FINDINGS

Limits on Interns' Hours Ignored

Restrictions set up three years ago to limit the hours that medical interns work are being routinely ignored, putting both the young doctors and their patients at risk, two studies report.

More than 80 percent of interns studied worked excessive hours in the year after the regulations were put in place and, in a given month, almost half violated the regulations, said researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education set limits in July 2003 after studies showed shifts for interns that stretched 70 hours or more added to medical errors on the job and to accidents afterward. Interns are supposed to be limited to 30 consecutive hours of work and to 80-hour workweeks that include one day off. Even that's too much, some say.

"We have a set of standards that are very permissive and allow shifts that would be considered dangerous in other places, and even these loose standards are not complied with," said Christopher Landrigan, an author of the study.

The findings appear today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A second study found that interns are 61 percent more likely to get a needle stick or a serious cut during an extended work shift -- potentially exposing them to HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne pathogens.

Premature Past, Positive Future

Many premature, severely underweight babies encounter an array of developmental and health problems as they get older, but a survey indicates that these kids grow up to think they're doing fine, researchers reported this week in the journal Pediatrics.

In interviews with 130 young adults who were born at normal weight and 143 young adults who were born weighing between 1.1 pounds and 2.2 pounds, Canadian researchers found little difference in how the two groups viewed their health-related quality of life.

Among the low-birth-weight group, 62 percent rated their quality of life positively, compared with 72 percent of the normal-birth-weight group.

The findings were greeted with "some skepticism and disbelief," the authors wrote. Skeptics said the positive responses had to be because of "denial and self-deception."

But the consistency of the responses "support the concept that this is real," the researchers wrote.