HEALTH BEAT.

• Position: News Briefs - Brief Article

Emergency rooms across the country are increasingly crowded and busy, so you may wonder if your medical problem is serious enough to warrant utilizing them. According to Ron Charles, assistant professor of emergency medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, certain symptoms or situations should send you straight to the emergency room. "If you are having chest pains, having trouble breathing, or if you are experiencing a sudden change in vision, dizziness, or weakness, especially on one side of your body, come to the emergency room." Other conditions that warrant a visit include gaping wounds, sudden severe pain anywhere in the body, persistent vomiting, bleeding that won't stop after 10 minutes of applying pressure, confusion or dazed behavior accompanied by a fever that won't respond to medication, spinal injuries, major burns, or a drug overdose.

Intervention by a specially trained nurse can help asthma patients improve their quality of life and have fewer, shorter hospitalizations, indicates Mario Castro, assistant professor of medicine, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (Mo.). A study found that such intervention saved $4,600 per patient per year in health care costs.

Heart disease and depression are linked, researchers at Yale-New Haven (Conn.) Hospital maintain, with those who have heart disease more likely to suffer from depression and those with depression more likely to develop heart disease. Moreover, patients with depression are more likely to experience a second heart attack or sudden cardiac death.

Exercise may help people with panic disorders, notes Jack Raglin, a sports psychologist at Indiana University, Bloomington. When panic disorder patients were exposed to extremely intense, short-term, high-effort exercise in a study, their anxiety decreased.

People get fit faster with personal trainers, a study at Ball State University, Muncie, Ind., found. A group of 20 men who underwent a 12-week strength-training regimen under the one-on-one guidance of a personal trainer gained more power in about 30% less time than those who trained alone.

School-based screening for chlamydia is associated with a decline in this sexually transmitted disease among teenage boys...