Research on treatments for health problems, such as diabetes, stroke and schizophrenia, is not being focused on the treatments considered most important by patients and clinicians, according to a study published in the open access journal Research Involvement and Engagement. The study suggests that current research is instead favoring drug treatments over physical or psychological therapies, or interventions to improve educational approaches or service organization. Study author Iain Chalmers, one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration and James Lind Alliance, ...

A single supportive close friendship can help young people from low-income backgrounds to thrive in challenging circumstances, according to a new University of Sussex study. The research, led by psychologist Dr Rebecca Graber, is published today, Thursday 25 June, in the British Journal of Psychology. Young people from low-income areas typically face substantial challenges to good physical health, mental health, academic achievement and employment. Previous research has linked these challenges to involvement with peers and membership of larger friendship groups - ...

Smokeless tobacco and, more recently, e-cigarettes have been promoted as a harm reduction strategy for smokers who are "unable or unwilling to quit." The strategy, embraced by both industry and some public health advocates, is based on the assumption that as smoking declines overall, only those who cannot quit will remain. A new study by researchers at UC San Francisco has found just the opposite. The researchers analyzed survey data spanning 18 years in the United States and six years in the European Union. They found that, contrary to the prevailing assumptions, ...

An investigation published by The BMJ today reveals how the controversial concept of "harm reduction", embraced enthusiastically by the tobacco industry, has sharply divided the public health community. On one side of the increasingly bitter dispute are those who believe it is time to work with the industry in support of products such as e-cigarettes. Those in the other camp, however, not only contest the claimed public health benefits of the new products but also fear harm reduction is a cynical and superficial smokescreen for an industry that has every intention of ...

Women who have experienced a stillbirth have up to a fourfold increased risk of stillbirth in a second pregnancy compared to those who had an initial live birth, finds a new meta-analysis published in The BMJ this week. Stillbirth rates have declined across most of Europe, but the UK still has a major public health problem. Ranked 33rd out of 35 for stillbirth rates among European countries, the UK recorded 3,286 stillborn babies in 2013. "Stillbirth is one of the most common adverse obstetric outcomes and a traumatic experience for parents," explain Sohinee Bhattacharya ...

Countries most affected by HIV must focus on stopping new HIV infections and expanding access to antiretroviral treatment or risk the epidemic rebounding, urges a major new report from the UNAIDS and Lancet Commission. "We must face hard truths--if the current rate of new HIV infections continues, merely sustaining the major efforts we already have in place will not be enough to stop deaths from AIDS increasing within five years in many countries," said Professor Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Co-Chair of the Commission, and ...

Congress needs to immediately lift the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs to counter the threat of HIV outbreaks among injection drug users like the one that has seen an alarming number of new cases erupt in a single rural Indiana county. So say Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Professor Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, and Steffanie A. Strathdee, PhD, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of California-San Diego, in a commentary published online June 24 in The New England Journal of Medicine. "There are going to be more ...

DALLAS, June 24, 2015 -- Nearly half of Hispanic adults were unaware they have high cholesterol, and less than a third receive any kind of cholesterol treatment, in a new study in Journal of the American Heart Association. Hispanics are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in America, with 52 million among the U.S. population, yet their awareness and management of high cholesterol lags behind other ethnic groups. Educating Hispanics/Latinos about the importance of maintaining healthy cholesterol levels could have a significant public health impact on reducing the ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - When older adults transfer between nursing homes and hospitals, inefficient and unclear communication between the organizations can hinder patient care. Now, a team of MU researchers is working to improve patients' health outcomes by increasing efficient, secure communication between nursing homes and hospitals using an electronic communication system called a health information exchange (HIE). "The exchange of accurate, complete and timely information between hospitals and nursing homes can be complicated when older adults transfer from one place to another," ...

Putnam Valley, N.Y. (June 24, 2015) - Cell transplantation researchers have successfully used bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) to treat a variety of diseases and conditions. Now, using injections of MSCs, a research team in Brazil has successfully treated laboratory rats modeled with severe burns. They found that the MSCs accelerated healing, enhanced local blood supply, affected the immune system in a positive way, secreted beneficial growth factors with anti-inflammatory properties, and ultimately provided higher survival rates than in control animals ...

Urinary tract and sexually transmitted infections in women are misdiagnosed by emergency departments nearly half the time, according to a paper in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. These misdiagnoses result in overuse of antibiotics, and increased antibiotic resistance, according to Michelle Hecker, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, MetroHealth Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, and her collaborators. "Less than half the women ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dubbed "The Behemoth" bleeding from a planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous, comet-like feature is about 50 times the size of the parent star. The hydrogen is evaporating from a warm, Neptune-sized planet, due to extreme radiation from the star. This phenomenon has never been seen around an exoplanet so small. It may offer clues to how other planets with hydrogen-enveloped atmospheres could have their outer layers evaporated by their parent star, leaving behind solid, rocky ...

Cystic fibrosis is more deadly for Hispanic than non-Hispanic patients, a disparity that is not explained by differences in their access to health care, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The study, published online June 18 in Chest, tracked more than 1,700 California residents with cystic fibrosis. Between 1991 and 2010, Hispanic CF patients were almost three times as likely to die as non-Hispanic CF patients, the study found. The gap in survival existed in spite of the fact that both groups visited CF specialty clinics equally ...

Glowing corals that display a surprising array of colours have been discovered in the deep water reefs of the Red Sea by scientists from the University of Southampton, UK, Tel Aviv University and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences (IUI), Israel, together with an international team of researchers. The researchers, whose findings have been published online today in research journal PLOS ONE, hope that some of the coral pigments could be developed into new imaging tools for medical applications. The team studied corals at depths of more than 50 metres and ...

Vitamin B12 tweaks how genes behave in the facial bacteria of some people who normally enjoy clear skin. The activity changes of the facial bacteria promote inflammation and lead to pimples. By shedding light on one mechanism behind B12's role in acne, the UCLA finding may identify drug targets that lead to new treatments for acne. Huiying Li, an assistant professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist at LA BioMed at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, are available for interviews. Science ...

On the hunt for better cancer screening tests, Johns Hopkins scientists led a proof of principle study that successfully identified tumor DNA shed into the blood and saliva of 93 patients with head and neck cancer. A report on the findings is published in the June 24 issue of Science Translational Medicine. "We have shown that tumor DNA in the blood or saliva can successfully be measured for these cancers," says Nishant Agrawal, M.D., associate professor of otolaryngology -- head and neck surgery -- and of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "In ...

Various diagnostic imaging techniques are currently used for clinical imaging/disease diagnosis. The accuracy of diagnosis is mainly based on the type of energy used (such as X-ray, sound waves, photons and positrons) to derive the visual information, as well as the degree of spatial resolution (mesoscopic or microscopic) and the level of information that can be obtained (physiological, anatomical or molecular). Based on potential health hazards imposed by type of energy used, clinical imaging modalities can be broadly categorized as ionizing and non-ionizing modalities. ...

From AGU's blogs: Landslide-induced sediment production after the Sabah earthquake in Malaysia The Mw=6.0 5 June 2015 Sabah earthquake in Malaysia, which killed 18 people in rockfalls on Mount Kinabalu, generated landslides that have released large volumes of sediment. The heavy tropical rainfall in Sabah means that this sediment is now starting to enter the river systems in the form of mudflows and sediment-rich flash floods. Dave Petley explores the aftermath of the Sabah earthquake in a new post on The Landslide Blog. From Eos.org: Improving predictions of Arctic ...

A new study of an otherworldly creature from half a billion years ago - a worm-like animal with legs, spikes and a head difficult to distinguish from its tail - has definitively identified its head for the first time, and revealed a previously unknown ring of teeth and a pair of simple eyes. The results, published today in the journal Nature, have helped scientists reconstruct what the common ancestor of everything from tiny roundworms to huge lobsters might have looked like. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of ...

LA JOLLA--Telomeres, specialized ends of our chromosomes that dictate how long cells can continue to duplicate themselves, have long been studied for their links to the aging process and cancer. Now, a discovery at the Salk Institute shows that telomeres may be more central than previously thought to a self-destruct program in cells that prevents tumors, a function that could potentially be exploited to improve cancer therapies. When cells replicate in a process called mitosis, their telomeres get a little shorter each time. Eventually, after many cell divisions, telomeres ...

The prospect of finding ocean-bearing exoplanets has been boosted, thanks to a pioneering new study. An international team of scientists, including from the University of Exeter, has discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen escaping from a Neptune-sized exoplanet. Such a phenomena not only helps explain the formation of hot and rocky 'super-earths', but also may potentially act as a signal for detecting extrasolar oceans. Scientists also believe they can use the discovery to envisage the future of Earth's atmosphere, four billion years from today. The ground-breaking ...

DETROIT - Urban gardens are becoming more commonplace across Detroit and other major urban cities throughout the United States. These gardens offer a source of free or inexpensive healthy food for the public and educate community members about food production and rehabilitating the local ecosystem. The revolution of urban agriculture has the potential to address many economic, environmental and personal health issues. With urban agriculture gaining popularity for improving local and sustainable food systems, the question of food safety has become a growing concern. To ...

The Impact Factors and journal metrics for the range of molecular bioscience journals published by Portland Press, the knowledge hub for life sciences, have been announced. The 2015 Release of Journal Citation Reports® (Source: 2014 Web of ScienceTM Data) shows an increase in article influence scores indicating that the research being published and cited in Portland Press journals carries influence scores above the average in its field. The announcement of these metrics comes in the middle of an exciting year for Portland Press. Having just migrated all its journals ...

The initial results of a study suggested that children born by cesarean section were 21 percent more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder but that association did not hold up in further analysis of sibling pairs, implying the initial association was not causal and was more likely due to unknown genetic or environmental factors, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is thought to affect about 0.62 percent of children worldwide, although estimates in the United States have been closer to 1.5 percent. ...

The notion that geography often shapes economic and political destiny has long informed the work of economists and political scholars. Now a study led by medical scientists at Johns Hopkins reveals how geography also appears to affect the very survival of people with end-stage kidney disease in need of dialysis. "If you are a person with kidney failure in Texas you're in trouble, but if you're in New England you're golden, and that's profoundly troubling because the quality of care shouldn't be predicated on your ZIP code," says senior investigator Mahmoud Malas, M.D., ...