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Aviation and medicine both require professionals to hold peoples’ lives in their hands. Now, study findings hint that hospitals may improve patient safety by drawing on aviation-type safety initiatives.

When medicine “turns its eyes to the sky,” patient safety on the ground may improve, Dr. Harry C. Sax, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, noted in a telephone interview with Reuters Health.

Pre-flight checklists and non-punitive incident reporting are measures that significantly minimize aviation accidents, Sax and colleagues point out in the Archives of Surgery.

In their study, they assessed how hospital staff at a 722-bed university hospital and a 247-bed community hospital implemented and felt about similar safety initiatives.

The hospitals trained a total of 857 hospital staff with the “Lessons from the Cockpit” training course as one of their safety initiatives. The course highlights team safety-enhancing efforts used in aviation and how similar efforts may have benefit in other industries.

Immediate post-training surveys revealed that staff were more willing to commit themselves to team efforts to improve patient safety and to effectively confront their own mistakes and those of other technicians, nurses, and physicians.

Additional surveys, completed a minimum of 2 months after training, hinted that staff maintained their sense of “personal empowerment” in regards to patient safety initiatives, Sax commented in a telephone interview with Reuters Health.

Sax and colleagues also found that use of pre-surgery checklists increased from 75 percent in 2003 to 100 percent in 2007 in hospitals that utilized the training course.

Moreover, the community hospital that additionally implemented a Web-based, self-reporting incident and error system modeled after the non-punitive Aviation Safety Reporting System administered by the National Air and Space Administration, saw a marked increase in staff self-reporting of errors.

Per-quarter, self-reports of errors and incidents increased from 709 in 2002 to 1,481 in 2008.

The researchers continue to collect information to better determine which aspects of the course maintain their impact over one-year and which specific measures yield the most benefit in terms of increased patient safety.

Baby aspirin taken for high-risk pregnancy complications does not appear to harm brain development among very premature children assessed when 5 years old, according to a French study. It may actually have some benefit, the study hints.

As this was an observational study, Dr. Stephane Marret from Rouen University Hospital, cautioned in an email to Reuters Health, “it is necessary to confirm our data in other studies.”

Moreover, physicians and pregnant women must always appreciate the potential impact on the developing baby of medications given to mothers during pregnancy, Marret added.

Doctors sometimes recommend baby aspirin to pregnant women at high risk for certain complications. Marret and colleagues assessed the outcomes of 656 infants born prior to 33 weeks of pregnancy to 584 women with pregnancy-related complications, such as high blood pressure, or kidney or immune problems. A total of 125 of these women took low-dose (baby) aspirin for about 12 to 13 weeks while pregnant, the researchers note in the journal Pediatrics.

In outcome assessments conducted 5 years later, Marret’s team found no significant association with any infant or child outcome measures and use of low-dose aspirin during pregnancy.

Among the infants in the study, rates of stillbirth, neonatal death, brain bleeding, and brain injury were similar in baby aspirin-exposed and non-exposed groups.

After allowing for other associated social and medical factors, the researchers likewise noted no neurological impairments associated with low-dose aspirin exposure among the 341 children available for physical, neurological, and psychological examination at the age of 5 years.

Actually, Marret and colleagues saw a trend toward lesser rates of behavioral impairment among the children exposed to low-dose aspirin. Just 12 and 7 percent of this group had hyperactive and conduct problems, respectively, compared with 23 and 14 percent of those not exposed.

The investigators also noted lower overall rates of emotional and peer problems among children exposed to baby aspirin in the womb.

These findings warrant further clinical investigation, Marret and colleagues conclude, particularly in light of a potential neurological benefit among children exposed to low-dose aspirin during gestation.

New study findings offer reassurance to pregnant women that acetaminophen does not appear to raise the risk of birth defects.

Acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Tylenol and certain other painkillers, and is often found in over-the-counter cold and flu remedies. Taken as directed, acetaminophen is considered safe during pregnancy, making it the medication of choice for pregnant women’s body aches and fevers.

However, there are still some questions about whether the drug can contribute to birth defects. Studies looking at birth defects as a broad group have either found no link to acetaminophen use or have yielded inconclusive findings.

Some research, meanwhile, has suggested that the drug may be linked to a higher risk of a birth defect called gastroschisis — but other studies have found no such connection. Gastroschisis refers to a defect in the abdominal wall that allows the intestines to protrude; it has been linked to aspirin use during pregnancy.

In the new study, researchers analyzed data from a large U.S. study that included more than 11,600 children born with congenital defects such as spina bifida, cleft lip and various defects affecting the brain, heart, lungs, limbs and gastrointestinal system. They were compared with 4,500 children born with no major anomaly.

Overall, the study found, there was no evidence linking mothers’ acetaminophen use in the first trimester to a heightened risk of any birth defect.

In fact, women who took the medication to treat a first-trimester fever had a lower risk of certain birth defects — including gastroschisis — than women who did not treat their fevers with acetaminophen.

Researchers led by Dr. Marcia L. Feldkamp, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, report the findings in the January 2010 issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The findings, according to the researchers, show that there is “little evidence that single-ingredient acetaminophen increases the risk of a broad range of birth defects.”

They also raise the “intriguing” possibility that lowering a first-trimester fever with acetaminophen cuts the risk of certain defects, Feldkamp’s team writes.

Among women who had fevers in early pregnancy, babies born to those who used acetaminophen had a 65 percent to 83 percent lower risk of certain birth defects of the brain, a 56 percent lower risk of cleft lip and a 59 percent lower risk of gastroschisis.

The researchers note that hyperthermia, or excessively high body temperature, has been implicated in the risks of certain birth defects. More studies, they conclude, are needed to confirm whether treating fevers with acetaminophen does in fact prevent some birth defects.

Drivers who text-message are putting themselves and others in danger as they switch their attention between two complex tasks, a new study confirms.

Researchers who placed young adults in a virtual driving simulator found that the gap between the driver’s car and the car ahead shrank when texting came into the mix, but the driver’s reaction times slowed.

The result: Drivers who were texting were six times more likely to be involved in a virtual ‘crash’ than those who were concentrating just on driving.

Texting seemed to raise the danger factor for drivers more than talking on a cell phone, the researchers noted.

While talking on a cell phone, “drivers apparently attempt to divide attention between a phone conversation and driving, adjusting the processing priority of the two activities, depending on task demands,” wrote the research team, led by Frank Drews, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Utah.

Texting, on the other hand, requires drivers to switch their attention completely to that task, and away from driving, they found, and this made for slower reaction and braking times.

In addition, they found that reading text messages proved more distracting than composing messages.

In the study, reported in the journal Human Factors, Drew and his colleagues had 20 male and female drivers, 19 to 23 years old, engage in either driving or driving while texting in a “high-fidelity [driving] simulator.” All of the participants were experienced texters.

The team found that drivers’ median reaction time increased by 9 percent while they were on a cell phone, vs. 30 percent while texting, compared with the driving-only condition. At the same time, the “minimum following distance” between themselves and the virtual car ahead shrank.

Numerous U.S. cities have banned texting while driving after accidents linked to the practice began to rise.