The American journal of medicine
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Review
Inclusion of Dental Services in Medicare to Improve Oral and General Health for Older Americans.
Poor oral health negatively impacts overall health, quality of life, and well-being. Increasing evidence suggests that provision of basic dental care for elderly Americans would improve outcomes for a variety of systemic diseases and reduce the overall cost of healthcare. ⋯ This article outlines evidence, rationale, and approaches required for inclusion of dental benefits for more Americans through the Medicare program. Improving access to dental services through Medicare to help prevent and manage common chronic diseases is an important step toward integration of dental care with general healthcare to improve the overall health, quality of life, and well-being for many older Americans.
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This communication, based on a review of the relevant literature on ratios deriving from blood pressure and heart rate measurements, and their conformance/nonconformance to the mathematical golden rule (ie, 1.681), proposes that such ratios, particularly emanating from large numbers of home blood pressure and heart rate measurements obtained by the patients themselves or their caretakers, may constitute new risk markers, useful in the assessment of health and cardiovascular pathologies, prognosis of morbidity and mortality, and implementation to clinical practice and research.
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Virtually every professional society globally now endorses a plant-forward diet that is lower in fat and processed foods as key components of disease prevention and health promotion. It is characterized by whole grain foods, and predominantly made of fresh foods. With healthcare expenditures at record levels across the globe, implementing a treatment plan that has larger magnitude health improvements than nearly any known medicine, that is extremely inexpensive, and has the power to not only improve human health but also planetary health is critical. That plan is Food is Medicine (FIM) which will be explored in this manuscript.
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Vertebral fractures are a common cause of back pain and pain-related functional impairments in elderly patients. Despite their widespread occurrence, vertebral fractures frequently remain underdiagnosed, often leading to suboptimal management and poor clinical outcomes. ⋯ PT following vertebral fractures has been shown to significantly improve back pain and patient-reported outcomes, with studies even showing a correlation between resistance and aerobic training with improved bone mineral density. These findings highlight the need for interdisciplinary care and comprehensive PT interventions to address the growing burden of vertebral fractures as their incidence rises with the aging population.
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Perioperative medicine is an evolving field, with important publications each year across multiple disciplines. Staying up to date in the field is complicated due to the wide range of journals that publish relevant articles. This review summarizes the most noteworthy perioperative publications in 2023. ⋯ Abstracts, case reports, letters, protocols, pediatric and obstetric articles, and cardiac surgery publications were excluded. Two authors reviewed each reference using the Distiller SR systematic review software (Evidence Partners Inc., Ottawa, Ont, Canada). A modified Delphi technique was used to identify 8 practice-changing articles as well as another 8 articles for table-based summary.