Innovative partnerships to advance public health training in community-based academic residency programs.

Collaborative partnerships between community-based academic residency training programs and schools of public health, represent an innovative approach to training future physician leaders in population management and public health. In Kaiser Permanente Northern California, development of residency-Masters in Public Health (MPH) tracks in the Internal Medicine Residency and the Pediatrics Residency programs, with MPH graduate studies completed at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, enables physicians to integrate clinical training with formal education in epidemiology, biostatistics, health policy, and disease prevention. These residency-MPH programs draw on more than 50 years of clinical education, public health training, and health services research - creating an environment that sparks inquiry and added value by developing skills in patient-centered care through the lens of population-based outcomes.

Predictors of lung cancer: noteworthy cell type differences.

Objective: To study risk factors for cell types of lung cancer.

Methods: Cohort study of 126,293 persons with 1852 subjects with incident cancer. We performed Cox proportional hazards models (8 covariates) to estimate risk of the 4 most numerous specific cell types: adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, small cell carcinoma, and bronchioloalveolar carcinoma.

A novel cause of eosinophilic pneumonia: recreational marijuana exposure.

Eosinophilic pneumonia is characterized by pulmonary infiltrates visible on radiography, eosinophilic infiltration into the lung parenchyma, and frequent peripheral eosinophilia. The etiology may be idiopathic or secondary to identifiable causes, including drugs, parasites, toxins, infections, or systemic diseases such as hypereosinophilic syndrome. A 60-year-old man was seen in pulmonary clinic with 4 weeks of cough and wheeze.

Ethnicity and risk of hospitalization for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Purpose: To identify ethnic differences for risk of hospitalization for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Methods: We undertook a cohort study with 126,019 participants: 55% whites, 27% blacks, 11% Asians, and 4% Hispanics. To estimate asthma and COPD risk, we used Cox proportional hazards models adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, education, smoking, and alcohol intake.

Alcohol and lung airways function.

Background: Limited data suggest that moderate alcohol drinkers may have better lung airways function than abstainers. Because few studies have fully accounted for confounders (including smoking and coronary disease), and some might have been biased by the inclusion with nondrinkers of alcohol drinkers who quit because of illness, we performed a cross-sectional analysis in a large free-living population.

Methods: We studied the relation between alcohol and airways function in 177,721 members of a comprehensive health plan.