The government in post after the election should declare a national health and care emergency, calling on all parts of society to help improve health, care, and wellbeing, say experts in the first report of The BMJ Commission on the Future of the NHS.   The new government should, in effect, relaunch the NHS with a renewed long term vision and plan, they argue. "The NHS has never seemed so embattled—and its core principle of ‘free to all at the point of use’ has never been so under threat,” said Kamran ...

East Hanover, NJ – January 30, 2024 – Amidst the backdrop of a remarkable four-year streak of growth, the employment indicators for people with disabilities reached unprecedented milestones in 2023. This achievement stands in stark contrast to the experiences of people without disabilities who faced a more severe decline during the COVID-19 pandemic and a slower recovery, not surpassing their pre-pandemic employment levels until 2023. That’s according to the National Trends in Disability Employment (nTIDE) 2023 Year-End Special Edition, ...

**EMBARGOED UNTIL 7:01 P.M. ET TUESDAY, JAN 30** Evolutionary biologists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report they have combined PET scans of modern pigeons along with studies of dinosaur fossils to help answer an enduring question in biology: How did the brains of birds evolve to enable them to fly? The answer, they say, appears to be an adaptive increase in the size of the cerebellum in some fossil vertebrates. The cerebellum is a brain region responsible for movement and motor control. The research findings are published in the Jan. 31 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists have long thought that the cerebellum should be important ...

A recent study co-authored by Dr. Matthew Segar, a third-year cardiovascular disease fellow at The Texas Heart Institute and led by his research and residency mentor, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Dr. Ambarish Pandey, utilized a machine learning-based approach to identify, understand, and predict diuretic responsiveness in patients with acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF). The study “A Phenomapping Tool and Clinical Score to Identify Low Diuretic Efficiency in Acute Decompensated ...

  Clear legal rules outlining the use of the sperm and eggs of those who are incapacitated must remain in place to protect the vulnerable from being involved in fertility treatment without their consent, a new study says. There are strict laws in England and Wales involving the use of reproductive materials, but the research outlines how recent court cases have weakened this existing rigorous consent regime. It warns this could create a common law exception to informed consent, leaving the current law in a delicate position. The research says it is “not outside the realms of possibility” that some people may try to take ...

An interview with Eric J. Topol, MD, a world-renowned cardiologist, best-selling author of several books on personalized medicine, and the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, has been published. in the new peer-reviewed journal, AI in Precision Oncology. Dr. Topol is an advocate for using digital technologies and artificial intelligence in health care. click here to read the interview now. Douglas Flora, MD, Editor-in-Chief of AI in Precision Oncology, interviewed Dr. ...

Rotman School Professor Named to Thinkers50 Radar Class Toronto – Maja Djikic, an associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, has been named to the Thinkers50 Radar class for 2024. Announced every January, the Thinkers50 Radar identifies a cohort of 30 up-and-coming thinkers from around the world whose ideas have the potential to make an important impact on management thinking in the future. A personality psychologist specializing in adult development, Prof. Djikic is executive director of the Self-Development Lab at the Rotman School, which provides ...

A new study co-led by Associate Professor Kristin Cleverley of the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing has found evidence that Psychosis Spectrum Symptoms (PSS) are often present in youth accessing mental health services. From a profile of the initial 417 youth aged 11-24 participating in the study, 50 per cent were shown to meet the threshold for Psychosis Spectrum Symptoms, a number Cleverley says was higher than expected, meaning there is a large number of children with these symptoms accessing mental health services. Cleverley, ...

PITTSBURGH – The University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy’s Program Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) has received a five-year, $7.8 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to improve quality of care for patients with opioid use disorder across Pennsylvania.   The project will establish the Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEALing) Measures Center at Pitt, which will focus on developing and implementing measurement-based care into 20 community opioid treatment programs across Pennsylvania with the goal of enhancing treatment ...

An international team that includes Rutgers University–New Brunswick scientists has developed a new method to make and manipulate a widely studied class of high-temperature superconductors. This technique should pave the way for the creation of unusual forms of superconductivity in previously unattainable materials. When cooled to a critical temperature, superconductors can conduct electricity without resistance or energy loss. These materials have intrigued physicists for decades because they can achieve a state of ...

A new study may hold a secret for getting your teenager to listen to appreciate  your unsolicited advice. The University of California, Riverside, study, which included “emerging adults” — those in their late teens and early 20s — found teens will appreciate parents’ unsolicited advice, but only if the parent is supportive of their teens’ autonomy. Parents support autonomy by providing clear guidelines for limitations and rules that will be enforced. They ...

Burnout is an occupational phenomenon that results from chronic workplace stress, according to the World Health Organization. Burnout often includes emotional exhaustion, negative feelings or mental distance from one’s job, and a low sense of accomplishment at work. COVID-19 increased feelings of burnout in primary care physicians, and a new study, sought to understand primary care clinicians’ perspectives on burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, the causes of burnout, and strategies to improve clinician well-being.  Inefficiencies of electronic health records systems and high levels of documentation contribute ...

“We conducted a comprehensive investigation into the potential of XRCC1 as a valuable diagnostic and prognostic indicator in diverse cancer types.” BUFFALO, NY- January 30, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 16, Issue 1, entitled, “XRCC1: a potential prognostic and immunological biomarker in LGG based on systematic pan-cancer analysis.” X-ray repair cross-complementation ...

Scientists from Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University succeeded in regenerating fully functional urinary bladder tissue in a long-term study utilizing a non-human primate model. This unique model initially created by the Sharma Research Group explores long term bladder tissue regeneration at both anatomical and physiological levels. The Group used a novel biodegradable scaffold seeded with stem and progenitor cells from the animal’s own bone marrow, which demonstrated a higher degree of success than intestinal segments ...

With the national opioid epidemic disproportionately affecting American Indians and Alaska Natives, a tribal confederation in Oregon decided to take matters into their own hands. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde not only opened Oregon’s first tribally owned opioid treatment program in Salem in 2021, but a year later, the tribe also began what is believed to be the nation’s first tribally operated mobile medication unit. The mobile bus runs a daily circuit from the tribal reservation in Grand Ronde to McMinnville to Salem, seeing patients and dispensing medications directly to tribal members struggling with an opioid use disorder. The program appears ...

The emergence of successive SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern during 2020-22 created a need to understand the drivers of such growth; this study uses a Bayesian model to reveal how a set of key covariates (the infecting variant, symptom status, age and number of prior exposures) affect viral kinetics at both individual and population levels   ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology:   http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002463 Article Title: Combined analyses of ...

Mutations in the Cu-Zn superoxide dismutase 1 gene SOD1 can cause familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (fALS) in a process that involves dissociation of the SOD1 dimer; this study shows that a novel cyclic thiosulfinate cross-linker has favorable drug-like properties and can stabilize the SOD1 dimer in vivo, with therapeutic implications for fALS ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002462 Author ...

Dr. Jeannine Gerhardt, an assistant professor of stem cell biology in obstetrics and gynecology and in reproductive medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, has received a five-year, $2.1 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health, for the study of repetitive DNA and RNA sequences and the mechanisms by which they cause cell dysfunction and diseases. The NIGMS Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award is intended to support recipients’ research more broadly and flexibly than standard project grants, which must specify proposed research thoroughly in advance. “This award is particularly nice because ...

More than half of the world’s population—4.4 billion people—lives in cities, and that proportion will grow to two-thirds by the year 2050, according to the United Nations. As the world’s population expands, and becomes increasingly urbanized, many have raised concerns about the impact of waste—from house trash to wastewater to greenhouse gas emissions—on the planet. “We as a society tend to ignore the unpleasant side of our production,” says Mingzhen Lu, an assistant professor at New York University’s ...

Scientists at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) developed a green antibiotic alternative to treat the deadly pathogen Streptococcus iniae in hybrid striped bass, the fourth most farmed finfish in the United States, according to a recent study.  S. iniae is the causative agent of streptococcosis, a disease prevalent in aquaculture and causes a worldwide economic loss of $150 million annually. Disease outbreaks can bankrupt fish farms and ...

Peer-reviewed - Survey Rebuilding trust in fisheries governance will be vital to create a sustainable industry post-Brexit England, according to new research.  Strong trust between managers and fishers is essential for achieving sustainable fisheries, but new research from the University of East Anglia has found worryingly low levels of trust in fisheries following the UK’s departure from the European Union.  The survey pioneered a methodology assessing different elements influencing trust. It revealed perceived incompetence, indifference to fishers' livelihoods, and inadequate consultation as major drivers of fishers' distrust towards fishery regulators.  Lead ...

PHOENIX — High-grade gliomas are cancerous tumors that spread quickly in the brain or spinal cord. In a new study led by Mayo Clinic, researchers found invasive brain tumor margins of high-grade glioma (HGG) contain biologically distinct genetic and molecular alterations that point to aggressive behavior and disease recurrence. The findings suggest insights into potential treatments that could modify the course of the disease. The study published in Nature Communications, profiled 313 tumor biopsies from 68 HGG patients using genomics (study of genes), ...

Depending on their location, cancer cells within a three-dimensional (3D) tumor structure can have different microenvironments. Cells in the core of the tumor receive less oxygen (hypoxia) and nutrients than those in the periphery. These varying conditions can drive differences in cell growth rates and drug sensitivities, highlighting the need to study 3D tumor models in lab settings. Until recently, conventional methods used to create such tumor spheroids were time-consuming, produced inconsistent results and involved high setup costs. Investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding ...

Ann Arbor, January 30, 2024 – Experiencing a pregnancy from sexual violence is common in the United States, according to research conducted by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier. Nearly six million women in the United States who were raped, sexually coerced (defined as non-physically forced unwanted penetration), or both became pregnant as a result. This equates to about one in twenty American ...

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) recently inaugurated its new Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences (IQCB) in the presence of Clemens Hoch, the Minister of Science of Rhineland-Palatinate, and Professor Stefan Müller-Stach, JGU's Vice President for Research and Early Career Academics. The IQCB is an interdisciplinary research institute at the interface between the life sciences and neighboring disciplines including mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and engineering, thus generating new opportunities for research by way of, for example, computer-aided analysis of large amounts of data, computer-based ...