Troops returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with mental illness are receiving different levels of disability payments from the Department of Veterans Affairs depending on where they live, according to a McClatchy news analysis, McClatchy/Miami Herald reports. [click link for full article]

Deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD) are coming down, but CVD remains the primary cause of death among Americans, said a new report by the American Heart Association (AHA).The report is published in the 17th December early online issue of Circulation, and is compiled by the AHA Statistics Committee and Stroke Statistics Subcommittee. [click link for full article]

Summaries of two reports on the Medicare prescription drug benefit and SCHIP recently released by the Government Accountability Office appear below.Medicare prescription drug benefit: [click link for full article]

Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt (R) on Tuesday said that during the next state Legislative session he will propose nearly $2.5 million in additional funding “specifically dedicated” to expanding health services for more than 80,000 women and increasing access to breast and cervical cancer screenings, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. [click link for full article]

Otsuka Pharmaceutical Development & Commercialization, Inc. announced recently that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has accepted a new drug application (NDA) for the company’s investigational oral once-daily medication tolvaptan, a selective V2-vasopressin receptor antagonist, for two indications: treatment of adults with worsening heart failure and treatment of hyponatremia1. These indications are based on data from three phase 3 pivotal trials2. [click link for full article]

Although hundreds of studies link media violence to aggression in children and adolescents, most public policy attempts to reduce children’s media violence exposure in the U.S. have failed. Efforts to restrict children’s access to violent video games have been struck down by the courts as infringing on children’s First Amendment rights. [click link for full article]

The trend toward fewer conflicts reported by peace researchers since the early 1990s now seems to have been broken. This is shown in the latest annual report “States in Armed Conflict,” from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at the Uppsala University Department of Peace and Conflict Research. The findings worry the researchers. The Middle East is the region where peace initiatives are most conspicuous in their absence. [click link for full article]

Using tiny gold particles embedded with dyes, researchers have shown that they can identify tumors under the skin of a living animal. These tools may allow doctors to detect and diagnose cancer earlier and less invasivelyStudded with antibody fragments called ScFv peptides that bind cancer cells, the gold particles grab onto tumors after their injection into a mouse. [click link for full article]

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a disease with unknown cause with a very severe prognosis; when detected, it is already in an advanced stage. Patients suffering from it cannot develop with normality pulmonary gas exchange, and have a very reduced quality of life. Because of lack of an effective treatment, they rarely survive 5 years after being diagnosed. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis affects 13 out of 100,000 men and 7 out of 100,000 women, normally over 40 years of age. [click link for full article]

Research out of the Ireland Cancer Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center, in collaboration with six integrated health plans that are part of the Cancer Research Network, found that the majority of older women with early stage breast cancer fail to adhere to the standard of treatment - five years of daily oral use of the chemo-prevention drug Tamoxifen. [click link for full article]