LOS ANGELES TIMES - Participants without physical activity trackers showed nearly twice the weight loss benefits at the end of the 24 months. Participants who used wearable devices reported an average weight loss of 7.7 pounds, while those who partook only in health counseling reported an average loss of 13 pounds, according to researchers WENDY KING, ABDUS WAHED, and STEVEN BELLE.
DEAN BURKE led a session at today's ASPPH Annual Meeting on "Forecasting and Deflecting the Opioid Epidemic Curve" with a projection of likely opioid overdose deaths based on biostatistical data gathered by JEANINE BUCHANICH and the Mortality Information and Research Analytics (MOIRA) system, a repository and retrieval system for detailed death data from the National Center for Health Statistics developed here (named for the Fates of Greek myth).
Dozens of Pitt Public Health grads from the capital area gathered at Penn Social during the 2017 ASPPH annual meeting, joining Dean Burke and host faculty for hearty conversations and refreshments. If the forecast of snow scared you away, we missed you! Access our photo albums anytime at www.publichealth.pitt.edu/flickr.
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION - Associate professor ROBERT KRAFTY and coauthors including Pitt's Sleep and Chronobiology Center introduce a new method to unlock information collected by devices that monitor activity during sleep. The study uncovered new connections between heart rate patterns of older adults serving as primary caregivers for their spouse and the amount of time they are able to spend in bed during the night.
INSIDEUPMC - Senior associate dean, geneticist, and biostatistician ELEANOR FEINGOLD contributed to this interdisciplinary research team's findings: measures of eye, nose, and facial breadth could be associated with genetic variants in certain regions of the genome. In several of these regions, genes known to contribute to facial development or implicated in birth defects where the face is affected were found. However, because many genes affect f...
NY TIMES / JAMA - Epidemiology and biostatistics researchers WENDY KING, ABDUS WAHED, and STEVEN BELLE contributed to a two-year Pitt-led study which found that people who used wearable fitness devices for 18 months lost significantly less weight than those who didn’t. At the end of the IDEA Trial, study participants "without access to the wearable technology lost an average of 13 pounds. Those with the wearable tech lost an average of 7.7 pound...
The Department of Biostatistics is pleased to announce the promotion of JEANINE M. BUCHANICH Ph.D., M.Ed., to research associate professor. Buchanich joined the faculty of Pitt Public Health in 2008 in the department of Biostatistics. Dr. Buchanich is leading an initiative to make a Pitt Public Health-held mortality repository more accessible to public health professionals and stakeholders. As part of this effort, she has investigated mortality t...
ABDUS S. WAHED presented a plenary speech and provided a three-hour workshop at the International Conference on Repeated Measures, organized by the East West University of Bangladesh.
STAT NEWS -- There’s no shortage of explanations for Donald Trump’s victory, but one possibility is that Trump voters viewed the election as a life-or-death matter. Using data from Pitt Public Health’s Mortality and Population Data System (MOIRA), researchers found that Trump swept the 16 states with the highest mortality rates, while people in 15 of the 18 states with lowest mortality voted for Clinton...
THE INQUIRER / PHILLY.COM - Last weekend's frightening and widely reported string of overdoses in Philadelphia — nine deaths in 36 hours , according to police — was just part of what officials suspect was a devastating five days that left 35 people dead. It started Dec. 1, when 12 people died between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. [Pitt Public Health's Jeanine Buchanich responds to Philadelphia's disturbing spike in overdose deaths.]