Grand Rounds 5.14 Holiday Edition

Seasons Greetings! Welcome to the Holiday Edition of Grand Rounds, featuring some of the best articles of the biomedical and healthcare blogosphere.

There’s a revolution occurring on the Web: those “authoritative” articles written on traditional, static websites are being replaced with blogs, wikis and online social networks. In the sphere of health, medicine and information technology, this “real-time Web” consists of many who are professionals in the field; their posts are listed below.
In the digital age, these are the characteristics of new media: recent, relevant, reachable and reliable.

At this time last year, I announced the Highlight HEALTH Network, a single source that aggregates content from all the Highlight HEALTH websites. This year, I have a similar gift for biomedical and healthcare blogosphere readers:

Health and Medicine blog carnival email and RSS subscriptions!

More Education Decreases the Risk of Death

Everyone knows that a good education is important for getting a good job. Now researchers are finding that being well-educated can lengthen your life. The study, published earlier this month in the journal PLoS ONE, finds that socioeconomic inequalities in the U.S. death rate between people with less than a high school education and college graduates increased from 1993 to 2001 [1]. The widening gap is due to (i) significant decreases in mortality from all causes, heart disease, cancer, stroke and other conditions, in the most educated and (ii) unchanged or increasing death rates in the least educated.