Children age 4 to 7 in states with booster seat laws appear more likely to be appropriately restrained during car crashes than children in states without booster seat laws, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

When a person fails to complete an advance directive and becomes incapacitated by illness or injury, doctors typically ask the patient's loved one to predict what treatment the patient would have wanted. But a paper in PLoS Medicine reports that a computer-based decision tool can predict a patient's treatment wishes better than a loved one.

Doubts over three influential head injury studies mean that patients are receiving treatment that may be unsound, warn doctors in this week's BMJ.

Expanding waistlines, unsightly bulges: people will gladly remove excess body fat to improve their looks. But unwanted fat also contains stem cells with the potential to repair defects and heal injuries in the body. A team led by Philippe Collas at the University of Oslo in Norway has identified certain chemical marks that allow him to predict which, among the hundreds of millions of stem cells in liposuctioned fat, are best at regenerating tissue.

While seat belts reduce by about 50 percent the risks of injuries and deaths in motor vehicle crashes, results from more than a dozen studies of seatbelt use disparities between Hispanics and non-Hispanics over the years have been strikingly inconsistent.

Many people assume that most people who drink to excess are probably alcoholics.
A recent survey of 4,761 New Mexico adults found that while 16.5 percent drank alcohol in excess of national guidelines, only 1.8 percent met criteria for alcohol dependence.

Leading study author, Dr Jackie Center says: "While women are initially twice as likely as men to have a fracture, once the first break occurs, the risk of a second substantially increases and the protective effects of being male disappear altogether."

Legal liability is a powerful driver that could dramatically hasten the development of personalized medicine, according to a newly published article by genetics and law experts at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

Sleepiness and sleep deprivation have long been associated with an increased risk of injury. However, the results of a recent study by a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher suggest that this commonly accepted theory might not be true.