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.
Rome, Italy 30 August 2016: New generation drug eluting stents (new DES) did not outshine contemporary bare metal stents (BMS) as they were expected to, in a surprise finding of the largest randomized stent trial to date.
The Norwegian Coronary Stent Trial (NorStent), presented at ESC Congress 2016, and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine, "demonstrates that the efficacy of new DES versus contemporary BMS is lower than expected," noted Kaare Harald Bonaa, MD, PhD, in a Hot Line session here.
"Patients treated with DES do not live longer and they do not live better than patients treated with BMS."
Though the Affordable Health Care was passed and signed without really knowing what it was, a few things were certain; you could keep your doctor, it would be cheaper due to competition for new customers, and socio-economic disparities would be eliminated.
Female plastic surgeons need more equitable representation in leadership roles, according to an op-ed in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
"Women bring unique qualities to leadership, yet there remain barriers to gender equality," according to the article by five leading women plastic surgeons. "Our failure to attract, nurture, and sustain women for leadership positions significantly reduces the talent pool of capable leaders in plastic surgery," writes Debra J. Johnson, MD, of The Plastic Surgery Center in Sacramento and colleagues.
INDIANAPOLIS - If you really want a drink right now, the source of your craving may be a pea-sized structure deep inside the right side of your brain, according to scientists at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Using two different kinds of advanced brain imaging techniques (PET and fMRI), the researchers compared the results of giving beer drinkers a taste of their favorite beer versus a sports drink. After tasting the beer the participants reported increased desire to drink beer, whereas the sports drink did not provoke as much desire for beer. The brain scans also showed that the beer flavor induced more activity in both frontal lobes and in the right ventral striatum of the subjects' brains than did the sports drink.
From natural ecosystems to farmers' fields, plants face a dilemma of energy use: outgrow and outcompete their neighbors for light, or defend themselves against insects and disease.
But what if you could grow a plant that does both at the same time?
A team of researchers at Michigan State University is the first to accomplish that feat, and the breakthrough could have fruitful implications for farmers trying to increase crop yields and feed the planet's growing population.
A cabbage looper caterpillar crawls on an Arabidopsis plant. Credit: Kurt Stepnitz
The first study to investigate how dog brains process speech shows that our best friends in the animal kingdom care about both what we say and how we say it. Dogs, like people, use the left hemisphere to process words, a right hemisphere brain region to process intonation, and praising activates dog's reward center only when both words and intonation match, according to a study in Science.
It is now possible for machines to learn how natural or artificial systems work by simply observing them, without being told what to look for, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield.
This could mean advances in the world of technology with machines able to predict, among other things, human behaviour.
The discovery takes inspiration from the work of pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed a test, which a machine could pass if it behaved indistinguishably from a human. In this test, an interrogator exchanges messages with two players in a different room: one human, the other a machine.
Do anti-vaccine people hang around with anti-vaccine people or did hanging around with them cause them to lose faith in science?
There are an alarming number of factors that all correlate with anti-vaccine sentiment; the types of food purchased, beliefs about science, beliefs about energy, and beliefs about politics. But did all of those happen, and the people who embraced them gravitated toward each other, or did the social circle create the issue?
Irvine, Calif., Aug. 29, 2016 - As a multiyear drought grinds on in the Southwestern United States, many wonder about the impact of global climate change on more frequent and longer dry spells. As humans emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, how will water supply for people, farms, and forests be affected?
A new study from the University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington shows that water conserved by plants under high CO2 conditions compensates for much of the effect of warmer temperatures, retaining more water on land than predicted in commonly used drought assessments.
DALLAS, Aug. 29, 2016 -- Food fortified with folic acid, a B vitamin required in human diets for numerous biological functions, was associated with reduced rates of congenital heart defects, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
"Our study examined the effect of folic acid food fortification on each specific subtype of congenital heart disease based on the Canadian experience before and after food fortification was made mandatory in 1998," said K.S. Joseph, M.D., Ph.D., the study's senior author and professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
The number of cardiovascular drugs in the research pipeline has declined across all phases of development in the last 20 years even as cardiovascular disease has become the number one cause of death world-wide, according to research published today in JACC: Basic to Translational Science.
While the development and use of new prescription drugs have been associated with significant reduction in cardiovascular mortality over the past two decades, cardiovascular disease is still the leading cause of death in the developing world and accounts for 1 in 3 deaths in the United States. There has been growing concern over the decline in the development of new therapies.
NEW YORK, NY (August 29, 2016)-- New findings suggest that most Americans with depression receive no treatment, while raising the possibility that overtreatment of depression is also widespread. Less than a third of American adults who screened positive for depression received treatment for their symptoms, whereas over two-thirds of adults receiving treatment for depression did not report symptoms of depression or serious psychological distress, according to a study from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the University of Pennsylvania.
The study also found that among those who are treated for depression, less than half of those with severe psychological distress are seen by a mental health specialist.
