WASHINGTON, DC—In the wake of a shooting spree last month at Fort Hood that left 13 dead and dozens injured, federal officials are trying to make sense of the tragedy. One step is piecing together warning signs that may or may not have been...

June 2013 Improving Symptom Management for Patients with Multiple Sclerosis in the Federal Healthcare Setting 1.0  AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ This complimentary, certified CME publication, developed as a supplement to U.S. Medicine, identifies...

WASHINGTON, DC—The effort to get ahead of the spread of the H1N1 flu epidemic has been a story of two steps forward and one step back, agency leaders told legislators in October. The good news is that the virus has not experienced any wides...

WASHINGTON, DC—Legislators are concerned that a lack of detailed knowledge about the environmental hazards that troops are exposed to during deployment will result in health consequences further down the line. Specifically, they are concerned as to whether DoD is collecting enough data and whether that information, if it exists, is being transferred in a swift and detailed manner to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where it will be useful in the treatment of sick veterans.

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WASHINGTON, DC—Secondhand-smoke exposure increases the risk of coronary heart disease and heart attacks. Smoking bans reduce the risk, according to an Institute of Medicine report commissioned by the CDC. “It’s clear that smoking bans work,” said Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health professor Lynn Goldman, chair of the committee of experts that wrote the IoM report. “Bans reduce the risks of heart attack in nonsmokers as well as smokers.

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WASHINGTON, DC—The Department of Defense is planning to increase access to mental health services for beneficiaries living in rural areas through telehealth mobile units.

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WASHINGTON, DC—Military and civilian medical facilities are collaborating to improve care and treatment for servicemembers who have sustained major extremity injuries in a newly established extremity trauma research consortium.

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WASHINGTON, DC—Military providers are concerned about how the stress of war may be affecting the mental health of teenagers of military parents. Colonel Kris Peterson, the Army Surgeon General’s Consultant for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Chief of Psychiatry at Madigan Army Medical Center, says studies on military children show that they are experiencing increased anxiety and depression.

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WASHINGTON, DC—It is recommended that physicians screen for depression in diabetic patients because the combination of diabetes and depression can be dangerous. “When a person has diabetes and they experience depression, there is a whole host of complications that can occur if the depression is not treated,” said Dr Michelle Owens-Gary, PhD, a behavioral health scientist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Diabetes Translation.

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WASHINGTON, DC—It can take upwards of 15 or 20 years to develop an evidence-based therapy, clinically prove its effectiveness, and then disseminate pertinent information across the population of patients that need it. When that population involves the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system, which serves four million veterans throughout hundreds of facilities, it might be expected that dissemination of information could take much longer.

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