News from the School of Public Health

After psychiatric hospitalization, follow-up appointments are key for helping patients re-acclimate to normal life, manage their medications and avoid readmission. But not all hospitals are successful at getting their patients to engage in follow-up treatment.

Associate Professor Jie Chen and doctoral student Ivy Benjenk examined two factors that can affect hospitals’ follow-up rates: the hospitals’ organizational structures and the neighborhoods they serve.

Does the way you breathe influence how likely you are to spread flu or colds? You might be able to help researchers ferret out that answer—and many others about how respiratory illnesses spread—by wearing an activity tracker as you go about your day on campus.

For more than a year, the CATCH the Virus study has been tracking volunteers at the University of Maryland as they get sick, stay well or hover somewhere in between in an effort to figure out what makes us contagious.

To avoid stress fractures, runners often guard against running too fast or too long or accelerating their training too quickly. But according to a new study from the University of Maryland School of Public Health, running fast doesn’t cause any more strain on a person’s shin bones than running at a slower pace does.

New research by University of Maryland School of Public Health Assistant Professor Jessica N. Fish is the first to explore disparities in high-intensity binge drinking by people of different sexual orientations. The research, published in LGBT Health, found that sexual minority women were two to three times more likely than sexual majority women to engage in high-intensity binge drinking, and sexual minority men were equally as likely or less likely than sexual majority men to engage in high-intensity binge drinking.

State policies that rely only on treatment programs or on criminal penalties to help get pregnant women who use drugs into rehabilitation aren't as effective as those that use multiple approaches, according to new research from the School of Public Health.

HIV disproportionately affects older African Americans: they face higher rates of infection and mortality than older adults of other racial groups, and they are less likely to receive care.

While various studies have examined the reasons for these disparities, no literature review has consolidated their results.