I love that Scandinavian researchers are able to access health registers for clinically significant data about the population. The US healthcare "system" is such a grab bag of a very limited number of reportable diseases and PHI regulations governing medical records that these types of studies are expensive, if not next next to impossible.
No abstract is available for this study on the journal's website. This practice makes it very difficult to determine if one should go to the trouble of obtaining a full text copy.
Well designed study with an thorough, easy-to-understand write up; furthermore, the conclusions do not exceed the scope of the study design or its results. Well done.
This recent review provides more support for recommending chromium supplements to Type II diabetics. Cochrane's most recent review was 2012, and only addressed effects on overweight/obese people. It would be nice to have an updated Cochrane review, as this supplement is widely recommended by clinicians.
The instrument used in this study to assess stressful life events is extremely limited, and the final item is not a well-written measure, as it asks two questions, one of which is open-ended ("Did you if move to Porto Alegre? What is your feeling about this move?"). No mention was made of coding open-ended questions. It is entirely possible to have experienced very distressing life events that are not included in the 7-item scale, calling the entire study results and conclusions into doubt.
More evidence of a potential link between suppressed anger and hypertension. It would be nice to see some US studies of same using more mainstream approaches.
This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense; it seems that those who project anger outward make it someone else's problem, and thus it does affect their blood pressure.
This study is especially important, given the propensity of most residents and their political and social representatives to assume that pollution of various types is what lies behind most clusters of high rates.
It is unclear to me how the trajectories were computed, as the self-reports of sleep time were computed from as few as 2 visits. In addition, a potential complication with self-reported sleep could arise from the fact that reported sleep in 2008 was likely reported as the time that the person laid down till the time that they became consciously awake, whereas in more recent years, participants may have relied on smart watch recordings.
This appears to be a narrative review, and as such does not report any numeric findings (at least in the abstract). In addition, the abstract fails to provide sufficient detail about what supplements were included in the reviewed studies. The conclusion "Medical doctors are therefore encouraged to incorporate dietary supplements into the regimen employed for hypertension and diabetes management." is therefore not supported.
Interesting addition to CAM studies, but unfortunately this article does not explain enough about the health education classes that the control subjects participated in, compared with the experimental condition; in addition, the sample size was very small. Problematic English grammar also makes this hard to follow.
Although the writing is pretty clunky, this article's rigorous methods and graphical presentation of their findings (Qigong shows the most promising benefits for lowering overall BP) are a welcome addition to the CAM literature.
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