Evidence synthesis of medical cannabis research: current challenges and opportunities.

As a wide group of medicines, the effectiveness and safety of 'medical cannabis' products is likely to vary in relation to product-specific dimensions such as potency, dosage, route of administration, and cannabinoid composition. Systematic reviews can perform a crucial role in analysing and synthesising the outcomes of medical cannabis interventions found in empirical research. We analysed 23 contemporary systematic reviews on the effectiveness and safety of medical cannabis to discern the extent to which this body of work aimed to capture, and ultimately captured, the differing outcomes of medical cannabis products by product-specific dimensions of treatment.

Exploring feasibility and acceptability of an integrated urban gardens and peer nutritional counselling intervention for people with HIV in the Dominican Republic.

Objective: Food security interventions with people living with HIV (PLHIV) are needed to improve HIV outcomes. This process evaluation of a pilot intervention involving urban gardening and peer nutritional counselling with PLHIV assesses feasibility, acceptability and implementation challenges to inform scale-up.

Design: Mixed methods were used, including quantitative data on intervention participation and feasibility and acceptability among participants ( 45) and qualitative data from a purposive sample of participants ( 21).

Heterogeneous Effects of Early Algebra across California Middle Schools.

How should schools assign students to more rigorous math courses so as best to help their academic outcomes? We identify several hundred California middle schools that used 7th-grade test scores to place students into 8th-grade algebra courses and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate average impacts and heterogeneity across schools. Enrolling in 8th-grade algebra boosts students' enrollment in advanced math in ninth grade by 30 percentage points and eleventh grade by 16 percentage points. Math scores in tenth grade rise by 0.

Is Interpersonal Abuse Associated with Sexual (Dis)satisfaction among Postmenopausal Women?

Purpose: To investigate associations between past-year verbal and/or physical abuse (VA/PA) and sexual (dis)satisfaction, that is, global or frequency-related (dis)satisfactions with sexual activity, among postmenopausal women in the Women's Health Initiative.

Procedures: A cross-sectional analysis of archival data was performed from the subset of 83,329 Women's Health Initiative participants (clinical trial and/or observational study components) who reported sexual activity in the year before baseline. Associations between VA/PA and global frequency (dis)satisfactions were modeled using logistic regression.

What can the past of pay-for-performance tell us about the future of Value-Based Purchasing in Medicare?

The Medicare program has implemented pay-for-performance (P4P), or Value-Based Purchasing, for inpatient care and for Medicare Advantage plans, and plans to implement a program for physicians in 2015. In this paper, we review evidence on the effectiveness of P4P and identify design criteria deemed to be best practice in P4P. We then assess the extent to which Medicare's existing and planned Value-Based Purchasing programs align with these best practices.

Eating better for less: a national discount program for healthy food purchases in South Africa.

Objectives: To examine whether reducing prices for healthy food purchases leads to changes in self-reported measures of food consumption and weight status.

Methods: Repeated surveys of about 350,000 HealthyFood participants and nonparticipants.

Results: Program participation is associated with more consumption of fruits/vegetables and whole-grain foods and less consumption of high sugar/salt foods, fried foods, processed meats, and fast food.

Advancing clinical decision support using lessons from outside of healthcare: an interdisciplinary systematic review.

Background: Greater use of computerized decision support (DS) systems could address continuing safety and quality problems in healthcare, but the healthcare field has struggled to implement DS technology. This study surveys DS experience across multiple non-healthcare disciplines for new insights that are generalizable to healthcare provider decisions. In particular, it sought design principles and lessons learned from the other disciplines that could inform efforts to accelerate the adoption of clinical decision support (CDS).

Affordability and Obesity: Issues in the Multifunctionality of Agricultural/Food Systems.

The conference discussed public goods and externalities created as byproducts of the food system, including local development, obesity, air and water pollution, climate change, antibiotic resistance, and other public health issues. Multifunctionality is a framework that integrates these diverse issues and has been influential in international policy. This commentary focuses on arguably the most prominent public health issue at the moment: obesity.