JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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The United States National Library of Medicine's (NLM) MEDLINE database is the largest and most widely used medical bibliographic database. MEDLINE is manually indexed with NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary. ⋯ This article reviews the structure and use of MeSH, directed toward the nonexpert, and outlines how MeSH may help resolve a number of common difficulties encountered when searching MEDLINE. The increasing importance of the MEDLINE database as an information resource and the trend toward individuals performing their own bibliographic searches makes it crucial that health care professionals become familiar with MeSH.
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As disability is highly prevalent among older women, is costly, and affects the quality of life, preventable causes of disability must be identified. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the body mass index (BMI), weight change, and the onset of disability in older women. ⋯ These prospective data suggest that high BMI is a strong predictor of long-term risk for mobility disability in older women and that this risk persists even to very old age. However, the paradoxical increase in risk associated with weight loss in the old-old women requires further study. Programs to prevent overweight may have potential for decreasing disability in women.