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Toronto Star: Angioplasty works better than drugs
An important Danish study of 1,129 patients who had major heart attacks reveals that emergency angioplasties are superior to drug treatment. The study concludes that the procedures are worth the wait of transfer to a hospital that does the procedure and could, according to the August 22 Toronto Star, reshape cardiac recommendations for the 1.1 million Americans and 75,000 Canadians who have heart attacks each year. Of those studied, 14 percent either died or had another heart attack or a disabling stroke during the month-long study when treated with drugs alone; only 8 percent had such outcomes when transferred to another hospital for angioplasty. Alice Jacobs, a MED professor of medicine, who performs angioplasties at Boston Medical Center, says, “I think the study is very provocative and needs to make us think about transferring patients, but very carefully and very thoughtfully.”
Money: Emotional investments for the future
The older we get, the more likely we are to focus on the emotional aspects of investing, says the September issue of Money magazine. Today’s “yield drought” -- banks offering, for example, 1.06 percent yields on one-year certificates of deposit that were opened when yields were at 3.2 percent -- is challenging older Americans to choose between making ends meet in the present or looking for future safety. As investors age, their perception of time shortens and they focus more on fulfilling their emotional needs -- covering living expenses or making sure that the principal value of initial investments will stay intact -- rather than on preparing for the future. Zvi Bodie, an SMG professor of finance and economics and coauthor of Worry-Free Investing, says that such thinking is part of a familiar story. What older people experience with such thinking “is a perfect example that the level of a person’s wealth is no guarantee of consumption or standard of living if interest rates fluctuate.”
Boston Globe: Murder, or assault?
Should murder charges be brought against criminals who inflict injury
but whose victims do not die from their wounds until months or years later?
Hundreds of years of English common law once dictated that prosecutors
in Massachusetts and most other states could bring murder charges only
if the victim died within a year and a day after the attack, reports the
August 25 Boston Globe. But in 1980, the Supreme Judicial Court said the
rule was outdated. Massachusetts and other states are now struggling with
challenges to the “year and a day” standard as victims linger
under the care of medical science and sometimes die years after they were
attacked. “When medical science couldn’t trace out cause and
effect as easily and when opportunistic infections were much more common,
it was harder to say what caused the death,” says David Rossman,
a LAW professor and director of criminal law clinical practice, law instruction,
J.D. program.
28
August 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations