Conclusion: Severe OSA is associated with cardiovascular death in women, and adequate CPAP treatment may reduce this risk.

via Cardiovascular Mortality in Women With Obstructive Sleep Apnea With or Without Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Treatment.

BMJ Group blogs: BMJ » Blog Archive » Richard Lehman’s journal review – 16 January 2012.

BMJ Group blogs: BMJ » Blog Archive » Richard Lehman’s journal review – 23 January 2012.

BMJ Group blogs: BMJ » Blog Archive » Richard Lehman’s journal review – 30 January 2012.

via Liberty Life renamed Athene Annuity & Life Assurance | Insurance & Financial Advisor I IFAwebnews.com.

Specifically, authors of “Primary Care Attributes and Mortality: A National Person-Level Study” found that patients who reported three attributes in their usual source of care — comprehensiveness, patient-centeredness and enhanced access — had lower mortality during up to six years follow-up than patients reporting less access to those three attributes.

via Patient Access to Core Attributes of Primary Care Linked to Lower Mortality — AAFP News Now — American Academy of Family Physicians.

If you have a job or are pursuing a certain career primarily because you think you should, or because others think you should, you are making a huge mistake. You need to understand that if you keep doing this, you are never going to be truly happy. You need to be living the life and having the career that makes you happy. The voices that you hear inside yourself, which tell you to pursue a certain profession or be a certain thing, are often not your own voice. They are the voices of your parents; they are the voices of your peers in school; they are the voices of the people you associate with at work.

via Job Search Guru | A Harrison Barnes, Career Advice, Job Search, Change In Profession | Harrison Barnes | Try the Career Coaching Club!.

Why do you do what you do?  Easy question but sometimes you may not like the answer.

Spin enough plates and soon you will end up keeping the plates spinning instead of finding new plates to spin.

Seth Godin

How many plates are you spinning?

Advice to people at the beginning of their careers: do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant. Grab every opportunity to take responsibility and do things for which you are unqualified.

Advice to people at the middle of their careers: do not be afraid to switch careers and try something new. As my friend the physicist Leo Szilard said (number nine in his list of ten commandments): “Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.”

via THE 60-YEAR JOB: FREEMAN DYSON | More Intelligent Life.

I really wanted to post this when I first read the article.  But I was in Chicago, sitting in a Cosi, working on a laptop that should have been replaced five years ago.  I didn’t have my usual software tools, but I digress.  I loved this advice and I know you’ll love it too.

The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.

The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.

via Tablet and E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Faithful followers are aware this author abandoned his Read a Book a Week project sometime in 2011.  Workload got very busy so I ultimately had to trade non-work reading time for revenue.  Not a bad trade-off but I still miss my recreational reading time.

I’ve owned a Kindle for over a year now and received a smart phone this past Christmas.  I can now access my Kindle books on my phone.  We’ll see if this helps me read more books this year.

Click through to the Pew website where you can download a PDF copy of this study.

via Medical News: 50-Year-Olds Get New Knees in Record Numbers – in Surgery, Orthopedics from MedPage Today.

Knee replacement cost – cost of knee replacement surgery.

After reading about the dramatic increase in the number of knee replacements I did a Google search for “average cost knee replacement” without the quotation marks in the search string.  At the top of page one was the second link above.

Taiwan anyone?

Thankfully, we’ve learned from our mistakes. Opening blocked vessels is useful in really only two general areas:

Heart attack, where the rule of thumb is to open the tightest blockage (we refer to it as the “infarct-related artery”) and leave the rest as is.

Symptomatic blockages such as the 99% plug that caused my patient his troubles. If, on the other hand, a person has no chest pain or breathing difficulty associated with the disease, we provide no benefit by uncorking it—even if the blockage is 100%.

via Meaningful treatments in the battle against coronary disease.