Preventive medicine
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Preventive medicine · Mar 2007
Food store availability and neighborhood characteristics in the United States.
This study provides a multivariate analysis of the availability of food store outlets in the US and associations with neighborhood characteristics on race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES). ⋯ The study results highlight the importance of various potential public policy measures for improving access to supermarkets that may serve to reduce systematic local area barriers that are shown to exist by race, ethnicity and income.
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To measure beliefs about cancer causation, cancer screening behaviors, access to information about and resources for cancer screening, and interest in cancer genetics services in two underserved predominantly Latino communities. ⋯ The results of this survey demonstrate an awareness of heredity as a potential cause of cancer. The observed high level of interest in cancer genetics services suggests the acceptability of cancer genetics services in this predominantly underserved Latino population. Furthermore, cancer genetics services would likely augment awareness and utilization of available cancer screening services in the community.
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Preventive medicine · Mar 2007
Incidence and risk factors of disability in the elderly: the Rotterdam Study.
This study analyzed the incidence of disability and its risk factors in multiple dimensions in community-dwelling women and men of older age, between 1990 and 1999, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. ⋯ Identified risk factors in this study are to some extent modifiable, enabling interventive strategies, reckoning with gender differences in risk profile, in order to prevent disability.
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Preventive medicine · Mar 2007
Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative StudyRecruiting pregnant smokers into a clinical trial: using a network-model managed care organization versus community-based practices.
Recruiting pregnant smokers into smoking cessation intervention trials is challenging. Changes in health care systems offer new opportunities to overcome many of the obstacles encountered by researchers attempting to address the significant harm from maternal smoking. Investigators could facilitate smoking cessation study recruitment by collaborating with health care systems that systematically collect patient smoking status and record it in a centralized, retrievable fashion. This paper reports the results of utilizing this novel approach and compares it with a typical decentralized practice-based recruitment strategy. ⋯ A recruitment strategy using a health plan's centralized system was more efficient than a practice-based recruitment strategy at identifying potential study participants, but less efficient at generating study participants from the referrals received. Importantly, participants recruited by the two strategies differed by socioeconomic, but not cessation-related, characteristics. To date, recruiting pregnant smokers into intervention studies remains resource intensive and time consuming. Participant identification and recruitment will be greatly enhanced by health system innovations such as implementation of electronic medical records.