A major, USC-led study of more than 214,000 older adults across 14 countries and regions finds that the most common controllable risk factors for dementia — such as low education, high blood pressure and smoking — vary widely from country to country, meaning a one-size-fits-all approach to prevention won’t work everywhere.

Bradley A. Maron, MD, Senior Associate Dean for Precision Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), has been named editor-in-chief of Circulation, the American Heart Association's flagship peer-reviewed journal and one of the world's leading scientific publications in cardiovascular medicine. In his new role, Dr. Maron will help shape the journal's editorial direction and its ongoing publication of rigorous, practice-changing science for clinicians and researchers worldwide.

The University of Stuttgart has once again achieved the highest possible score in the “Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure” category of the Times Higher Education (THE) global sustainability rating and is ranked first worldwide.

Penn State College of Medicine received a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the Human Resources and Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to support a new street medicine program that will serve unsheltered populations in both urban and rural areas in southcentral Pennsylvania and to train the next generation of physicians in street medicine.

A new statistical tool could help researchers and practitioners determine when personalized treatments, educational programs, or recommendations are truly worth the extra cost and complexity, according to a new study. The findings offer a rigorous tool to identify when tailoring interventions is likely to outperform more conventional one-size-fits-all approaches. Personalized interventions are increasingly used in fields such as medicine, education, marketing, economics, and computer science because individuals often respond differently to the same treatment or support. However, personalized interventions are more expensive, often require more data, and can be more difficult to implement than universal interventions. There are very few tools to evaluate and identify scenarios when the added cost and complexity of personalization are justified by meaningful improvements in outcomes. To address this, Zhaoqi Li and Emma Brunskill developed a statistical hypothesis test – the K-fold Personalization Test (KPT) – that analyzes existing datasets to evaluate whether a personalized intervention policy is expected to outperform the best universal intervention. Unlike previous methods, the test accommodates multiple interventions, many individual characteristics, and flexible machine learning models while maintaining rigorous statistical guarantees, including control of false-positive (Type I) error. Across four datasets spanning job training, depression treatment, education, and marketing systems, the authors found that the KPT approach consistently demonstrated broad applicability and outperformed previous statistical methods for evaluating personalization. Li and Brunskill note, however, that the test evaluates personalization only within a user-specified class of decision policies and does not identify the optimal personalized policy itself. Yet even with these limitations, the KPT provides a rigorous and broadly applicable framework for helping researchers and practitioners determine when personalization is likely to deliver meaningful benefits.

In K-12 schools across the country, administrators are tasked with keeping everyone safe. New research shows they may be the most in need of protection.

In a study published this week in Psychology of Violence, researchers surveyed school personnel prior to the onset of COVID-19, during the height of COVID restrictions and after most restrictions had been lifted, and their findings surprised them: Administrators were more likely than teachers or school mental health professionals to experience verbal and threatening aggression from parents. After restrictions lifted, 77% of administrators reported such experiences, nearly 3.5 times the rate reported by teachers.

About The Study: In this cohort study of California public high schools, sustained availability of a dedicated health course was associated with modestly lower prevalence in several common forms of adolescent substance use. These findings suggest that sustained, dedicated health coursework may be a scalable component of school-based substance use prevention.

The University of Texas at Arlington’s Smart Hospital has been granted accreditation in teaching and education by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, the leading global accrediting body for healthcare simulation programs.