of those found in industrial countries of the late twentieth century.

A history of health in Europe from the late Paleolithic era to the present.

This article briefly describes a large, multidisciplinary research project that combines skeletal data in Europe over the past 10,000 years with information from sources in history, archaeology, geography and climate history to measure and analyze important aspects of human health. Over this era human health was significantly affected by climate change, the rise of settled agriculture, urbanization, new technologies, global exploration and colonization, and industrialization.

Supervision of residents by faculty radiologists using home workstations.

Our purpose was to determine if a home-based faculty radiologist equipped with a high-resolution workstation could add new information to residents' readings on overnight computed chest images that was equivalent to the new information generated by faculty reviewers inside the hospital. Teleconferencing software was installed on home workstations for online supervision of residents by faculty on chest images from a cardiothoracic intensive care unit. Critical observations that could affect patient care were recorded by first-year radiology residents before and after teleconferencing with the home-based radiologist.

Diagnosis of obstructive jaundice.

The diagnosis of obstructive jaundice remains difficult yet vital, since operative decompression may relieve extrahepatic blockage, but operation can only harm patients with intrahepatic block or parenchymal cell inflammation or necrosis. Three new diagnostic methods (liver scanning, angiography, and transjugular transhepatic cholangiography) are reviewed, as is bilirubin metabolism, so important in the diagnosis of jaundice. Three clinical problems are discussed: extrahepatic obstruction due to cancer of the pancreas, biliary atresia causing jaundice in the newborn, and the diffuse ductal obstruction known as sclerosing cholangitis.