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.
An international study has identified significant vascular changes in the brains of people with Huntington's disease. This breakthrough, the details of which are published in the most recent issue of Annals of Neurology, will have significant implications for our understanding of the disease and could open the door to new therapeutic targets for treating this fatal neurodegenerative condition.
Huntington's disease (HD) is a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder that causes serious motor, cognitive, and psychiatric dysfunction and gradually leads to loss of autonomy and death. The disease develops in people age 40 to 50 on average. There is no cure and current treatments can only help control certain symptoms, but do not slow the neurodegenerative process.
How does our auditory system represent time within a sound? A new study investigates how temporal acoustic patterns can be represented by neural activity within auditory cortex, a major hub within the brain for the perception of sound.
Dr. Daniel Bendor, from University College London, describes a novel way that neurons in auditory cortex can encode temporal information, based on how their excitatory and inhibitory inputs get mixed together.
Your car moves when you press the accelerator and stops when you step on the brakes. In much the same way, a neuron's activity depends on the excitation and inhibition it receives from other neurons. But how these inputs combine together to make a neuron "go" or "stop" can also convey information.
In 2004, astronomers examining a map of the radiation leftover from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) discovered the Cold Spot, a larger-than-expected unusually cold area of the sky. The physics surrounding the Big Bang theory predicts warmer and cooler spots of various sizes in the infant universe, but a spot this large and this cold was unexpected.
Now, a team of astronomers led by Dr. Istvan Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa may have found an explanation for the existence of the Cold Spot, which Szapudi says may be "the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity."
Most of today's anticancer drugs target the DNA or proteins in tumor cells, but a new discovery unveils a whole new set of potential targets: the RNA intermediaries between DNA and proteins.
This RNA, called messenger RNA, is a blueprint for making proteins. Messenger RNA is created in the nucleus and shuttled out into the cell cytoplasm to hook up with protein-making machinery, the ribosome. Most scientists have assumed that these mRNA molecules are, aside from their unique sequences, generic, with few distinguishing characteristics that could serve as an Achilles heel for targeted drugs.
There is concern about e-cigarettes that they may cause addiction rather than cure it - California advocates are spending millions claiming Big Tobacco is marketing them to children - but like nicotine patches and chewing gum, teens may try them but unless they already smoke, they don't embrace them.
Writing in BMJ Open, the researchers base their findings on the results of two nationally representative surveys of primary and secondary schoolchildren (CHETS Wales 2 and the Welsh Health Behaviour in School aged Children) from more than 150 schools in Wales carried out in 2013 and 2014. In all, 1601 children aged 10-11 and 9055 11-16 year olds were quizzed about their use of e-cigarettes.
Cancer mortality remains significantly elevated among African-Americans but if recent trends continue, cancer outcomes will disappear over time, according to a new analysis of "Health Equity" - defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services as the highest level of health for all people.
Half of all patients who survive a cardiac arrest experience problems with cognitive functions such as memory and attention, according to new research from Lund University. A control group comprising heart attack patients had largely the same level of problems, which suggests that it is not only the cardiac arrest and the consequent lack of oxygen to the brain that is the cause of the patients’ difficulties.
Looking after yourself, and trying not to infect others, is a good strategy to prevent disease from spreading - not only if you are a considerate co-worker, but also if you are an ant, meerkat or other social animal, as revealed by an epidemiological model developed by the groups of Professor Fabian Theis from the Helmholtz Center Munich and Professor Sylvia Cremer from the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria.
In a Theme Issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on "The Society-Health-Fitness Nexus" published on 13 April 2015, they combine observations of hygienic interaction networks within ant colonies with epidemiological modeling to conclude that this strategy is best to prevent disease spread in social animal groups.
Nearly anyone touched by ovarian cancer will tell you that almost 80 percent of patients reach advanced stages before diagnosis and that most patients are expected to die within five years. One quarter of women diagnosed have no warning that they are resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy, the main line of defense and they probably have less than 18 months to live.
Diagnosis, prognosis, and even treatment of ovarian cancer have remained largely unchanged for 30 years - the best indicator for how a woman will fare, and how her cancer should be treated, has been the tumor's stage at diagnosis.
Literacy has been getting declining support in recent years. The Obama administration only wants to spend $187 million for its Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy initiative while the Bush administration had devoted $1 billion annually to the Reading First program. That means it is necessary to find out which programs work best.
A new study uses a scientific lens to look at the conversational art of instruction, a team of researchers identify specific ways teachers talk to students that measurably impact literacy skills.
Faster increases in life expectancy do not necessarily produce faster population aging, a counterintuitive finding that came as a result of applying new measures of aging developed at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in order to project future populations for Europe out to the year 2050.
Traditional measures of age simply categorize people as "old" at a specific age, usually 65, but previous research by Scherbov, Sanderson, and colleagues has shown that the traditional definition puts many people in the category of "old" who have characteristics of much younger people.
Poor sanitation is linked to 280,000 deaths per year worldwide but it has lots of benefits besides just saving lives. That is why sanitation is a key policy goal in many developing countries.
Strange sociological voodoo like a "community motivation" model to improve hygiene has done nothing, according to a recent analysis of Bangladesh, but it would if there are subsidies for hygienic latrines targeted to the poor.
