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While more businesses continue to shift to remote work, some well-known CEOs remain steadfast against the movement. Naresh Khatri, an associate professor of health management and informatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri, said the success of shifting to remote work depends on the flexibility of the organization to adjust to individual employees and the technology available to them.
As an expert who has published more than 60 research articles and book chapters about organizational structure and management within health care organizations, Khatri said offering remote work as an option to employees can serve as a powerful recruitment tool and one that can be easily implemented by organizations with the right resources. The key is providing strategic and impactful human resource and information technology departments.
“Regardless of where employees are working, these two departments are vital to a healthy workforce,” said Khatri,who recently co-authored a guest editiorial published in Personnel Review . “Many businesses are embracing this newer option because it opens up the potential for more applicants and workers.”
Additionally, Khatri analyzed several studies and found companies with effective HR and IT departments became even stronger when employees were allowed to work from anywhere because the option offered more flexibility. The end result showed that work completed by employees from home was not statistically different from work produced by employees in the office. In fact, no matter where they were working, employees were able to complete collaborative tasks with a similar level of quality and quantity.
“Past research has shown that the performance of remote and in-person workers were not significantly different, even when employees were working on collaborative tasks that depended upon work from other employees,” he said. “In fact, research has also shown that the people working from home exhibit no decline in their ability to collaborate.”
By supporting HR and IT with funding and labor, businesses are better prepared to face issues such as motivation and technical glitches that employees might encounter while working from home, Khatri said.
“To help prevent burnout and inefficient hours, HR practitioners should tailor their motivational practices to ensure they meet the unique needs of their employees, including employees who need to or would like to work from home,” he said. “That takes time and effort, but prior research shows that this support ultimately leads to mutual gains or benefits for both the employees and the company.”
Research also shows that HR offices that continuously explore new ways to implement innovative practices to inspire employees tend to have more success in creating favorable mindset and attitudes in their employees, which Khatri said could help prevent burnout and uncover best practices for individual employees.
“People are different,” he said. “Some are more efficient when working from home, and some are more efficient being around people in the office. Either way, the workforce is changing. Industries are changing, and if companies are preventing people from working from home, they are missing out on a valuable way to expand their profits, their personnel and company health as a whole.”

People who eat diets rich in green leafy vegetables as well as other vegetables, fruits, whole grains, olive oil, beans, nuts and fish may have fewer amyloid plaques and tau tangles in their brain — signs of Alzheimer’s disease — than people who do not consume such diets, according to a study published in the March 8, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The study examined how closely people followed the MIND and Mediterranean diets. While similar, the Mediterranean diet recommends vegetables, fruit, and three or more servings of fish per week while the MIND diet prioritizes green leafy vegetables like spinach, kale and collard greens along with other vegetables. The MIND diet also prioritizes berries over other fruit and recommends one or more servings of fish per week. Both the MIND and Mediterranean diet recommend small amounts of wine.
While this study shows an association of regularly consuming these diets with fewer Alzheimer’s disease plaques and tangles, it does not establish a cause and effect relationship.
“These results are exciting — improvement in people’s diets in just one area — such as eating more than six servings of green leafy vegetables per week, or not eating fried foods — was associated with fewer amyloid plaques in the brain similar to being about four years younger,” said study author Puja Agarwal, PhD, of RUSH University in Chicago. “While our research doesn’t prove that a healthy diet resulted in fewer brain deposits of amyloid plaques, also known as an indicator of Alzheimer’s disease, we know there is a relationship and following the MIND and Mediterranean diets may be one way that people can improve their brain health and protect cognition as they age.”
The study involved 581 people with an average age of 84 at the time of diet assessment who agreed to donate their brains at death to advance research on dementia. Participants completed annual questionnaires asking how much they ate of food items in various categories.
The participants died an average of seven years after the start of the study. Right before death, 39% of participants had been diagnosed with dementia. When examined after death, 66% met the criteria for Alzheimer’s disease.

At autopsy, researchers examined participants’ brains to determine the amounts of amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Both are found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease but may also be found in the brains of older people with normal cognition. Researchers then looked back at the food questionnaires which were collected during follow-up and ranked the quality of diet for each person.
For the Mediterranean diet, there were 11 food categories. Participants were given a score of zero to 55, with higher scores if they adhered to the diet in these categories: whole grain cereals, fruits, vegetables, legumes, olive oil, fish and potatoes. They were given lower scores if they ate red meat, poultry and full-fat dairy products.
For the MIND diet, there were 15 categories. Participants were given a score of zero to 15, with one point each for 10 brain-healthy food groups including green leafy vegetables, other vegetables, nuts, berries, beans, whole grains, fish, poultry, olive oil, and wine. They lost a point if they ate foods more than recommended in five unhealthy food groups, including red meats, butter and margarine, cheese, pastries and sweets, and fried and fast food.
Researchers then divided participants into three groups for each diet and compared those in the highest groups to those in the lowest groups. For the Mediterranean diet, people in the highest group had an average score of 35 while those in the lowest group had an average score of 26. For the MIND diet, the highest group had an average score of 9 while the lowest group had an average score of 6.
After adjusting for age at death, sex, education, total calorie intake and whether people had a gene linked to a greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers found people who scored highest for adhering to the Mediterranean diet had average plaque and tangle amounts in their brains similar to being 18 years younger than people who scored lowest. Researchers also found people who scored highest for adhering to the MIND diet had average plaque and tangle amounts similar to being 12 years younger than those who scored lowest.

A MIND diet score one point higher corresponded to typical plaque amounts of participants who were 4.25 years younger in age.
When looking at single diet components, researchers found people who ate the highest amounts of green leafy vegetables, or seven or more servings per week, had plaque amounts in their brains corresponding to being almost 19 years younger than people who ate the fewest, with one or fewer servings per week.
“Our finding that eating more green leafy vegetables is in itself associated with fewer signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain is intriguing enough for people to consider adding more of these vegetables to their diet,” said Agarwal. “Future studies are needed to establish our findings further.”
A limitation of the study was that participants were mostly white, non-Hispanic, and older so the results cannot be generalized to other populations.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

In the first step toward understanding how dogs — and perhaps humans — might adapt to intense environmental pressures such as exposure to radiation, heavy metals, or toxic chemicals, researchers atNorth Carolina State, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, and the National Institutes of Healthfound thattwo groups of dogs living within the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, one at the site of the former Chornobyl reactors, and another 16.5 km away in Chornobyl City, showed significant genetic differences between them. The results indicate that these are two distinct populations that rarely interbreed. While earlier studiesfocused on the effects of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster on various species of wildlife, this is the firstinvestigation into the genetic structure of stray dogs living near the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.
The 1986 Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster displaced more than 300,000 people living nearby and led to the establishment of an Exclusion Zone, a “no man’s land” of an approximately 30 km radius surrounding the damaged reactor complex, While a massive steam explosion releasing enormous amounts of ionizing radiation into the air, water, and soil was the direct cause of the catastrophe, radiation exposure is not the only environmental hazard resulting from the disaster. Chemicals, toxic metals, pesticides, and organic compounds left behind by years-long cleanup efforts and from abandoned and decaying structures, including the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat and the Duga-1 military base, all contribute to an ecological and environmental disaster.
“Somehow, two small populations of dogs managed to survive in that highly toxic environment,” noted Norman J. Kleiman, PhD, assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and a co-author. “In addition to classifying the population dynamics within these dogs at both locations, we took the first steps towards understanding how chronic exposure to multiple environmental hazards may have impacted these populations.”
“The overarching question here is: does an environmental disaster of this magnitude have a genetic impact on life in the region?” says Matthew Breen, Oscar J. Fletcher Distinguished Professor of Comparative Oncology Genetics at NC State, and a corresponding author. “And we have two populations of dogs living at and near the site of a major environmental disaster that may provide key information to help us answer that question.”
Earlier research by the co-authors, led by collaborators at NIH, used a much smaller set of genetic variants, but a larger number of dogs, to show that the two populations were separate and that each had complicated family structures.
In this parallel study, the team analyzed the dog DNA samples with four times the number of genetic variants, which provided a closer look at the genomes. In addition to confirming that the two populations are indeed genetically distinct, the team were also able to identify 391 outlier regions in the genomes of the dogs that differed between dogs living at the two locations. “Think of these regions as markers, or signposts, on a highway,” Breen says. “They identify areas within the genome where we should look more closely at nearby genes. Moreover, some of these markers are pointing to genes associated with genetic repair; specifically, with genetic repair after exposures similar to those experienced by the dogs in Chornobyl.” He went on to say “at this stage we cannot say for sure that any genetic alterations are in response to the multigenerational and complex exposures; we have a lot more work to do to determine if that is the case”
“The question we must answer now are why are there striking genetic differences between the two dog populations?” says Megan Dillion, PhD candidate at NC State and a lead author of the published study. “Are the differences just due to genetic drift, or are they due to the unique environmental stressors at each location?”
“The dog is a sentinel species,” Breen says. “By and teasing out whether or not the genetic changes we detected in these dogs are the canine genome’s response to the exposures the populations have faced, we may be able to understand how the dogs survived in such a hostile environment and what that might mean for any population — animal or human — that experiences similar exposures.”
“Though 37 years have passed since the accident, the ~30-year-long half-lives of lingering radioisotopes means the danger posed by radiation exposure is still very much real,” notes Kleiman, who is also director of the Columbia University Radiation Safety Officer Training course. “When radiation exposure is combined with a complex toxic chemical mixture of uncertain composition, there are very real human health concerns raised for the thousands of people who continue to work within the Exclusion Zone on continuing cleanup efforts as well as at two newly constructed nuclear fuel reprocessing plants.”
“Understanding the genetic and health impacts of these chronic exposures in the dogs will strengthen our broader understanding of how these types of environmental hazards can impact humans and how best to mitigate health risks.”

A cyberattack on the District of Columbia’s online health insurance marketplace may have compromised identifying data of many members of Congress and other users.The online health insurance marketplace for members of Congress and Washington, D.C., residents was subjected to a hack that compromised the personal identifying information of potentially thousands of lawmakers, their spouses, dependents and employees, according to a letter from House leaders informing their colleagues about the breach and a memo from the Senate’s top security official.The Capitol Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, of the attack on the D.C. Health Link marketplace. Federal investigators had been able to purchase personal information about members of Congress and their families on the “dark web” because of the breach, the letter said.“Right now, our top priority is protecting the safety and security of anyone in the Capitol Hill community affected by the cyber hack,” Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Jeffries wrote on Wednesday, calling the incident an “egregious security breach.”“The Office of the Chief Administrative Officer will be in contact with important resources including credit and identity theft monitoring services, which we strongly encourage you to utilize,” the lawmakers wrote.The data of senators and their staffs were also compromised, according to an internal memo from the Senate sergeant-at-arms. That memo stated that the compromised data included “full names, date of enrollment, relationship (self, spouse, child), and email address, but no other personally identifiable information.”The cause, size and scope of the data breach affecting D.C. Health Link was not immediately known, according to the House leaders, who wrote that they were “being consistently briefed” about the matter by the police and the F.B.I.But the online health insurance marketplace serves about 11,000 members of Congress and their staffs, and nearly 100,000 people overall.“This breach significantly increases the risk that members, staff, and their families will experience identity theft, financial crimes, and physical threats — already an ongoing concern,” Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Jeffires wrote. “Fortunately, the individuals selling the information appear unaware of the high-level sensitivity of the confidential information in their possession, and its relation to members of Congress. This will certainly change as media reports more widely publicize the breach.”House leaders are now demanding answers from Mila Kofman, the director of the D.C. Health Benefit Exchange Authority, a private-public partnership responsible for the District of Columbia’s online health insurance marketplace. Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Jeffries sent a series of pointed questions to Ms. Kofman on Wednesday.Among them were why the insurance market had not formally alerted individuals whose data was compromised; what specific enrollee information was stolen; and how many lawmakers were impacted.In a statement on Wednesday evening, Adam Hudson, a spokesman for the authority, confirmed the breach, saying that “data for some D.C. Health Link customers has been exposed on a public forum.”Mr. Hudson said the agency had begun an investigation.“Concurrently, we are taking action to ensure the security and privacy of our users’ personal information,” Mr. Hudson said. “We are in the process of notifying impacted customers and will provide identity and credit monitoring services.”

A cyberattack on the District of Columbia’s online health insurance marketplace may have compromised identifying data of many members of Congress and other users.The online health insurance marketplace for members of Congress and Washington, D.C., residents was subjected to a hack that compromised the personal identifying information of potentially thousands of lawmakers, their spouses, dependents and employees, according to a letter from House leaders informing their colleagues about the breach and a memo from the Senate’s top security official.The Capitol Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, of the attack on the D.C. Health Link marketplace. Federal investigators had been able to purchase personal information about members of Congress and their families on the “dark web” because of the breach, the letter said.“Right now, our top priority is protecting the safety and security of anyone in the Capitol Hill community affected by the cyber hack,” Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Jeffries wrote on Wednesday, calling the incident an “egregious security breach.”“The Office of the Chief Administrative Officer will be in contact with important resources including credit and identity theft monitoring services, which we strongly encourage you to utilize,” the lawmakers wrote.The data of senators and their staffs were also compromised, according to an internal memo from the Senate sergeant-at-arms. That memo stated that the compromised data included “full names, date of enrollment, relationship (self, spouse, child), and email address, but no other personally identifiable information.”The cause, size and scope of the data breach affecting D.C. Health Link was not immediately known, according to the House leaders, who wrote that they were “being consistently briefed” about the matter by the police and the F.B.I.But the online health insurance marketplace serves about 11,000 members of Congress and their staffs, and nearly 100,000 people overall.“This breach significantly increases the risk that members, staff, and their families will experience identity theft, financial crimes, and physical threats — already an ongoing concern,” Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Jeffires wrote. “Fortunately, the individuals selling the information appear unaware of the high-level sensitivity of the confidential information in their possession, and its relation to members of Congress. This will certainly change as media reports more widely publicize the breach.”House leaders are now demanding answers from Mila Kofman, the director of the D.C. Health Benefit Exchange Authority, a private-public partnership responsible for the District of Columbia’s online health insurance marketplace. Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Jeffries sent a series of pointed questions to Ms. Kofman on Wednesday.Among them were why the insurance market had not formally alerted individuals whose data was compromised; what specific enrollee information was stolen; and how many lawmakers were impacted.In a statement on Wednesday evening, Adam Hudson, a spokesman for the authority, confirmed the breach, saying that “data for some D.C. Health Link customers has been exposed on a public forum.”Mr. Hudson said the agency had begun an investigation.“Concurrently, we are taking action to ensure the security and privacy of our users’ personal information,” Mr. Hudson said. “We are in the process of notifying impacted customers and will provide identity and credit monitoring services.”

Published37 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, ReutersMedical charity Doctors Without Borders says gang violence in Haiti’s capital has forced the temporary closure of its hospital in Port-au-Prince.It said that patients and staff at its facility in the Cité Soleil district had been put at risk.Haitians looking for treatment had become collateral victims of warfare just metres from the hospital, it said.Gang violence and kidnappings in Haiti have risen sharply since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021.The Caribbean nation has been facing a growing economic crisis. The charity, commonly known by its French abbreviation MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), made the move after heavily armed gangs expanded their territory to new areas in Port-au-Prince and nearby towns.Several schools have also closed as kidnappings increase.Earlier this year, an MSF-backed public hospital located south of the capital also closed after a patient was killed by a bullet as he left the emergency room.Inside the capital taken hostage by brutal gangsHaiti gangs: Three churchgoers kidnapped after MassUS arrests four over Haiti leader’s assassinationCité Soleil, an impoverished neighbourhood on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital, now has just one private hospital and one other MSF operation, which is reducing operations.Vincent Harris, a medical adviser for the aid group, said: “We are living scenes of warfare just meters [yards] from the establishment.”Our hospital has not been directly targeted but we have been a collateral victim of the fighting since the hospital found itself on the frontline.”Field communication manager Alexandre Marcou said a child who was on oxygen had died in a security room, where patients are sent for protection from gunfire around the building.A 70-year-old man had also been found shot as he tried to cross the street to the hospital.Haiti has been led by Prime Minister Ariel Henry since Moïse’s death, but he has failed to rein in the gangs which control much of the capital.Mr Henry has repeatedly called for the deployment of an international force to help police in their fight against the criminal gangs.So far, no country has offered to lead such a force, while Mr Henry says it is key to providing security so that long-postponed elections can be held.This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.More on this storyHaiti gangs: Three churchgoers kidnapped after Mass13 FebruaryUS arrests four over Haiti leader’s assassination14 FebruaryInside the capital taken hostage by brutal gangs5 December 2022

A review of poisonings among children 5 and younger found that opioids contributed to nearly half of deaths from 2005 to 2018, largely from accidental overdoses, according to new research.Opioids were the leading cause of fatal poisonings among children age 5 years old and younger in recent years, a study has found, underscoring how the opioid epidemic has not spared children.The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics, analyzed 731 poisoning-related deaths that occurred from 2005 to 2018 across 40 states. The authors found that opioids, a class of synthetic drugs that includes prescribed pain relievers but also illegal narcotics such as heroin and fentanyl, contributed to nearly half, or 47 percent, of those deaths.About 41 percent of these poisoning deaths resulted from accidental overdoses, according to the study, which described 18 percent as “deliberate” poisonings.And over the 14-year period from 2005 to 2018, the frequency of pediatric opioid poisonings steadily rose, accounting for more than half of child poisoning fatalities in 2018, the authors concluded.“Strikingly, opioids accounted for a progressively greater proportion of the substances contributing to poisoning-related deaths over the study period, from 24 percent in 2005 to 52 percent in 2018,” the authors wrote, adding that this data emphasized the “increasing impact of the opioid epidemic on children.”The authors’ findings point to a shifting landscape of potential opiate exposure for children. In the last decade, children were not just exposed to the usual prescription opioids, but also surrounded by “new opioid sources,” such as heroin and synthetic opiates such as fentanyl and buprenorphine, a drug used in medication-assisted treatments to curb opiate reliance, the study said. These nonprescription opioids are not subject to long-established federal safeguards mandating child-resistant packaging for medicines.“As the burden of nonprescription opioids increases in our nation’s communities, there are more opportunities for children to be exposed to them, sometimes fatally,” Dr. Christopher E. Gaw, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the study’s lead author, said in an interview.The study cited statistics from the National Center for Fatality Review and Prevention.About 42 percent of the 731 fatalities were among infants one year old and younger and most of the incidents occurred in the child’s home, the study found. Many of the fatal poisonings happened while the child was supervised and nearly 100 of the children had open child protective services cases at the time of their deaths, the authors said.Over-the-counter pain, cold and allergy medications were the second most common substance contributing to the pediatric poisoning deaths. These accounted for about 15 percent and most often affected children two years old and younger, according to the study.Dr. Gaw said the results provide evidence of “how the opioid epidemic has not spared our nation’s infants or young children.” He said that prevention efforts could focus on boosting availability and familiarity with naloxone and better educating caregivers on the signs of poisoning.“There are so many toxic substances in our world that could harm children,” Dr. Gaw said. “It is truly striking how just one class of substances was implicated so frequently in child poisoning deaths.”

People with a recent diagnosis of atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common irregular heart rhythm, have a modestly higher risk of developing dementia than people without the condition, according to research published today.
“Previous studies that have examined the link between atrial fibrillation and dementia have yielded conflicting results, and we hope that our study’s large sample size helps to establish confidence in our findings,” said Dr. Nisha Bansal, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “The study also included a community based, diverse population, which may increase the generalizability of our findings.”
Bansal was corresponding author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Atrial fibrillation, typically a very rapid heart rhythm, can spur blood clots in the heart, increasing someone’s risk for stroke and heart failure, and shorten lifespan.
“We know that atrial fibrillation is one of the strongest risk factors for ischemic stroke, but whether atrial fibrillation increases the risk of developing dementia independent of having a stroke has been unclear,” said senior author Dr. Alan S. Go, a senior research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. “If it does, it would have important clinical and public health implications given that atrial fibrillation is becoming more common nationally and internationally.”
The research spanned 2010 to 2017 and involved nearly 197,000 patient records from Kaiser Permanente health systems in California. Half of the patients had been recently diagnosed with atrial fibrillation; their counterparts in the control group were selected for similar age and health profiles but did not have AF. Both patient groups’ medical records were reviewed for three years, on average, to identify subsequent diagnoses of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

Overall, people with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation had a 13% higher risk of developing dementia. That risk appeared to be amplified in people whose AF diagnosis came before 65 years of age (65% higher risk) and people who did not have chronic kidney disease (20% higher risk). No such significant differences in risk were seen in patients’ sex, race or ethnicity.
The researchers used a methodology to mitigate the influence of other medical conditions also known to heighten dementia risk, Bansal said. So it was a surprise, she added, to find greater risk among relatively younger patients and those without kidney disease. As a nephrologist, Bansal is particularly interested in the influence of kidney disease on total body health.
“You don’t think about ostensibly healthier people being at a higher risk for serious health conditions — especially for a disease like dementia,” Bansal said.
The findings also show that risks of complications related to atrial fibrillation are not uniform in all patients, she said.
“Many people with atrial fibrillation will not develop dementia, but I think this is a conversation a patient with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation needs to have with their doctor, weighing their potential individual risk of developing dementia, as well as weighing the risks and benefits of treating the atrial fibrillation.”
Bansal said the next stages of this research will aim to better understand the biological mechanisms linking atrial fibrillation and dementia, and studying whether different AF therapies — for instance, catheter ablation of the heart muscle vs. medication — affect patients’ trajectories for dementia and other complications.
The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (R01 HL142834) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health funded this work. The authors’ conflict-of-interest statements are in the published paper, which will be provided to journalists upon request.