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A.
The Nation's First Elder Abuse Forensic Center
Narrator: This is Science Today. It's estimated that every year about a million elderly people in the United States are abused. Dr. Laura Mosqueda, director of the University of California, Irvine Medical Center's Geriatrics Program is a well-known expert on elder abuse treatment.
Mosqueda: We decided here at UCI to take a closer look at this issue and see how we could add a medical component into the social and criminal justice system. We found the most efficient and best way to bring all these different aspects together – social services, criminal justice and medical – was to form the first ever elder abuse forensic center and what we do is look at particularly complicated abuse cases that require a team approach. We find that we're able to solve problems more quickly and we think in a better way for both the victim and the perpetrator.
Narrator: The Elder Abuse Forensic Center was established in 2003 and is located in Santa Ana, California . For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Understanding & Dealing With Job Burnout
Narrator: This is Science Today. Job burnout is currently a hot button issue, but for researchers studying the subject, it's not the first time. In fact, Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California , Berkeley , has been a pioneering researcher in the field of job burnout since the mid-1970s.
Maslach: In terms of what burnout is, we find there are three key components that are overlapping. One is the thing everybody thinks of, which is exhaustion. There's a second dimension of what we call cynicism and basically, this is a response to the job and the third dimension is inefficacy.
Narrator: Then there are the six areas of work life that affect feelings of burnout. They are: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.
Maslach: The research data are now showing that we can pick up early warning signs. That means one of the three dimensions of burnout is beginning to show a problem and the tipping point tends to be that there's a serious mismatch between the person and their workplace on at least one of those six areas.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Saliva-Testing Coming to a Doctor's Office Near You?
Narrator: This is Science Today. Will diagnostic saliva-testing someday be part of your regular check-up? Researchers at the UCLA School of Dentistry are working on it. Dr. David Wong, director of the university's Dental Research Institute says they have developed the first standardized RNA test for oral cancer, but they're now targeting other diseases.
Wong: We have five systemic disease that we're currently approaching: pancreatic cancer; breast cancer; lung cancer; diabetic Type 2 as well as Alzheimer's disease. So, the day will come that you will go into a doctor's office, a nurse's office or a dentist's office and before you see a physician or a dentist, you can have point of care, real-time screening using a non-invasive fluid. Our task is to bring the science.
Narrator: The UCLA group hosted a saliva screening station a recent annual convention of the American Dental Association.
Wong: To introduce the concept to the attending dentists there that there will be a changing landscape in their office about two years from now.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
The Effects of Two Volcanic Eruptions on the Ocean
Narrator: This is Science Today. Using a dozen state-of-the-art climate models, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that the ocean warming and sea level rise in the 20 th century were substantially reduced by the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia . Atmospheric scientist, Peter Gleckler, says volcanic aerosols blocked sunlight, which caused the ocean surface to cool.
Gleckler: When we looked at Krakatoa, we found that the sea level did drop as a result of the eruption, but that drop in sea level didn't go away – it stayed for decades.
Narrator: The researchers compared this to the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines , which was comparable to Krakatoa in terms of size and intensity, but the heat content recovery occurred much more quickly. The models indicate that global warming effects taking place during this time erased the effect of Pinatubo to some extent.
Gleckler: We're working hard to really understand these results, what the models are telling us. In a sense, it opened up many more questions than we started with.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. What You Should Know about 'Mini-Strokes'
Narrator: This is Science Today. Every year, about 240 thousand Americans are diagnosed with a transient ischemic attack, or TIA. Dr. S. Claiborne Johnston, a neurologist at the University of California , San Francisco Medical Center , says TIAs are essentially mini-strokes.
Johnston : The traditional definition for TIAs that those symptoms resolve within twenty-four hours, but they typically resolve in an hour or less. What's new is that just in the last few years, we've come to realize that risk of having a permanent stroke after a TIA is very high after the first few days to weeks after the TIA.
Narrator: That's why seeking treatment immediately is essential.
Johnston : Any sudden neurological symptoms should be considered an emergency. The only way that you'll be adequately treated if we could figure it out is to come in right away and have the physicians try to figure it out and do testing and often when a patient arrives and is carefully evaluated, we can tell whether it was a TIA and certainly we can always tell whether it was a stroke.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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