Today's Globe: moving brain patients, stents vs. drugs, antibiotic reactions, abortion and mental health, rehospitalizations, tuna salad recall, Frank E. Wheatley Jr.

Kaya Alexander, 29, with mother Victoria DeCoteau, wants to be ''with people my
age.'' (Barry Chin/Globe staff)

An all-but-final court settlement may soon begin to help as many as 2,000 Massachusetts residents with brain injuries leave nursing homes, in a slow but sweeping exodus that advocates and officials say is unprecedented in the country.

People with chronic chest pain who are not in big danger of a heart attack now may have even less reason to rush into an artery-opening angioplasty: There's more evidence drugs should be tried first and often are just as effective.

Bad reactions to antibiotics, mostly allergic ones, send people to US emergency rooms more than 140,000 times each year, government researchers reported yesterday.

Women who have a single abortion do not have a higher risk of mental health problems such as depression than women who have their babies, the American Psychological Association reported yesterday.

"Medicare spends vast sums on hospital care for patients readmitted within 30 days of their previous stay in a hospital. These readmissions are often avoidable," Robert Pozen and Cathy Schoen of the Commonwealth Fund write on the op-ed page.

Massachusetts health officials are broadly expanding the recall of a ready-to-eat tuna salad that may be contaminated with listeriosis-causing bacteria.

Dr. Frank E. Wheatley Jr., a retired radiologist who practiced at Milton Hospital, Lawrence Memorial Hospital, and Choate Medical Center, died Aug. 3 in Gainesville, Fla. He was 88.