A type of drug used to treat diabetes may reduce the risk of developing Parkinson's disease, according to a new study published in PLOS Medicine. The research, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, found that diabetes patients taking glitazone antidiabetes drugs (either rosiglitazone or pioglitazone) had a 28% lower incidence of Parkinson's disease than people taking other treatments for diabetes who had never taken glitazones. [1] Glitazones are a class of drug that activate the peroxisome proliferation-activated gamma (PPARγ) receptor, which ...

VANCOUVER, B.C. and DURHAM, N.C. - A Phase III, individually randomized trial has found conditional cash transfers for school attendance did not reduce the risk of HIV among high-school aged women in South Africa, investigators from the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) reported today at the 8th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Vancouver, Canada. The new finding is from HPTN 068, the first individually randomized study of young women conditioned on school attendance with an HIV incidence endpoint. In the trial, ...

An international panel of leading scientists is launching a new TripAdvisor-style website aimed at helping researchers choose better-quality research tools - and avoiding potentially serious errors in biomedical research. In a 'call to action' published today (Tuesday), the international expert panel warns that many scientists are unwittingly using poor-quality chemical probes, leading to mistaken conclusions being drawn from research studies. The expert panel - made up of researchers from non-profit research institutions and from biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies ...

July 2, 2015 - Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is the most widespread disease in the swine industry. In sows, PRRSV causes reproductive problems during gestation, including abnormal litters or abortions. Growing pigs with the disease will have respiratory problems and poor growth. In 2012, Holtkamp and colleagues estimated the annual losses due to PRRSV to be a staggering $664 million in the U.S. alone. Producers on larger farms use vaccines and enhanced biosecurity measures to prevent eradicating an entire herd during a PRRSV outbreak. Unfortunately, ...

NEW YORK, July 21, 2015 -- A recent study conducted at Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (NKI) and NYU Langone Medical Center implicates a new culprit in Alzheimer's disease development. The research reveals that ßCTF -- the precursor of the amyloid beta (Aß) peptide -- acts at the earliest stage of Alzheimer's to initiate a range of abnormalities leading to the loss of groups of neurons critical for memory formation. Results from the study are published online July 21, 2015 in the journal, Molecular Psychiatry, and the article has been selected ...

WASHINGTON -- In animal models, acupuncture appears to impact the same biologic pathways ramped up by pain and stress, analogous to what drugs do in humans. Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) researchers say their animal study, published online in Endocrinology, provides the strongest evidence to date on the mechanism of this ancient Chinese therapy in chronic stress. "The benefits of acupuncture are well known by those who use it, but such proof is anecdotal. This research, the culmination of a number of studies, demonstrates how acupuncture might work in the ...

Electroconvulsive therapy remains one of the most effective treatments for severe depression, but new UNSW research shows ultra-brief pulse stimulation is almost as effective as standard ECT, with far fewer cognitive side effects. The study, published today in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, is the first systematic review to examine the effectiveness and cognitive effects of standard ECT treatment, brief pulse stimulation, versus the newer treatment, known as ultra-brief pulse right unilateral (RUL) ECT. It comes after previous trials had shown conflicting results. ...

Native Americans living in the Amazon bear an unexpected genetic connection to indigenous people in Australasia, suggesting a previously unknown wave of migration to the Americas thousands of years ago, a new study has found. "It's incredibly surprising," said David Reich, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics and senior author of the study. "There's a strong working model in archaeology and genetics, of which I have been a proponent, that most Native Americans today extend from a single pulse of expansion south of the ice sheets--and that's wrong. We missed something ...

There is archaeological evidence of modern humans in the Americas by ca. 15 thousand years ago (KYA). However, there is still debate over exactly when and how many times the ancestors of present-day Native Americans entered the New World from Siberia. A large genome-scale study conducted by an international team headed by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen has now provided answers to these questions. The study reveals that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans arrived in the Americas as part of a single migration wave, no earlier than ...

Location-based advertisements may pinpoint customers geographically, but often miss the target because customers may find the ads creepy and intrusive, according to an international team of researchers. To overcome this negativity, the researchers suggest advertisers invite their customers to help tailor ads they might receive. While being physically close to a product or shop improved attitudes about local advertisements on their mobile devices, customers felt significantly better about both the advertisement and location-based advertising when they had a hand in selecting ...

Emergency room physicians treating patients with alcohol-related trauma can better identify those at risk of future drinking-related trauma with a 10-point questionnaire rather than the standard blood alcohol content test, according to a study in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association (JAOA). The questionnaire, known as the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), was developed by the World Health Organization to address difficulties in identifying at-risk drinking behavior. It assesses alcohol consumption, drinking behaviors and alcohol-related ...

The original Americans came from Siberia in a single wave no more than 23,000 years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age, and apparently hung out in the north - perhaps for thousands of years - before spreading in two distinct populations throughout North and South America, according to a new genomic analysis. The findings, which will be reported in the July 24 issue of Science, confirm the most popular theory of the peopling of the Americas, but throws cold water on others, including the notion of an earlier wave of people from East Asia prior to the last glacial maximum, ...

Starting antiretroviral therapy early not only prevents serious AIDS-related diseases, but also prevents the onset of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other non-AIDS-related diseases in HIV-infected people, according to a new analysis of data from the Strategic Timing of AntiRetroviral Treatment (START) study, the first large-scale randomized clinical trial to establish that earlier antiretroviral treatment benefits all HIV-infected individuals. Rates of both serious AIDS-related events and serious non-AIDS-related events were significantly reduced with early therapy. The ...

The Institute of Medicine has identified interprofessional education (IPE) as a key innovation for achieving the triple aim of better care, better outcomes and reduced health care costs. Yet, a shortage of qualified faculty and difficulty with aligning learners' schedules often prevent sustainable and scalable IPE. Now, a team of New York University researchers from both the College of Nursing (CoN) and NYU School of Medicine (SoM), are addressing the barriers to wide-spread adoption of IPE. Led by Maja Djukic, PhD, RN, assistant professor at the CoN, and Marc Triola, ...

The United States now produces about as much crude oil as Saudi Arabia does, and enough natural gas to export in large quantities. That's thanks to hydraulic fracturing, a mining practice that involves a rock-cracking pressurized mix of water, sand and chemicals. Ongoing research by Stanford environmental scientist Rob Jackson attempts to minimize the risks of "fracking" to underground drinking water sources. The most recent such study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, finds that at least 6,900 oil and gas wells in the U.S. were fracked less than a mile ...

MADISON, Wis. -- Cognitive scientists have come to view the brain as a prediction machine, constantly comparing what is happening around us to expectations based on experience -- and considering what should happen next. "These predictions, most of them unconscious, include predicting what we're about to see," says Gary Lupyan, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor. Work in Lupyan's lab has demonstrated the predictive process through manipulating the connection between language and vision in the brain. A study published recently in The Journal of Neuroscience ...

MIAMI - Researchers discovered a threatened coral species that lives in deeper waters off the U.S. Virgin Islands is more fertile than its shallow-water counterparts. The new study showed that mountainous star corals (Orbicella faveolata) located at nearly 140 feet (43 meters) deep may produce one trillion more eggs per square kilometer (247 acres) than those on shallow reefs. The findings from scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the University of the Virgin Islands have important implications for the future ...

ATLANTA - July 21, 2015-If Louisiana, which has some of the highest colon cancer incidence and mortality rates in the nation, had the same risk factors, screening uptake, and survival rates as New Jersey, incidence and mortality from the disease would not only drop, they would drop to levels below that of New Jersey, according to a new study. The study, appearing in Cancer, shows that removing differences in health behavior and survival would close a gap that has appeared over the past several decades. Decades ago, colorectal cancer incidence and mortality rates were ...

New research provides mathematical evidence that Michelangelo used the Golden Ratio of 1.6 when painting The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Golden Ratio is found when you divide a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is equal to the whole length divided by the longer part. The Golden Ratio has been linked with greater structural efficiency and has puzzled scientists for centuries due to its frequent occurrence in nature--for example in snail shells and flower petals. The Golden Ratio can also be found in a ...

Sudden cardiac arrest kills an estimated 200,000 people a year in the United States, but many of those lives could be saved if ordinary bystanders simply performed CPR, a new study led by Duke Medicine shows. The early application of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by an average person nearby, combined with defibrillation by firefighters or police before the arrival of emergency medical services (EMS), was the one intervention that substantially increased survival from cardiac arrest, according to findings reported by Duke researchers and colleagues in the July 21 ...

Two studies in the July 21 issue of JAMA find that use of interventions such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation and automated external defibrillators by bystanders and first responders have increased and were associated with improved survival and neurological outcomes for persons who experienced an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is an increasing health concern worldwide, with poor prognoses. Shinji Nakahara, M.D., Ph.D., of the Kanagawa University of Human Services, Yokosuka, Japan, and colleagues examined the associations between ...

Although some previous studies have suggested an increased risk of bladder cancer with use of the diabetes drug pioglitazone, analyses that included nearly 200,000 patients found no statistically significant increased risk, however a small increased risk could not be excluded, according to a study in the July 21 issue of JAMA. Additional analyses with another large group found that use of pioglitazone was associated with an increase in the risk of prostate and pancreatic cancer, although further investigation is needed to assess whether the associations are causal or due ...

In a phase 2 trial that included nearly 1,000 adults, the AS03 and MF59 adjuvants (a component that improves immune response of inactivated influenza vaccines) increased the immune responses to two doses of an inactivated H7N9 influenza vaccine, with AS03-adjuvanted formulations inducing the highest amount of antibody response, according to a study in the July 21 issue of JAMA. In March 2013 the first human infections with the avian influenza A(H7N9) virus were reported in China, and since that time hundreds of cases have been documented. While most infections are believed ...

Researchers have found an association between treatment with the antibiotic dicloxacillin and a decrease in international normalized ratio (INR; a measure of blood coagulation) levels among patients taking the vitamin K antagonists warfarin or phenprocoumon, according to a study in the July 21 issue of JAMA. A challenge in the use of vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) is the potential for drug-drug interactions, resulting in insufficient or excessive anticoagulation. Solid data are lacking for most alleged interactions. In case reports, the commonly used antibiotic dicloxacillin ...

WASHINGTON, DC, July 21, 2015 - It's not unusual for two drivers to depart from the same location, head out to the same destination, drive more or less the same speed and nevertheless arrive at dramatically different times, with one driver taking significantly longer to arrive. While this can simply be bad luck, sometimes the reason isn't an obvious external event. And if you are a world traveler, you've likely noticed the fact that transportation works like a charm in some countries, in the sense that you can plan your commute or trip via public bus with confidence. ...