(Boston)--Since 2008, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and VA Boston Healthcare System have studied Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive brain disease associated with repetitive head impacts that has been diagnosed after death in the brains of American football players and other contact sport athletes as well as members of the armed services. Clinically, impulsivity, explosivity, depression, memory impairment and executive dysfunction have been reported to occur in the disease. While many of the scientific studies to date ...

New study fills an important knowledge gap about the potential health effects of hair relaxers commonly used by Black women. (Boston)--The lifetime risk of breast cancer is similar among Black and white women in the U.S., but Black women are disproportionately affected by aggressive breast cancer subtypes such as estrogen receptor (ER) negative tumors, which are diagnosed at a younger age and have a higher mortality rate. While certain hair care products, including relaxers (straighteners) and leave-in conditioners, used more commonly by Black than white women may contain compounds with estrogens or endocrine-disrupting chemicals, few epidemiologic studies have assessed the relationship of hair relaxer use to breast cancer risk. Researchers have now found no association ...

CLEVELAND -- A new paper in the June issue of New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery describes how the University Hospitals (UH) system applied design-based thinking in a re-imagined process for referrals of patients from primary care physicians to psychiatrists in a value-based, high-reliability model. "Referrals from primary care to specialty care represent a critical pathway in the patient journey to wellness. As we move toward value-based payment models, high-reliability referral pathways will be of increasing importance in achieving better outcomes at lower cost," said Patrick Runnels, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Population Health and Behavioral Health at UH, Vice Chair of Psychiatry at Case Western ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Schools in the U.S. are set to receive $123 billion in federal pandemic relief funding. Across the country, parents and school administrators are engaging in spirited debates about whether to teach critical race theory. And Americans are bitterly divided in their opinions about how and when to resume in-person instruction following rising rates of vaccination against COVID-19. One might expect that given all that's at stake, school board meetings across the U.S. would be hotbeds of discussion. But in many cases, they're the same staid, sparsely attended affairs that they can often be. "We have more ...

ATLANTA--Absentee property ownership in many small college football towns has a negative impact on permanent residents of those communities, according to a study by a Georgia State University geosciences researcher. The research is the first known attempt to quantify and map local geographies of gameday home investments. Each weekend in the fall tens of thousands of football fans flood into college towns to watch their favorite teams kick off against rival schools. Many of them stay in gameday homes, investment properties that sit vacant for much of the year. Taylor Shelton, assistant professor of geosciences and the study's author, examined data from more than a dozen college towns in the South where schools in the Southeastern Conference attract large ...

BOSTON - A clinical trial pairing community health workers (CHWs) with patients admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found that fewer intervention group participants were readmitted within 30 days than were control group participants. The effect was significant for those discharged to short-term rehabilitation but not for those discharged home. The study, one of few of its kind, has been published in JAMA Network Open. "These results indicate that CHW interventions may help reduce hospital readmissions and improve preventive care among some clinically complex patients ...

BOSTON -- Hearing loss is the third most common chronic health condition in the United States. Previous studies of people with hearing loss have uncovered higher prevalence of osteoporosis -- a disease in which the bones become weak and brittle -- and low bone density (LBD). But research on whether these conditions may influence risk of hearing loss over time is scarce. It is also unknown whether hearing loss can be avoided by taking bisphosphonates, the primary medication used to prevent fractures in people with reduced bone density. As part of the Conservation of Hearing Study ...

Middle-school aged children who use the internet, social media or video games recreationally for more than an hour each day during the school week have significantly lower grades and test scores, according to a study from the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. The findings appear in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. Researchers say the findings give parents and children a moderate threshold for using entertainment-related technology -- no more than one hour daily on school days and four hours a day on weekends. "Interactive technology is widely used to promote children's educational access and achievement," said lead author Vivien (Wen Li) Anthony, an assistant professor at ...

A recent study offers insight into how adults can navigate the often awkward experience of moving back in with their parents. "People move back in with their parents for a lot of reasons, and the trend is increasing due to the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic woes," says Lynsey Romo, co-author of the study and an associate professor of communication at North Carolina State University. "We launched this study before the pandemic happened because we wanted to learn more about how adults who move back in with their parents manage that process," Romo says. "How do they think about it? How do they talk about it? "We think the findings ...

The extreme drought suffered by the Pantanal in 2019-20, considered the worst in the last 50 years, was caused by natural climate conditions similar to those underlying the 2014-16 water crisis in São Paulo state. The Pantanal is one of the world’s largest wetlands. The Brazilian portion is located in the Center-West region, mainly Mato Grosso do Sul state. The 2019-20 extreme drought was studied by researchers affiliated with the Natural Disaster Surveillance and Early Warning Center (CEMADEN), the National Space Research Institute (INPE) and São ...

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have been quantifying how different batches of mesenchymal stem cells respond to the mechanical stiffness of their environments. They focused on how certain proteins were "localized" in cell nuclei and found key trends in how this changed with stiffness. Their findings explain inconsistencies between previous findings and may guide how scientists control the state of stem cells for research and medical treatments. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are important "progenitor" cells that can transform into muscle, cartilage, bone or fat cells. ...

Press release - Abstract 1394: Alterations in clock genes expression in Eutopic and Ectopic Endometrial Tissue New research suggests that night shift work is linked to menstrual irregularity and increased chance of developing endometriosis According to a study being presented at the 23rd European Congress of Endocrinology (e-ECE 2021), on Sunday 23 May at 19:00 CET (http://www.ece2021.org), women working night shifts may be at a greater risk of menstrual irregularity and developing endometriosis. The research found a reduction in the expression of ...

A natural food supplement reduces anxiety in mice, according to a new Weizmann Institute of Science study. The plant-derived substance, beta-sitosterol, was found to produce this effect both on its own and in synergic combination with an antidepressant known under the brand name Prozac. If these findings, published today in Cell Reports Medicine, are confirmed in clinical trials, they could point the way toward the use of beta-sitosterol as a treatment for relieving anxiety in humans. Anxiety is not always a bad thing. In fact, in evolutionary terms, feeling anxious about potential threats is critical for survival because it helps us mount an appropriate response. That's precisely why developing antianxiety drugs is so challenging. The circuits for anxiety ...

New research from Flinders University in Australia indicates people with myopia are more likely to experience poorer sleep quality than people with normal vision. The study indicates that people with short-sightedness have more delayed circadian rhythms and lower production of melatonin, a hormone secreted in the brain and responsible for regulating sleep at night, compared to people with normal vision. People affected by myopia or short-sightedness are familiar with the frustration of only being able to clearly see objects up close, but not a far distance. Optometrist Dr Ranjay Chakraborty , from the Flinders University Caring Futures Institute, says the study adds to the growing evidence of the potential association between disruption of the circadian ...

Gaping policy shortfalls in the Australian Government's 'Closing the Gap' program have seen it fail to reduce disparities in Indigenous health, income, employment, child removal and incarceration, Flinders University researchers say. Their five-year study just published in the Australian Journal of Public Administration examined why the targets of Australia's national Closing the Gap strategy to reduce or eliminate inequalities in health, education and employment outcomes between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other Australians have mostly not been met. "Despite talk of governments 'doing things with and ...

Our livers work hard to perform an entire range of activities: helping us digest food, maintaining body temperature and serving as an important checkpoint of the immune system for everything that we eat. It is inside the liver that the unique, rich and complex network of immune cells and pathways is set up to decide what is a harmless food particle, and what is a dangerous pathogen that should be neutralized and removed. Liver is therefore very sensitive to the food we consume, and sometimes a bad diet can induce a serious dysregulation of the immune activities within it. Obesity is an extremely ...

The chemotherapy drug decitabine is commonly used to treat patients with blood cancers, but its response rate is somewhat low. Researchers have now identified why this is the case, opening the door to more personalized cancer therapies for those with these types of cancers, and perhaps further afield. Researchers have identified the genetic and molecular mechanisms within cells that make the chemotherapy drug decitabine--used to treat patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) --work for some patients but not others. The findings should assist clinicians in developing more patient-specific treatment strategies. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science on March 30. The chemotherapy drug decitabine, ...

Recently, Professor YANG Liangbao, from the Institute of Health and Medical Technology, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), developed a general surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) method for actively capturing target molecules in small gaps based on nano-capillary pumping model. Relevant results were detailed in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. SERS is a spectroscopic technique typically used to determine vibrational modes of molecules. It's commonly used in chemistry to provide a structural fingerprint by which molecules can be identified. In this research, using the principle of capillary suction, they constructed ...

Talk of a graduate student mental health crisis is abundant in academic and popular media, but a University of Otago study has found no evidence of one in New Zealand. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, used data from the Graduate Longitudinal Study New Zealand to compare the mental wellbeing of students who did, and did not, transition into PhD study after completing their undergraduate degree. Co-author Dr Damian Scarf, from the Department of Psychology, says the researchers found poor mental health is not an inevitable consequence of PhD study in New Zealand. This is despite ...

ATLANTA - MAY 24, 2021 - A new study underscores the importance of health insurance coverage continuity in access to and receipt of care and care affordability in the United States. Researchers found that health insurance coverage disruptions were consistently associated with worse healthcare access and problems with care affordability. The study appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Decades of research has demonstrated that health insurance coverage is associated with better access to care and health outcomes in the U.S. However, less research has addressed coverage disruptions ...

A strange phenomenon happens with modern blue whales, humpback whales and gray whales: they have teeth in the womb but are born toothless. Replacing the teeth is baleen, a series of plates composed of thin, hair- and fingernail-like structures growing from the roof of their mouths that act as a sieve for filter feeding small fish and tiny shrimp-like krill. The disappearing embryonic teeth are testament to an evolutionary history from ancient whales that had teeth and consumed larger prey. Modern baleen whales on the other hand use their fringed baleen ...

The swift development of vaccines has provided a vital tool to combat the spread of the deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus, but challenges to reaching herd immunity posed by the rise of new mutations and the inability of immunosuppressed people to develop an effective immune response following vaccination point to a need for additional solutions to maximize protection. A new USC study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry reveals how therapies targeting a molecular chaperone called GRP78 might offer additional protection against COVID-19 and other coronaviruses that emerge in the future. Chaperones like GRP78 are molecules that help regulate the correct folding of proteins, especially when a cell is under ...

Reduced levels of a metabolic hormone known as leptin is linked to poor vaccine antibody responses in the general population, a University of Queensland study has found. The researchers made the discovery while investigating several cohorts' responses to the influenza vaccine or hepatitis B vaccine pre-COVID. UQ's Professor Di Yu identified a link between the metabolic and immune systems that could be used to develop new strategies for improving vaccine protection in vulnerable populations. "Using multiple advanced techniques in immunology, genetics ...

Women taking 1,000 mg of docosohexanoic acid (DHA) daily in the last half of pregnancy had a lower rate of early preterm birth than women who took the standard 200 mg dose, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Women who entered the study with the lowest DHA level had the greatest reduction in early preterm birth, which is birth before 34 weeks of pregnancy and which increases the risk of infant death and disability The study was conducted by Susan E. Carlson, Ph.D., at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, and colleagues. It appears in EClinicalMedicine. Funding was provided by NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National ...

Among the powerful biochemicals of the human immune system, peptides are one of the best. Most commonly found in the places where microbes love to take root - mucous membranes of the eye, mouth, nose and lungs - they're known to kill all sorts of tiny invaders, such as viruses, bacteria and fungi. Given their power, one might think peptides would represent promising drug treatments, perhaps even a cure, for many infectious diseases. But, alas, they are fundamentally flawed: They are vulnerable to a myriad of enzymes whose job is to rapidly break them down in a way that robs them of their therapeutic properties. "Because of their vulnerability to enzymatic breakdown, ...