After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
A recent randomized trial looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation and found that delivering universal donor plasma to massively hemorrhaging patients can be accomplished consistently and rapidly and without excessive wastage in high volume trauma centers.
The plasma is given in addition to red blood cell transfusions to optimize treatment.
Injury is the leading cause of death among young adults, and uncontrolled hemorrhage is the most important preventable factor among those who sustain traumatic injury.
Much of what we know about cancer and many modern medicines that treat it grow from experiments on cancer cells but it is difficult to maintain the integrity of cell lines due to contamination or simple mistakes such as mislabeling.
Later generations of a cell line may bear no resemblance to the original sample, potentially invalidating results of research performed on mistaken cells. For this reason, the National Cancer Institute maintains a library of 60 authenticated human cancer cell lines for the purposes of research, called the NCI-60.
Researchers have solved a genetic mystery that has afflicted three unrelated families, and possibly others, for generations: The genetic basis for a variety of congenital eye malformations, including the complete absence of eyes.
We can complain about the cost of American health care but that is the price for doctors caring too much. While in Holland doctors can just unilaterally make the decision to let a patient die, in the United States doctors will continue to recommend tests even when recommendations are that they should be done half as often.
Major depression comes with an unexpected metabolic signature, according to new findings.
Authors in search of genes that increase depression risk analyzed thousands of women. those with recurrent major depression and healthy controls, and found that many of the women with depression also had experienced adversity in childhood, including sexual abuse.
The researchers noticed something rather unusual in the DNA. The samples taken from women with a history of stress-related depression contained more mitochondrial DNA than other samples.
"Our most notable finding is that the amount of mitochondrial DNA changes in response to stress," says Professor Jonathan Flint of the University of Oxford.
More than 100 drugs have been approved to treat cancer but predicting which ones will help a particular patient hasn't really been possible.
A new device may change that. It is an implantable device, about the size of the grain of rice, and can carry small doses of up to 30 different drugs. After implanting it in a tumor and letting the drugs diffuse into the tissue, researchers can measure how effectively each one kills the patient's cancer cells. Such a device could eliminate much of the guesswork now involved in choosing cancer treatments, says Oliver Jonas, a postdoc at MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and lead author of the paper in Science Translational Medicine.
Everyone discusses ways to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (or not) but less considered is that there is a massive storehouse of carbon that has the potential to significantly alter the climate change picture.
Ancient carbon, locked away in Arctic permafrost for thousands of years, could transformed into carbon dioxide and released into the atmosphere by warmth.
The first malaria vaccine candidate (RTS,S/AS01) to reach phase 3 clinical testing is partially effective against clinical disease in young African children up to 4 years after vaccination, according to final trial data published in The Lancet.
Science topics in culture, be they vaccines, GMOs or global warming, may seem to be about science but they are more about politics, including identity politics, and sometimes about economics.
Nonetheless, only one of those topics is hot in academia - ironically, the reason for that is also political. An impartial analysis of Congressional testimonies shows that, politics or not, most of the experts that the Republican majority requests to speak during hearings support the consensus on climate change - which means resistance to taking action is not because they are against science, it is just economics.
In 2012 the US saw a resurgence of pertussis (whooping cough) cases. the highest since 1955. Like in engineering, the reason a small increase in anti-science beliefs can lead to a big change in the number of cases comes down to degrees of freedom and the math of networks.
Human DNA accumulates damage over time and older bodies can't repair it as well as younger, leading to the obvious conclusion that damage builds up over time and leads to an irreversible dormant state known as senescence.
Cellular senescence is believed to be responsible for some of the telltale signs of aging, such as weakened bones, less resilient skin and slow-downs in organ function. DNA damage also seems to play a role in conditions called progerias, which cause premature aging. Progeria patients have mutations in genes responsible for DNA damage repair. Now researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have pinpointed a molecular link between DNA damage, cellular senescence and premature aging.
A proof-of-concept study in mice showed it is possible to prevent transmission of mitochondrial disease to children without resorting to controversial cytoplasmic transfer - "three-parent" IVF.
Mitochondria are known as the powerhouse of the cell because they generate most of the cell's supply of energy. Each cell in the body contains anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 copies of mitochondrial DNA, which is exclusively transmitted through maternal inheritance. In most patients with mitochondrial disease, mutated and normal mitochondrial DNA molecules are mixed together in cells.
