Archive for the ‘University of Michigan’ Category
Life and Death during the Great Depression: U-M Study
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The Great Depression had a silver lining: During that hard time, U.S. life expectancy actually increased by 6.2 years, according to a University of Michigan study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Life expectancy rose from 57.1 in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1932, according to the analysis by U-M researchers José A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux. The increase occurred for both men and women, and for whites and non-whites.
“The finding is strong and counterintuitive,” says Tapia Granados, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “Most people assume that periods of high unemployment are harmful to health.”
For the study, the researchers used historical life expectancy and mortality data to examine associations between economic growth and population health for the period between 1920 and 1940. They found that while population health generally improved during the four years of the Great Depression and during recessions in 1921 and 1938, mortality increased and life expectancy declined during periods of strong economic expansion, such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936-1937.
U-M computer software matches kidneys to hard-to-match recipients
Paired Kidney Donation program provides additional opportunity for some people needing a kidney transplant
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – The University of Michigan has developed an organ matching software program that offers new hope to patients needing a kidney transplant.
Often a patient who needs a kidney has a family member or friend willing to donate one of his or her kidneys, but it cannot be done due to tissue or blood type incompatibilities. The University of Michigan Transplant Center seeks to match these two people – an incompatible recipient/donor pair – with other pairs in the same situation, utilizing this U-M computer program.