Month: April 2014

By Angela Moon NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stocks jumped on Wednesday, with the three major indexes hitting session highs, after minutes from the Federal Reserve's latest policy meeting showed a more supportive central bank than previously expected. The Dow and the Nasdaq rose more than 1 percent with internet and biotech stocks leading the gains. Fed policymakers were unanimous in wanting to ditch the thresholds they had been using to telegraph a policy tightening, according to minutes of a meeting last month that shed little new light on what might prompt an eventual interest-rate rise. "People are taking solace in the idea that the Fed may be more accommodative than previously thought, for longer than previously thought," said Steve Sosnick, equity-risk manager at Timber Hill/Interactive Brokers Group in Greenwich, Connecticut.

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By Ronnie Cohen NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People with insomnia may have a higher risk of stroke than their well-rested peers, a new study shows. The link between insomnia and stroke was especially strong in young adults, who were up to eight times more likely to suffer a stroke if they had insomnia. That finding – based on an analysis of health records of more than 21,000 people with insomnia and 64,000 regular sleepers in Taiwan – doesn’t prove sleep disturbances cause strokes. And even among young people with insomnia, total stroke risk remained low.

By Sharon Begley and M.B. Pell NEW YORK (Reuters) – In 2012, an enterprising ophthalmologist in south Florida received $20.8 million in Medicare payments, the highest amount the government health plan for the elderly paid an individual provider that year, according to a preliminary analysis of federal data. And a California laboratory apparently received $190 million, the most Medicare paid a single entity in 2012. After decades of litigation and over the strenuous objections of the American Medical Association, the leading U.S. doctors group, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Wednesday made public for the first time how much Medicare pays individual doctors. The massive data release, totaling nearly 10 million lines, also includes which medical services each of more than 880,000 physicians and other healthcare providers nationwide billed Medicare for in 2012.

Several leading U.S. and European heart doctors are calling for curbs, or even a moratorium, on using devices meant to lower blood pressure by zapping kidney arteries, following a surprising failure of the technology in a clinical trial. The views highlight a significant new hurdle to wider approval and acceptance of the therapy, known as renal denervation, which had raised hopes in the medical community as a way to treat stubbornly high blood pressure for patients who don't gain enough benefit from drugs. Wall Street analysts had estimated a potential market of $3 billion for the devices made by Medtronic Inc, Boston Scientific Corp and St Jude Medical Inc. But failure of the high-stakes clinical trial set off a heated debate between doctors who believe the approach is worth saving and those who say results show it provides no clear benefit.

By Barbara Liston ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) – A pregnant woman who drove a minivan with her three children into the ocean off a Florida beach no longer faces charges that she had planned to kill them, court papers filed on Tuesday show. The reduced charges of attempted second degree murder require prosecutors to show Ebony Wilkerson, 32, acted with a depraved state of mind, but no plan. She was originally charged with three counts of attempted first-degree murder which carry a presumption of a thought-out plan to kill her children aged 3, 9 and 10, who survived the incident off Daytona Beach, Florida last month. Wilkerson remains charged with three additional counts of child abuse.