More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
There has been some ongoing concern about bee colonies, even fears of an impending "colony collapse disorder", but both the fears and the causes have been misplaced, recent studies have shown.Rather than being a mysterious effect due to pesticides (like neonicotinoids) slight variations in bee populations remain the fault of parasites. Yet that brings its own mystery. Varroa mites, the biggest culprit, are not very mobile.
Atrial fibrillation and flutter (also known as AFF) is associated with serious health problems and is a significant contributor to death rates. Knowing that, why would there be different death rates for male and female patients who presented with AFF to emergency departments and then discharged? Even 30 and 90 days after discharge. AFF is an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia) that is associated with blood clots to the brain (e.g., stroke) and other organs, heart failure, and sometimes death. It affects approximately 2.66 million Americans.
Though men and women obviously differ, that has become muddled in the name of equality. Drug reactions are different, obviously one gender gives birth to children. A new study shows there are still many similarities, but also a whole lot of biological differences not in genes, but in gene expression. Their findings showed that harmful mutations in these particular genes tend to accumulate in the population in relatively high frequencies, and the study explains why. The detailed map of these genes provides evidence that males and females undergo a sort of separate, but interconnected, evolution.
Prosthetics may look better but they have not really changed much in the last 100 years. That could soon change. The next generation of hand prosthetics may be far more like a real hand - they could allow the wearer to reach for objects almost automatically, without really thinking, like real hands do now.Current prosthetic hands are controlled via myoelectric signals - that is electrical activity of the muscles recorded from the skin surface of the stump.In the US there are 500,000 upper limb amputees a year.
In the many efforts to prevent people from taking up smoking, most initiatives have focused on kids.
As the consumer advocacy group the American Council on Science and Health has long phrased it, "smoking is a pediatric disease." Prevent uptake in the young, and addiction rarely occurs.
But that has led to governments with a big blind spot about young adults, according to a paper in the Canadian Journal of Public Health by Thierry Gagné, a doctoral student at Université de Montréal's School of Public Health.
It's manna from heaven for sue-and-settle law firms; a new paper links common antibiotics, such as macrolides, quinolones, tetracyclines, sulfonamides and metronidazole, to an increased risk of miscarriage in early pregnancy.The association was weak, but juries won't know that, because Dr. Anick Bérard, Faculty of Pharmacy, Université de Montréal, declared, "our investigation shows that certain types of antibiotics are increasing the risk of spontaneous abortion, with a 60% to two-fold increased risk." That's important, since baseline risk of spontaneous abortion is 30 percent, but the women who miscarried in this study were more likely to be older, living alone and to have multiple health issues and infections.
Does the reality of mental disorders also cause depression, or is depression a harbinger of other disorders, a gateway as it were?
In 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations propose using animals like pigs to study the best way of evaluating protein quality in foods eaten by children.The researchers behind a new study calculated protein scores for eight sources of protein, derived from both plants and animals. Protein scores compare the amount of digestible amino acids in a food with a "reference protein," a theoretical protein which contains fully digestible amino acids in the proportions required for human nutrition at a particular stage of life.
Thiamethoxam is a compound in the class of targeted pesticides known as "neonicotinoids", because they are chemically similar to nicotine, which has natural insect repellent properties. Neonicotinoids are used in crops such as corn, soybeans and cotton and have been controversial because of environmental campaigns claiming a "colony collapse disorder" was caused by them. Yet bee numbers have not declined so concern has migrated to wild bee populations and sub-lethal effects - bees not killed but changed. These two arguments are easier to maintain because there is no way to count wild bees, only a few species even have hives, and therefore one guess is as good as another. Sub-lethal effects could also mean anything - like the ability to fly.
Though subways reduce overall pollution emissions in cities, what is good for society may not be good for the poor people who ride mass transportation. A new study finds that Canadian subways personal exposure to certain pollutants, and that Toronto has the highest levels in Canada.Sounds awful for city dwellers, right? Breathe easy, the pollutant they measured has yet to be linked to any harm, and no acute deaths, outside government claims when they want to restrict businesses.
If you hand food to a child when they are sad, or angry, or anything else, they will begin to associate food with those feelings. As adults, this emotional eating will be a tough habit to break. In youth, it will be even more difficult because kids aren't always aware that good things can be bad for you in excess.
In the late 2000s, after natural gas uptake caused American carbon dioxide emissions to plummet, panicked environmentalists began to scramble for new ways to campaign on ending so-called fossil fuels. Methane, with 23X the warming power of CO2, was ideal, but they had just spent a decade insisting methane could explain increased warming, because it did not persist long enough.And it would have started long before then, if the methane were linked to global warming by frozen tundra melting and releasing its methane. But it wasn't detected.
