Financial reimbursement and ownership of cardiac imaging equipment appears to influence physicians’ use of cardiac stress testing , according to a new study from Duke University Medical Center. The study finds that doctors who are reimbursed for both performing the test using their equipment and then interpreting the results were 50 to 100 percent more likely to order cardiac imaging tests on their patients than those who don’t bill the fees. The study appears today in the Journal of the American Medical Association

Michael Cuffe, M.D., MBA, vice president of Ambulatory Services and chief medical officer of the Duke University Health System (DUHS), has named Adam Perlman, M.D., MPH, the executive director of Duke Integrative Medicine.

In a bizarre way, Jeff Bradford has a car accident to thank for saving his life. After walking away from a crash caused by a drunken driver in July 2009, Bradford woke up the next morning with pain on the left side of his head. “I knew a localized headache was not a good thing,” said Bradford, 33, an attorney who lives in Cary with his wife and three young daughters

Duke University Medical Center is one of five academic medical centers being awarded part of a $10 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Prevention Epicenter Program, which supports efforts to develop and test innovative approaches to reducing infections in health care settings. While investigators from Duke are leading this project in North Carolina, it represents an active collaboration with co-investigators from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Researchers from Upstate New York institutions, including the University at Buffalo, have documented elevated levels of two industrial pollutants in carp in eastern Lake Erie, adding to the body of scientific work demonstrating the lasting environmental effects of human activity and waste disposal on the Great Lakes. The two contaminants the scientists studied were polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), manmade comanic compounds once used in products including motor oils, adhesives, paints, plastics, pigments and dyes, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), a class of flame-retardants found in common household items including furniture, personal computers, consumer electronics and drapes.

The ESHRE Task Force on Ethics and Law acknowledges the benefits that IMAR may bring to those choosing this approach and concludes that certain forms of IMAR are morally acceptable under certain conditions. The group advises to evaluate each request for IMAR individually, based on four ethical principles in health care: the respect for autonomy, beneficence and non-maleficence and justice. The Task Force explains that the right for individual autonomy is elementary: any individual should have the principle of choice with whom to reproduce

A number of states are trying to deal with huge unfunded pension liabilities that threaten to absorb large shares of K-12 education budgets. Because this fiscal crisis may force policymakers to consider teacher retirement benefit system reform, the authors of a newly published journal issue suggest now is the opportune time to examine the consequences of these systems on school staffing and educator quality. Michael Podgursky, a professor of economics in the University of Missouri College of Arts and Science, co-edited, with University of Arkansas Professor Robert Costrell, a special issue of the journal Education Finance and Policy , the official journal of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, which focuses on teacher retirement benefit systems