Subtract 68 from 100 to get a pulse pressure of 42 (Wikiphoto/Creative Commons)
Second in a two-part series on cardiovascular prevention in children. Read part 1.
Carrying too much weight is tough on the body. The dramatic rise of obesity in recent years means more and more people are confronting increased cardiovascular risk due to changes in their blood vessels, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood sugar. And the problem isn’t limited to adults: Today, there are more than three times as many obese children in the U.S. than there were in the early 1970s.
However, not every person with excess weight has cardiac risk factors, and not everyone with cardiac risk factors carries excess weight. So what is the relationship between childhood obesity and cardiac risk factors later in life? What links excess weight to its consequences?
Justin Zachariah, MD, MPH, a cardiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, was inspired to investigate these “risk factors of risk factors” when he observed a pattern in his pediatric preventive cardiology clinic. He noticed that many of his patients who were carrying excess weight did not have very high blood pressure, or hypertension. Full story »
To kick off the final panel of the Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards 2014, moderator Paul Solman (above), business and economics correspondent for PBS Newshour, launched straight into the question: What are we in healthcare doing with big data, and what should we be doing with it?
John Brownstein, PhD, director of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Computational Epidemiology Group and co-founder of HealthMap, said big data has had a significant positive effect on his group’s work. By incorporating social media into their data sets, he noted, they have been able to draw conclusions about large-scale infectious diseases in a matter of weeks.
Sachin Jain, MD, MBA, chief medical Information and innovation officer at Merck, took the role of devil’s advocate, making contrarian points about the “big data revolution.” “We’re not doing enough small data,” he said. “Everyone’s talking about predictive analytics, but they’re not doing basic analytics at the point of care.”
“Why can’t big data inform patient care at the point of care?” retorted panelist Joy Keeler Tobin, chief of health informatics at MITRE. Full story »
The only machine to ever win a TV game show is now transforming the world of healthcare.
After winning Jeopardy in 2011, IBM’s Watson has moved on to bigger and better things. Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President of the IBM Watson Group, told the audience at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards 2014 how the cognitive computing system is being used to synthesize medical data and assist clinicians caring for complex patients.
“We live in an age of information overload,” Rhodin explained. “The challenge is to now turn that information into knowledge.” Full story »
