Following up on a study that found widespread failures in simulated child resuscitation among emergency room staff, a research team from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and Duke University Medical Center reports that it doesn’t take much more than a mock trauma drill to diagnose the shortcomings and brief refreshers to get ER workers’ performance sharp again.

Socioeconomic status, and unemployment rates in particular, predict both the type of trauma seen in emergency rooms and the population groups more likely to be victims of trauma, according to Atul Madan (1) from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and his team. Their findings have just been published online in Springer’s World Journal of Surgery.

The first study to examine brain activity patterns in severely traumatized children showed their brains function differently than those of healthy children, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

Scientists studying one of nature’s simplest organisms have helped to unravel the structure of a key molecule that controls pain in humans.

Australian healthcare professionals were able to offer better mental health support to the victims of the 2005 Bali bombings, thanks to improved procedures and services introduced after the first explosions in 2002, according to the May issue of the UK-based Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing.

Exposure to trauma may create enough changes in the brain to sensitize people to overreact to an innocuous facial gesture years later, even in people who don't have a stress-related disorder, says new research. It appears that proximity to high-intensity traumas can have long lasting effects on the brain and behavior of healthy people without causing a current clinical disorder.