The top-10 coffee-drinking countries:
- Finland (11.8 kilograms per person per year)
- Norway (9.6 kilograms)
- Denmark (9 kilograms)
- Iceland (9 kilograms)
- Switzerland (8.2 kilograms)
- Sweden (7.8 kilograms)
- Aruba (6.8 kilograms)
- Netherlands (6.7 kilograms)
- Belgium/Luxembourg (6.6 kilograms)
- Bosnia and Herzegovina (6.1 kilograms)
�These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years,� writes Dr. Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women�s Hospital in Boston and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where a version of �The Checklist Manifesto� first appeared in late 2007. �So it seemed silly to make a checklist for something so obvious.�
But Dr. Pronovost knew that about one-third of the time doctors were skipping at least one of these critical steps. What would happen if they never skipped any? He gave the five-point checklist to the nurses in the I.C.U. and, with the encouragement of hospital administrators, told them to check off each item when a doctor inserted a central line � and to call out any doctor who was cutting corners. As Dr. Gawande relates it, �The new rule made it clear: if doctors didn�t follow every step, the nurses would have backup from the administration to intervene.�
The nurses were strict, the doctors toed the line, and within one year the central line infection rate in the Hopkins I.C.U. had dropped from 11 percent to zero. Two years after the checklist was introduced, Dr. Pronovost calculated, it had prevented 43 infections, avoided 8 I.C.U. deaths and saved the hospital approximately $2 million.
via www.nytimes.com
Adult children face reality about aging relatives and friends over the holidays
Across the nation this holiday season, thousands of families will slam into the reality that life has changed for aging parents — dad is far more frail than relatives thought, mom forgot to prepare the holiday feast, the house is filthy, the refrigerator is bare, or a stack of bills has gone unpaid.
This is known territory for many of the 46 million Americans who help frail, aging relatives and friends. But for some, it comes as a shock, and they often have little notion of what help is available, or even what is needed.
Study identifies those elderly most at risk for major depression.
University of Rochester Medical Center researchers have pinpointed the prime factors identifying which elderly persons are at the highest risk for developing major depression.
The researchers, led by Jeffrey M. Lyness, M.D., professor of Psychiatry at the Medical Center, reported their findings in an article in the December issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry.
Preventive treatments for people in the high-risk group hold promise for providing the greatest health benefit at the lowest cost, the researchers concluded.
"People with low-level depressive symptoms, who perceive that they have poor quality social support from other people, and with a past history of depression, were at particularly high risk to develop new major depression within the one-to-four year time period of the study," Lyness said. "This is good news, as we in the field are just learning how to prevent depression in particular high-risk groups. Future work will be able to test whether any of a variety of treatments—perhaps psychotherapy, perhaps medication, perhaps other things such as exercise—will help to prevent depression in persons suffering from the risks we identified in this study."
More than 600 people who were 65 years of age or older took part in the study. They were recruited from private practices and University-affiliated clinics in internal medicine, geriatrics and family medicine in Monroe County, N.Y. Only participants without an active diagnosis of major depression were included in the analyses.
Op-Chart - A Look at the Lives and Loves of Older People - NYTimes.com.
Snapshot of Aging Statistics adults 57-85