Older people with vision loss are significantly more likely to suffer mild cognitive impairment, which can be a precursor to dementia, according to a new study published in the journal Ageing Clinical and Experimental Research. The research by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) examined World Health Organisation data on more than 32,000 people and found that people with loss in both near and far vision were 1.7 times more likely to suffer from mild cognitive impairment. People with impairment of their near vision were 1.3 times more likely to suffer from mild cognitive impairment than someone with no vision impairment. However, people who reported ...

CLEVELAND--Using ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to map the brains of people with Down syndrome (DS), researchers from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals and other institutions detected subtle differences in the structure and function of the hippocampus--a region of the brain tied to memory and learning. Such detailed mapping, made possible by the high-powered MRI, is significant because it allowed the research team to better understand how each subregion of the hippocampus in people with DS is functionally connected to other parts of the brain. ...

A collaboration between experts and a Danish-based, global reaching patient organization has resulted in a groundbreaking medical publication, where guidelines are being presented on how to manage patients with unexplained low blood sugar. Danielle Drachmann, founder of Ketotic Hypoglycemia International (KHI), spent years being dismissed by doctors due to the outdated perception that her children's dangerous low blood glucose (sugar) and high ketone levels were a normal variation. Professor Henrik Christesen, Head of the Complex Hypoglycemia Center, Odense University Hospital, Denmark, could not identify the cause of the condition ...

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is still causing a dramatic loss of human lives worldwide, constituting an unprecedented challenge for society, public health, and economy, to overcome. Currently, SARS-CoV-2 can be diagnosed in two different ways: i) antigen tests (point-of-care, POC) and ii) molecular tests (nucleic acid, RNA, or PCR-polymerase chain reaction). Antigen tests can detect parts of SARS-CoV-2 proteins, known as antigens, via a nasopharyngeal or nasal swab sampling method. The main advantages of POC-test include the high specificity, quick response (less than an hour), and portability, with no need of fixed laboratory facilities. On the other hand, in a molecular diagnostic test, a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is evolved, also known as nucleic ...

A research group working at Uppsala University has succeeded in studying 'translation factors' - important components of a cell's protein synthesis machinery - that are several billion years old. By studying these ancient 'resurrected' factors, the researchers were able to establish that they had much broader specificities than their present-day, more specialised counterparts. In order to survive and grow, all cells contain an in-house protein synthesis factory. This consists of ribosomes and associated translation factors that work together to ensure that the complex protein production process runs smoothly. While almost all components of the modern translational machinery are well known, until now scientists did not know how the ...

Toxic pollution hits poorer populations hardest as firms experience more pollutant releases and spend less money on waste management in areas with lower average incomes. Research from Lancaster University Management School and Texas Tech University, published in European Economic Review looked into the relationship between the location choices of potentially polluting firms and levels of local income to discover if firms made strategic decisions on site locations based on population demographics. The team studied potentially polluting firms across Texas, and found a correlation between lower income locations and the probability of potentially polluting firms choosing to locate there. Their data, from the US Environment Agency's Toxic Release Inventory also ...

Ice ages are not that easy to define. It may sound intuitive that an ice age represents a frozen planet, but the truth is often more nuanced than that. An ice age has constant glaciations and deglaciations, with ice sheets pulsating with the rhythm of changing climate. These giants have been consistently waxing and waning, exerting, and lifting pressure from the ocean floor. Several studies also show that the most recent deglaciation, Holocene (approximately 21ka-15ka ago) of the Barents Sea has had a huge impact on the release of methane into the water. A most recent study in Geology looks even further into the past, some 125 000 years ago, and contributes to the conclusion: Melting of the Arctic ice sheets drives the release of the potent greenhouse ...

New Haven, Conn. -- The choice between two non-invasive diagnostic tests is a common dilemma in patients who present with chest pain. Yale cardiologist Rohan Khera, MD, MS, and colleagues have developed ASSIST©, a new digital decision-aiding tool. By applying machine learning techniques to data from two large clinical trials, this new tool identifies which imaging test to pursue in patients who may have coronary artery disease or CAD, a condition caused by plaque buildup in the arterial wall. The new tool, described in a study published April 21 in the European Heart Journal, focuses on the long-term outcome for a given patient. "There are strengths and limitations ...

Individuals who self-identify as Republicans became more skeptical of a potential COVID-19 vaccine and other inoculations, such as the flu shot, over the course of the pandemic, reveals a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management. The paper, published in PLOS ONE, measured general attitudes toward vaccines and assessed whether study participants would get a potential COVID-19 vaccine as well as the seasonal flu shot. It also gauged trust in media. “We found Republicans became increasingly vaccine hesitant and less trusting of media from March to August of 2020, while Democrats’ views on ...

LONDON, ON - In a published study, a team from Lawson Health Research Institute has found that a simple device can reduce swelling after kidney transplantation. The geko™ device, manufactured by Sky Medical Technology Ltd and distributed in Canada by Trudell Healthcare Solutions Inc., is a muscle pump activator which significantly improves blood flow by stimulating the body's 'muscle pumps.' Patients using the device following kidney transplantation experienced shorter hospital stays and reduced surgical site infections by nearly 60 per cent. Kidney and simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplantations ...

Scientists have recreated the reaction by which carbon isotopes made their way into different organic compounds, challenging the notion that organic compounds, such as amino acids, were formed by isotopically enriched substrates. Their discovery suggests that the building blocks of life in meteorites were derived from widely available substrates in the early solar system. Their findings were published online in Science Advances on April 28, 2021. Carbonaceous meteorites contain the building blocks of life, including amino acids, sugars, and nucleobases. These ...

Scientists from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The international team of 22 scientists, including biologists, evolutionary statisticians, and anthropologists, compared the brain mass of 1400 living and extinct mammals. For the 107 fossils examined--among them ancient whales and the oldest Old World monkey skull ever found--they used endocranial volume data from skulls instead of brain mass data. The brain measurements were then analyzed along with body size ...

Within the past decade, next-generation sequencing technologies have revolutionized the way in which genetic data are generated and analyzed. In the field of phylogenetics, this has meant that researchers are rapidly reconstructing the tree of life, a goal that biologists have been working toward since Darwin sketched the first phylogeny in his notebook in 1837. Yet despite the relative ease with which DNA can now be sequenced in large quantities, scientists must first extract that DNA from an organism, often relying on vast numbers of curated specimens ...

DALLAS, April 29, 2021 -- Health care professionals should consider prescribing medication for patients with slightly elevated blood pressure if levels do not decrease after six months of healthy lifestyle changes, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association. The statement, published today in the Association's journal Hypertension, fills a gap in guideline recommendations by addressing how to manage untreated, stage 1 high blood pressure - levels of 130-139/80-89 mm Hg - that was not fully addressed in the 2017 treatment guidelines. The 2017 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Blood Pressure Management ...

Eye contact plays a fundamental role in human communication and relationships. When we look into each other's eyes, we show that we are paying attention to each other. However, we do not only look at each other but also at our four-legged companions. According to new research by Hungarian ethologists, at least four independent traits affect dogs' ability to establish eye contact with humans. Short-headed, cooperative, young, and playful dogs are the most likely to look into the human eye. Dogs adapted uniquely well to live with humans, and communication plays a vital ...

Less than one percent of people in the United States use kratom, a plant-based substance commonly used to manage pain and opioid withdrawal, according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. However, the use of kratom--which is legal but carries the risk of addiction and harmful side effects--is more prevalent among people who use other drugs, particularly those with opioid use disorder. Derived from a tree native to Southeast Asia, kratom can be taken as a pill, capsule, or extract, or brewed as a tea. It acts on the brain's opioid receptors; at low doses, kratom is a stimulant, while at higher doses, it can relieve pain. Some people report using kratom as a substitute for opioids in an effort ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Researchers have created a new, open-access tool that allows doctors and scientists to evaluate infant brain health by assessing the concentration of various chemical markers, called metabolites, in the brain. The tool compiled data from 140 infants to determine normal ranges for these metabolites. Published in the journal NMR in Biomedicine, the study describes an easier and more reliable way to evaluate metabolite concentrations in the infant brain than was previously available, said study lead Ryan Larsen, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Metabolites play an important role in normal brain growth, development and function, said study co-author ...

When they go to the dentist to get a tooth pulled or another procedure, patients might not think that the prescription they receive to ease their pain could put them or their family at risk of an opioid overdose. But a new study from the University of Michigan shows that overdose rates were two and a half times higher among patients who filled a prescription for an opioid medication after a dental procedure, compared with those who didn't fill such a prescription. Overdose rates were also higher among the family members of such patients - possibly from misuse of the leftover pills. The study is published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by a team from the U-M Medical School and School of Dentistry. It used data from 8.5 million teen and adult ...

The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) has announced the development of an effective structural monitoring technique to monitor massive infrastructures, such as long-span bridge. The method provides accurate and precise responses over whole structural system densely by fusing advantages of multi-fidelity data. Rapid advances in sensing and information technologies have led to condition-based monitoring in civil and mechanical structural systems. The structural monitoring system plays a key role in condition-based monitoring to evaluate structural safety from responses measured by sensors. In other words, following method allows to examine the health of an existing structures, such ...

A ship's container lost overboard in the North Atlantic has resulted in printer cartridges washing up everywhere from the coast of Florida to northern Norway, a new study has shown. It has also resulted in the items weathering to form microplastics that are contaminated with a range of metals such as titanium, iron and copper. The spillage is thought to have happened around 1,500 km east of New York, in January 2014, with the first beached cartridges reported along the coastline of the Azores in September the same year. Since then, around 1,500 more have been reported on social media, with the greatest quantities ...

VANCOUVER, Wash. - Putting on a happy face might not be enough for entrepreneurs to win over potential investors. Despite perceptions that entrepreneurs should always be positive about their ventures, a study led by a Washington State University researcher found that entrepreneurs whose facial expressions moved through a mix of happiness, anger and fear during funding pitches were more successful. "Our findings show that there's a role for different emotions in pitches," said Ben Warnick, WSU assistant professor in WSU's Carson College of Business and lead author on the study published in the Journal of Business Venturing. "For example, an angry facial expression can convey how much you care about something, instead of just smiling, which on the extreme end ...

New York nurses caring for COVID-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic experienced anxiety, depression, and illness--but steps their hospitals took to protect them and support from their coworkers helped buffer against the stressful conditions, according to a study led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. "A critical part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic should be supporting the mental health of our frontline workers. Our study demonstrates that institutional resources--such as supportive staff relationships, professional development, providing temporary housing, ...

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology developed a new strategy for producing a wide range of organotin compounds, which are the building blocks of many organic synthesis methods. Their approach is based on the photoexcitation of stannyl anions, which alters their electronic state and increases their selectivity and reactivity to form useful compounds. This protocol will be helpful for the efficient synthesis of many bioactive products, novel drugs, and functional materials. Organotin compounds, also known as stannanes, are made of tin (Sn), hydrocarbons, and sometimes other elements like nitrogen and oxygen. During the 1970s, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Though more than 131 million Americans have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine to date, public confusion and uncertainty about the importance of second doses and continued public health precautions threaten to delay a U.S. return to normalcy, according to Cornell-led research published April 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 American adults conducted in February, less than half of respondents said they believed the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines provided strong protection against COVID-19 a week or two after a second dose, consistent with guidance from the U.S. Centers for Diseases ...

NEW YORK, NY-- Diagnosing chronic kidney disease, which is often undetected until it causes irreversible damage, may soon become automated with a new algorithm that interprets data from electronic medical records. The algorithm, developed by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, automatically scours a patient's electronic medical record for results of blood and urine tests and, using a mix of established equations and machine learning to process the data, can alert physicians to patients in the earliest stages of chronic kidney disease. A study of the algorithm was published in the journal npj Digital Medicine in April. "Identifying ...