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In a paper published this week in the online edition of  Social Psychological and Personality Science , Neff and other researchers in UT Austin's Department of Human Development and Family Sciences found that "spouses who reported being more satisfied with the availability of friends and family, whom they knew they could connect with during times of marital conflict, experienced conflict as less physiologically stressful." The paper is the first to look at the link between spouses' cortisol levels, which are an indicator of physiological stress, and marital conflicts occurring in the home. At a time when more couples in the U.S. are living in communities separate from where their families and friends reside, the research suggests there is a strong correlation between relationships like these outside of a marriage and people within the marriage experiencing lower risk factors for health problems such as weight gain, insomnia, depression and even heart disease. ...

A quality-improvement initiative by Children's National Health System's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) finds that these chest X-rays can be performed just twice weekly, lessening the chances of a breathing tube popping out accidentally, reducing infants' exposure to radiation and saving an estimated $1.6 million per year. "The new Children's National protocol reduced the rate of chest X-rays per patient day without increasing the rate of unintended extubations," says Michelande Ridoré, M.S., program lead in Children's division of neonatology, who presented the research during the 2017 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) national conference. "That not only helps to improve patient safety -- for newborns who are admitted to the NICU for longer periods, there is the additional benefit of providing significant savings to the health care system." Children's NICU staff assessed how many chest X-rays were being performed per patient day ...