A study presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (held online, 10-13 May) supports recommendations to avoid pregnancy for 12 months after bariatric (obesity) surgery due to an association with adverse outcomes in pregnancy including an elevated risk of preterm birth. The study is by Dr Laura Heusschen, Vitalys Obesity Clinic, part of Rijnstate Hospital, Arnhem, The Netherlands, and colleagues. More than half of all female patients who undergo bariatric surgery are of reproductive age, and the resulting weight loss improves fertility, as well as reducing the risk of gestational diabetes and hypertensive disorders during pregnancy. It also ...

The first global review of complementary medicines (herbal and dietary supplements) for weight loss in 16 years--combining 121 randomised placebo-controlled trials including nearly 10,000 adults--suggests that their use cannot be justified based on the current evidence. The findings of two studies, being presented at The European Congress on Obesity (ECO) held online this year, suggest that although some herbal and dietary supplements show statistically greater weight loss than placebo, it is not enough to benefit health, and the authors call for more research into their long-term safety. "Over-the-counter ...

Vegetarians appear to have a healthier biomarker profile than meat-eaters, and this applies to adults of any age and weight, and is also unaffected by smoking and alcohol consumption, according to a new study in over 166,000 UK adults, being presented at this week's European Congress on Obesity (ECO), held online this year. Biomarkers can have bad and good health effects, promoting or preventing cancer, cardiovascular and age-related diseases, and other chronic conditions, and have been widely used to assess the effect of diets on health. However, evidence of the metabolic benefits associated with being vegetarian is unclear. To understand ...

Lugano, Switzerland, 8 May 2021 - The finding that breast tumours can evolve to express low HER2 potentially widens the number of patients who can benefit from new investigational agents, typically novel antibody-drug conjugate therapies, that are currently in clinical trials for HER2-low tumours. The first study of its kind exploring how breast cancers change from the primary to the recurrent tumour has revealed that nearly 30% of breast cancer patients convert from, or to, human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER)2-low status. Specifically, the study found that 14% of triple-negative breast cancers with HER2-negative expression (also referred to as HER2-0) in the primary tumour converted to HER2-low expression in the recurrent tumour ...

Mild Covid-19 infection is very unlikely to cause lasting damage to the structure or function of the heart, according to a study led by UCL (University College London) researchers and funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and Barts Charity. The researchers say the results, published in JACC Cardiovascular Imaging, should reassure the public, as they relate to the vast majority of people who had Covid-19 infections with mild or no symptoms. This study of 149 healthcare workers recruited from Barts Health and Royal Free London NHS Trusts is the largest and most detailed study to date into ...

The air in the United States and Western Europe is much cleaner than even a decade ago. Low-sulfur gasoline standards and regulations on power plants have successfully cut sulfate concentrations in the air, reducing the fine particulate matter that harms human health and cleaning up the environmental hazard of acid rain. Despite these successes, sulfate levels in the atmosphere have declined more slowly than sulfur dioxide emissions, especially in wintertime. This unexpected phenomenon suggests sulfur dioxide emission reductions are less efficient than expected for cutting sulfate aerosols. A new study led by Tokyo ...

The use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as ibuprofen, does not lead to higher rates of death or severe disease in patients who are hospitalised with COVID-19, according to a new observational study of more than 72,000 people in the UK published in The Lancet Rheumatology journal. NSAIDs are common treatments for acute pain and rheumatological diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthrosis. Early in the pandemic, there was debate on whether the use of such drugs increased the severity of COVID-19, which led to urgent calls for investigations between NSAIDs and COVID-19. The ISARIC CCP-UK (International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging ...

The most comprehensive study of the family tree for legumes, the plant family that includes beans, soybeans, peanuts, and many other economically important crop plants, reveals a history of whole-genome duplications. The study also helps to uncover the evolution of genes involved in nitrogen fixation--a key trait likely important in the evolutionary spread and diversification of legumes and vital for their use as "green manure" in agriculture. To reconstruct the family tree, researchers compared the DNA sequence of more than 1500 genes from 463 different legume species, including 391 newly sequenced species, that span the diversity of this large plant family. A paper describing the ...

With the COVID-19 vaccines on many people's minds, some may be surprised to learn that we do not yet have vaccines for many common infectious diseases. Take salmonella, for example, which can infect people through contaminated food, water and animals. According to the World Health Organization, non-typhoidal salmonella infection affects more than 95 million people globally each year, leading to an estimated 2 million deaths annually. There is no approved vaccine for salmonella in humans, and some strains are antibiotic-resistant. But just as scientists spent decades doing the ...

For some people, social gatherings can be a time to imbibe. And for some, that can turn into a time to overindulge. But how do your neighborhood and your social network affect binge drinking? Along with colleagues at the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, Indiana University researcher Hank Green examined how neighborhood and social network characteristics were related to adult binge drinking. He and his co-authors found that both factors play a role in how much someone drinks, information that can help us better understand binge drinking among adults. The study was published in the journal Health and Place, indexed in Science Direct and PubMed. "Adults living ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- May 7, 2021 -- Long-running archaeological research, boosted by airborne lidar sensing and machine-learning algorithms, finds that Cambodia's Greater Angkor region was home to 700,000-900,000 people. The sprawling city, which thrived from the 9th to 15th centuries, has slowly revealed its forest-hidden past to archaeologists, but its total population has been a mystery. The new estimate, made possible by a study designed at the University of Oregon, is the first for the entire 3,000-square-kilometer mix of urban and rural landscape. The findings published May 7 in the journal ...

The protein, known as NusG, pauses the transcription machinery at specific DNA sequences to facilitate what is called "intrinsic termination" and prevent unwanted transcription that could disrupt cellular function. A new study, led by Penn State researchers, shows that NusG and the related protein, NusA, together facilitate termination at about 88% of the intrinsic terminators in the bacteria Bacillus subtilis. Understanding this process expands our basic knowledge of this key cellular function and could eventually aid in the development of antibiotics that target and disrupt gene regulation ...

Boston, Mass. – Sleep disorders are associated with significantly higher rates of health care utilization, conservatively placing an additional $94.9 billion in costs each year to the United States health care system, according to a new study from researchers at Mass Eye and Ear, a member hospital of Mass General Brigham. In their new analysis, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, the researchers found the number of medical visits and prescriptions filled were nearly doubled in people with sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and insomnia, compared to similar people without. Affected patients were also more likely to visit the emergency department and have more comorbid medical ...

(Toronto, Friday, May 7, 2021) -- Probing the unique biology of human pancreatic cancer cells in a laboratory has yielded unexpected insights of a weakness that can be used against the cells to kill them. Led by Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PM) Scientist Dr. Marianne Koritzinsky, researchers showed that about half of patient-derived pancreatic cancer cell lines are highly dependent or "addicted" to the protein peroxiredoxin 4 (PRDX4), as a result of the altered metabolic state of the cancer cell. This addiction is vital for the cancer cell's survival, thereby also making it a precise, potential target against the cancer. Pancreatic cancer is a deadly disease with an overall five-year survival of only eight per cent. Moreover, 36% to 46% of patients who undergo surgery with ...

Induced bank filtration is a key and well-established approach to provide drinking water supply to populated areas located along rivers or lakes and with limited access to groundwater resources. It is employed in several countries worldwide, with notable examples in Europe, the United States, and parts of Africa. Contamination of surface waters poses a serious threat to attaining drinking water standards. In this context, human pathogenic microorganisms such as some viruses and bacteria, originating from the discharge of wastewater treatment plants, form a major contaminant group. A detailed study at an induced bank filtration site along the Rhine river in Germany has now linked transport of bacteria to seasonal dynamics. Key results of the study show that floods should be ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Peer reviewed by medical experts that included three U.S. government senior scientists and published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, the research is the most comprehensive review of the available data taken from clinical, in vitro, animal, and real-world studies. Led by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a group of medical and scientific experts reviewed published peer-reviewed studies, manuscripts, expert meta-analyses, and epidemiological analyses of regions with ivermectin distribution efforts all showing that ...

The two meters of -stretched- DNA contained in human cells are continuously twisting and untwisting to give access to genetic information: when a gene is expressed to generate a protein, the two strands of DNA are separated to give access to all the machinery necessary for this expression, resulting in an excessive accumulation of coiling that needs to be resolved later. The paper that has now been published by the team led by Felipe Cortés, head of the DNA Topology and Breaks Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), in collaboration with Silvia Jimeno González, professor at the University of Seville ...

Neonatal hypothermia -- which occurs when an infant's core body temperature falls below the normal range needed to maintain health -- contributes to approximately one million deaths each year, and countless cases of stunted growth, almost exclusively in low- and middle-income countries. To address this common but preventable condition, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital, engineers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and colleagues in Rwanda developed the Dream Warmer, a low cost, reusable non-electric infant warmer to prevent and treat hypothermia. A new study from the team shows that infants who received treatment with the warmer had only an 11 percent rate of ...

A new experiment shows that the more energy consumed by a clock, the more accurate its timekeeping. Clocks pervade every aspect of life, from the atomic clocks that underlie satellite navigation to the cellular clocks inside our bodies. All of them consume energy and release heat. A kitchen clock, for example, does this by using up its battery. Generally the most accurate clocks require the most energy, which hints at a fundamental connection between energy consumption and accuracy. This is what an international team of scientists from Lancaster, Oxford, and Vienna set out to test. To do this, they built a particularly simple clock, consisting of a vibrating ultra-thin membrane, tens of nanometers ...

A research team from the Skoltech Center for Design, Manufacturing and Materials (CDMM) studied the effects of processing additives - aluminum hydroxide and zinc stearate - on the polymerization kinetics of thermosets used in pultrusion. The research was published in the Journal of Composite Materials. Fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP) structural elements that have obvious advantages over conventional materials, such as steel, wood, and concrete, are widely used in civil, marine and road construction. FRP structures are manufactured using the pultrusion process, in which polymerization is achieved by continuously pulling ...

A new University of Iowa study challenges the idea that gray matter (the neurons that form the cerebral cortex) is more important than white matter (the myelin covered axons that physically connect neuronal regions) when it comes to cognitive health and function. The findings may help neurologists better predict the long-term effects of strokes and other forms of traumatic brain injury. "The most unexpected aspect of our findings was that damage to gray matter hubs of the brain that are really interconnected with other regions didn't really tell us much about how poorly people would do on cognitive tests after brain damage. On the other hand, people with damage to the densest white matter connections did much worse on those tests," explains Justin Reber, PhD, ...

Training the artificial intelligence models that underpin web search engines, power smart assistants and enable driverless cars, consumes megawatts of energy and generates worrying carbon dioxide emissions. But new ways of training these models are proven to be greener. Artificial intelligence models are used increasingly widely in today's world. Many carry out natural language processing tasks - such as language translation, predictive text and email spam filters. They are also used to empower smart assistants such as Siri and Alexa to 'talk' to us, and to operate driverless cars. But to function ...

To observe the swift neuronal signals in a fish brain, scientists have started to use a technique called light-field microscopy, which makes it possible to image such fast biological processes in 3D. But the images are often lacking in quality, and it takes hours or days for massive amounts of data to be converted into 3D volumes and movies. Now, EMBL scientists have combined artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms with two cutting-edge microscopy techniques - an advance that shortens the time for image processing from days to mere seconds, while ensuring that the resulting images are crisp and accurate. The findings are published in Nature Methods. "Ultimately, we were able to take 'the best of both worlds' in this approach," says Nils Wagner, one of the paper's two lead ...

PHILADELPHIA-- A gene called GAS2 plays a key role in normal hearing, and its absence causes severe hearing loss, according to a study led by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers, whose findings are published online today in Developmental Cell, discovered that the protein encoded by GAS2 is crucial for maintaining the structural stiffness of support cells in the inner ear that normally help amplify incoming sound waves. They showed that inner ear support cells lacking functional GAS2 lose their amplifier abilities, causing severe hearing ...

Depressive symptoms are more common in teenage girls than in their male peers. However, boys' mental health appears to be affected more if they suffer from obesity. Irrespective of gender, bullying is a considerably greater risk factor than overweight for developing depressive symptoms. These conclusions are drawn by researchers at Uppsala University who monitored adolescents for six years in a questionnaire study, now published in the Journal of Public Health. Peer-review/Observational study/People "The purpose of our study was to investigate the connection ...