People who experience a type of stroke linked with nearly half of all dementias could be treated for the first time by repurposing two cheap and common drugs, a trial shows.   Researchers found that isosorbide mononitrate and cilostazol, which are already used to treat other heart and circulatory diseases, can safely improve the debilitating outcomes people experience after lacunar stroke.   The two drugs, which were found to be even more effective when used in combination, could be available as a treatment for lacunar strokes within five years, if the results are ...

Research Highlights: An analysis of data for more than 58,000 women in the U.K. Biobank found that both short (less than 21 days) or long (more than 35 days) menstrual cycles were associated with the development of cardiovascular disease, heart attack or atrial fibrillation (AFib). Short or long menstrual cycle length was associated with a 19% higher risk of heart disease among those women compared to women with menstrual cycle length between 22 to 34 days. Irregular menstrual cycle length was associated with a 40% higher risk of atrial ...

Statement Highlights: Addressing low levels of physical activity among people in some targeted groups has the potential to improve equity in cardiovascular health. Physical activity levels are lower among some population groups known to have higher cardiovascular disease risk, including adults who are older, female, Black, have depression, have disabilities, have lower socioeconomic status or live in rural areas. It’s important to improve resources and opportunities to decrease barriers to physical activity. Physical activity initiatives should engage the community and ...

A cleft lip or palate arises from the combined effects of genes and inflammatory risk factors experienced during pregnancy, such as smoking or infections, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, published in Nature Communications, has revealed for the first time how genetic and environmental factors come together to form a cleft lip or palate in a developing foetus. Cleft lip, with or without cleft palate, is the most common craniofacial malformation seen at birth, affecting one in 700 live births. It can have devastating ...

A long history of exposure to air pollution is associated with a higher risk of developing severe disease, admission to hospital or an intensive care unit (ICU) and death by COVID‑19 according to a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a research centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, was based on a large cohort of 4,660,502 adults resident in Catalonia in 2020, the year the Spanish autonomous community had a high incidence of COVID-19. The ...

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, working with French colleagues, have successfully developed a method able to kill the aggressive brain tumour glioblastoma. By blocking certain functions in the cell with a docked molecule, the researchers cause the cancer to die of stress. Cancer cells, especially those that form aggressive tumours, are in one way or another out of control and live a very stressful existence. To manage this stress, the cancer cells hijack mechanisms that the healthy cells use to regulate protein production and process the surplus proteins that they create. Without these hijacked mechanisms, ...

Leesburg, VA, May 17, 2023—According to an accepted manuscript published in ARRS’ own American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), deep learning–based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for breast lesion classification on ultrasound significantly improved radiologists’ diagnostic performance—particularly for reducing the frequency of benign breast biopsies. Compared with the literature supporting CAD at tertiary and/or urban centers, results from this prospective multicenter study of radiologists without ...

STARKVILLE, Miss.— Those needing extra sleep often reach for the bottle of melatonin, but Mississippi State scientists are discovering a host of other proven and potential health benefits for cattle who receive the supplement. MSU faculty and students in the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences and the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station are making intriguing discoveries about the functions of melatonin in the bovine body and how this hormone can help support cattle health. MSU Associate Professor Caleb Lemley has an extensive history of studying the use of melatonin as a supplement in cattle. He has been studying how the ...

A new study showed that despite there being no significant racial disparities in access or use of care during the perinatal period among veterans using Veterans Administration care, Black veterans were more likely than white veterans to experience postpartum re-hospitalization and to have a low-birth-weight infant. The study is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Women’s Health.  Click here to read the article now. Jodie Katon, PhD, MS, from VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, and coauthors, reported that Black veterans were 67% more likely than white veterans to have a postpartum re-hospitalization and 67% more likely to have a low-birth-weight ...

The Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Center at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama partnered with the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in India to develop and validate a new test for chytridiomycosis strains, offering new insights into a wildlife disease that caused dramatic declines of over 500 amphibian species and the extinction of 90 others. Their novel assay, published in the journal Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, identified previously undetected Indian strains, and successfully detected ...

(24 May 2023, Munich, Germany) A team of researchers from Denmark have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) framework to address the number of strokes that go unrecognised by human emergency call handlers.1 The framework outperformed emergency call handlers in recognising stroke for both sexes and across all age groups studied, indicating its potential as a supplementary tool for early and precise stroke identification in the future. The retrospective study, presented today at the European Stroke ...

A University of Massachusetts Amherst public health scientist has received a five-year, $3.4 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to lead an urban gardening and peer nutritional counseling program aimed at improving the health of HIV-positive people with food insecurity in the Dominican Republic. The project involving an international team of researchers and community partners is believed to the first full-scale trial to integrate nutritional counseling with food-generating ...

The effects of the ground on propeller noise have been measured experimentally for the very first time by researchers in the Aeroacoustics research team at the University of Bristol. In findings, published in the Journal of Sound and Vibration, the team found clear differences in the noise characteristics of propellers when over ground, known as ‘Ground Effect’, compared to when operated normally. They noted an overall noise increase when measuring at angles above the ground, with hydrodynamic and acoustic interaction effects being a key factor to the overall noise trends. It is hoped this research, tested in the National Aeroacoustic Wind Tunnel ...

A new study examining the effects of planting a wildflower meadow in the historic grounds of King’s College, Cambridge has demonstrated its benefits to local biodiversity and climate change mitigation. The study, led by King’s Research Fellow Dr Cicely Marshall, found that establishing the meadow had made a considerable impact to the wildlife value of the land, while reducing the greenhouse gas emissions associated with its upkeep. Marshall and her colleagues, among them three King’s undergraduate students, conducted biodiversity surveys over three years to compare the species richness, abundance ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University and Baylor University have made a breakthrough toward reducing the energy consumption of the photonic chips used in data centers and supercomputers. The findings are important because a data center can consume up to 50 times more energy per square foot of floor space than a typical office building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. A data center houses an organization’s information technology operations and equipment; it stores, processes and disseminates ...

The biology underpinning a rare genetic mutation that allows its carrier to live virtually pain-free, heal more rapidly and experience reduced anxiety and fear, has been uncovered by new research from UCL. The study, published in Brain, follows up the team’s discovery in 2019 of the FAAH-OUT gene and the rare mutations that cause Jo Cameron to feel virtually no pain and never feel anxious or afraid. The new research describes how the mutation in FAAH-OUT ‘turns down’ FAAH gene expression, as well as the knock-on effects on other molecular pathways linked to wound healing and mood. It is hoped the findings will ...

Joint Press Release Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT, Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President & CEO: Akira Shimada) and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST, Head office: Onna-son, Kunigami-gun, Okinawa, Japan, Acting President: Dr. Albrecht Wagner) have successfully conducted the world’s first simultaneous marine and atmospheric measurements at multiple locations directly beneath a violent, Category 5*1, which is the strongest class, typhoon in the North-West Pacific, before it reached land. These observations were made directly beneath typhoon No. 11, called “Hinnamnor”/”Henry”, ...

School accountability policies from around the world list an array of mandates and recommendations to improve schools. One prevalent mandate, especially in the United States, calls for the development of a school improvement plan (SIP). Since the 1970s, many U.S. states have required that schools develop SIPs, and, in the 1990s, the U.S. federal government started to require that all state-designated underperforming schools develop SIPs (IASA, 1994; Odden & Dougherty, 1982). These school accountability policy mandates assert that SIPs are an improvement tool for educators to use to set direction, ...

SAN ANTONIO (May 23, 2023) — The Mays Cancer Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio recently conducted a clinical trial combining two drugs in patients with recurrent, high-grade glioblastoma (GBM). The Mays Cancer Center, one of the four National Cancer Institute-Designated Cancer Centers in Texas, is the only center in America to conduct this trial. Andrew Brenner, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio and a specialist in both breast cancer and malignancies of the brain and spinal cord, initiated the clinical trial. “Glioblastoma ...

Researchers have experimentally demonstrated a new quantum information storage protocol that can be used to create Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) quantum states. There is a great deal of interest in these complex entangled states because of their potential use in quantum sensing and quantum error correction applications. Chun-Ju Wu from the California Institute of Technology will present this research at the Optica Quantum 2.0 Conference and Exhibition, as a hybrid event 18-22 June in Denver, Colorado. Quantum-based technologies store information ...

ACS Engineering Au is a member of the ACS Au family of journals. These publications are open access, and each one focuses on a specific field relevant to chemistry. Here, we take a look at a few recent papers from ACS Engineering Au, which publishes a broad scope of research from both academic and industrial settings. The journal welcomes papers on topics such as process design, product research, energy and fuels, and measurement techniques. Reporters can request free access to these papers by emailing newsroom@acs.org. "Heat ...

Hospital inpatients who develop an acute kidney injury (AKI) generally fare poorly after being discharged, and have few options for effective treatment.   A UW Medicine-led study published recently in American Journal of Kidney Diseases suggests that new tests might improve this narrative. In the study, “about 30% of the patients that came into the hospital developed AKI, which means in a matter of hours or days, their kidneys might be failing because of reaction to drugs or contracting sepsis,” said lead author Dr. Pavan Bhatraju, an assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Causes ...

East Hanover, NJ – May 23, 2023 – New data show that while individuals with visual disabilities were slow to recover employment because of the effects of the COVID-2019 lockdown, they have made headway, depending on their level of disability, almost meeting their pre-pandemic levels. Possible reasons for their slower recovery include major safety concerns due to the shortage of personal protective equipment, less access to vaccines, and their vulnerability to severe consequences of COVID, according to experts speaking during last Friday’s nTIDE Deeper Dive Lunch & Learn Webinar. Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for persons ages 16-64, the ...

About half of cigarette smokers and young adult non-smokers think that nicotine-based electronic cigarettes have the same amount or even more harmful chemicals than regular tobacco-based cigarettes, according to a Rutgers study.   The study, published in Addiction, measured perceived levels of harmful chemicals in e-cigarettes compared with cigarettes using national samples of more than 1,000 adults ages 18 and older who smoke cigarettes and 1,000-plus adults ages 18 to 29 who are nonsmokers. The study also measured associations with e-cigarette/cigarette relative harm perceptions, e-cigarette use and interest. About 20 percent of all participants ...

(Memphis, Tenn.—May 23, 2023) Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center studied the structure and function of a transporter involved in cancer and immunity. They captured six structures of the transporter, including when it was bound to an inhibitor, providing unprecedented insight into how it works. The findings, published in Cell, have implications for drug development.   Transporters escort substances across the cell membrane so that they can carry out their functions. Sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) is an important signaling molecule that regulates the immune system, blood vessel formation, auditory ...