(msn) As many as 90% of people suffering from depression in late life are not getting the care they need. The suicide rate in adults age 75 and older is a shocking 1½ times the average — higher than that of any other group, including teenagers. Elderly people receiving home care are twice as likely to suffer major depression as those in nursing homes. A whopping 78% of them receive no treatment at all. Patients diagnosed with major depression spend almost twice as much money on their health care as patients who don't have the disease.  More...

(healthday) If you arrive in an emergency room in significant pain, you are less likely to be prescribed a narcotic to ease that pain if you are not white, new research shows. The reasons for the disparity aren't clear, but there's no doubt that minorities don't get effective pain treatment in the ER as often as whites do, said study author Dr. Mark Pletcher, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. "There's no difference in the pain severity or types of pain that people are presenting with, but the difference is there consistently. " To come to this conclusion, Pletcher and his colleagues examined reports from a national survey about visits to emergency rooms between 1993 and 2005.  More...

(BBN Editors: Questions and answers about CT Scans) (unwr) A new report in the New England Journal of Medicine raises serious concerns about the use, and overuse, of CT scanning. While individual risks of developing cancer from a CT scan, which emits high doses of radiation, are relatively low, the researchers worry that their rapid growth as a highly accurate diagnostic tool is exposing too much of the population—and an increasing amount of vulnerable children—to radiation and might be setting the stage for higher incidence of cancer in years to come. Around 62 million scans are performed per year, compared with only 3 million in 1980. Moreover, the researchers estimate that a third of those CT scans are entirely unnecessary—many of them now performed by cautious doctors on worried people with no symptoms at all. How is a CT scan different from a traditional X-ray? When is a CT scan definitely warranted? How should judgment factor in? What are the risks involved in CT scanning? Is that happening? What are some alternatives to CT scanning that patients should know about or ask their doctors? How do you prevent redundant CT scans and help patients to keep track of the scans they've already had? Are CT scans useful for asymptomatic patients? .  More...