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 connection between persistent insomnia and increased inflammation and mortality from all causes has been identified by a group of researchers in The American Journal of Medicine. The results apply to those with persistent insomnia, not intermittent insomnia. Persistent (chronic) insomnia affects up to 10 percent of U.S. adults.
In the first U.S. study of urinary arsenic in babies, Dartmouth College researchers found that formula-fed infants had higher arsenic levels than breast-fed infants, and that breast milk itself contained very low arsenic concentrations.
The findings appear Feb. 23 online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. A PDF is available on request.
The researchers measured arsenic in home tap water, urine from 72 six-week-old infants and breast milk from nine women in New Hampshire. Urinary arsenic was 7.5 times lower for breast-fed than formula-fed infants. The highest tap water arsenic concentrations far exceeded the arsenic concentrations in powdered formulas, but for the majority of the study's participants, both the powder and water contributed to exposure.
A new film, Surviving Terminal Cancer (www.survivingterminalcancer.com) by director/writer Dominic Hill, had its premiere at Lincoln Center February 18, 2015. Through the personal stories of Ben Williams and a remarkable wave of other long-term glioblastoma survivors following in his path, the film offers for the first time some hope for an alternative to the certain death offered by the current medical establishment for what is ordinarily considered to be an invariably fatal disease.
Each year millions of infants, toddlers and preschool children require anesthesia or sedation for various procedures and a new review suggest caution about their use.A team of anesthesiology investigators and toxicologists writing in the New England Journal of Medicine reviewed existing animal and human studies for the impact of anesthetics on developing brains. Observational studies of children have been weak, but they still suggested a correlation between children who had received anesthetics and long-term cognitive impairments such as learning disabilities. Children between the ages of one and three appeared to be at a higher risk of adverse effects.
Wheat is a critical staple crop that provides 20% of the calories and over 25% of the protein consumed by humans. 'Yellow rust' caused by the fungus Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (PST) is one of the plant's major diseases and is found throughout the major wheat-producing areas of the world. Infections lead to significant reductions in both grain quality and yield, with some rare events leading to the loss of an entire crop. New strains of the fungus have recently emerged that adapt to warmer temperatures.
The MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever 3-D view of the deep Universe - in just 27 hours.By taking very long exposure pictures of regions of the sky, astronomers have created many deep fields that have revealed much about the early Universe. The most famous of these was the original Hubble Deep Field, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope over several days in late 1995. This spectacular and iconic picture rapidly transformed our understanding of the content of the Universe when it was young. It was followed two years later by a similar view in the southern sky -- the Hubble Deep Field South.
A pre-clinical study of ANAVEX 2-73 found that it prevents mitochondrial dysfunction and blocks resulting oxidative stress and apoptosis (cell death) in a nontransgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Mitochondrial damages have been consistently reported as an early cause of
Alzheimer's disease
and appear before amyloid-beta plaques and memory decline in Alzheimer's patients and transgenic mice. If so, by preserving mitochondrial functionality and reducing other key
Alzheimer's disease
hallmarks, it has the potential to prevent, stop, slow or reverse the disease, in addition to treating its symptoms.
The use of animals in experimental research has soared at US laboratories, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and taxpayer-funded scientists are the culprits. The 25 largest recipients of government funding increased animal experimentation 73 percent in 15 years, despite growing public opposition to the practice and mounting evidence that animal studies often do not faithfully translate to people, they write.They also say the data contradict government claims of reduced animal use and are at odds with government policies designed to curb and replace the use of animals in experiments.
Palbociclib, an investigational oral medication that works by blocking molecules responsible for cancer cell growth, is well tolerated and extends progression-free survival (PFS) in newly diagnosed, advanced breast cancer patients, including those whose disease has stopped responding to traditional endocrine treatments. Results of the phase II study, led by researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania , were published this month in Clinical Cancer Research. Earlier phase I results by researchers at Penn Medicine contributed to the development of palbociclib, which was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for metastatic breast cancer patients just beginning to undergo endocrine therapy.
Case Western Reserve University dental researcher Pushpa Pandiyan has discovered a new way to model how infection-fighting T cells cause inflammation in mice.
The hope is that the discovery can lead to new therapies or drugs that jump-start weakened or poorly functioning immune systems, said Pandiyan, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve School of Dental Medicine.
Pandiyan believes the process could lead to identifying and testing new drugs to replace antifungal medicines that have become ineffective as the fungi develop a resistance to them.
Pandiyan's findings are explained and demonstrated in the Journal of Visualized Experiments video and print article, "Th17 inflammation model of oropharyngeal candidiasis in immunodeficient mice."
Competition between doctors' offices, urgent care centers and retail medical clinics that cater to wealthy elites often leads to an increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written per person, finds a new analysis.The number of physicians per capita and the number of clinics are significant drivers of antibiotic prescription rate, they found, with the highest per capita rates of antibiotic prescriptions found in the southeastern U.S. and along the West and East coasts.
The team's comparative analysis of data for the years 2000 and 2010 were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau and the IMS Health Xponent database, which tracks prescriptions dispensed at the ZIP code level.
Notably high rates were found in Manhattan, southern Miami and Encino.
Researchers have linked a specific protein to the development of post-viral infection asthma, which is the first step in generating a novel type of asthma therapy designed to prevent development of post-viral asthma in young children.
Asthma is a chronic disease of the airways that affects more than 300 million people worldwide. It is the number one illness leading to school absences in children, and accounts for more than 1.8 million emergency room visits annually. There is no cure; all current therapies focus on providing symptomatic relief and reducing the number and severity of attacks.
