Listed by the World Health Organization among the ten leading causes of medical disability worldwide, the severity of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is at a level on par with cancer. This prevalent disorder is characterized by highly distressing intrusive thoughts and repeated compulsive behaviours such as washing or checking. "Inadequately treated OCD can rapidly deteriorate to disability for many persons and can negatively impact every sphere of life including school or work, basic self-care and care of children, and psychosocial functioning," says clinical psychologist and internationally renowned expert in OCD and related disorders Dr. Debbie Sookman, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry ...

The promotion and marketing of unproven stem cell therapies is a global problem that needs a global solution, say experts in a perspective published June 8 in the journal Stem Cell Reports. The authors of the paper call for the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish an advisory committee on regenerative medicine to tackle this issue and provide guidance for countries around the world. "The field of regenerative medicine, which entails the manipulation of cells and tissues to obtain therapeutic properties, has been hailed as the most promising research field in modern medicine," says senior author Mohamed Abou-el-Enein, the executive director of the joint University of Southern California/Children's Hospital of Los Angeles Cell Therapy Program. ...

A new study has pinpointed a small group of cells in the brain which could be crucial to understanding how Alzheimer's disease begins and how to slow its progression. This discovery could help research into treatment for the disease by focusing on this key group of cells in the brain. Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia, affecting between 50 and 75 per cent of those diagnosed. There are currently around 850,000 people with dementia in the UK. This is projected to rise to 1.6 million by 2040. "Alzheimer's disease evolves over decades but we currently lack an understanding of the events that take place in the early stages," explained Dr Diego Gomez-Nicola of the University of Southampton ...

MELVILLE, N.Y., June 8, 2021 -- Variations in children's speech has traditionally been attributed to developmental delays. Recent work suggests the reasons for variability are not so clear, and an immediate call for treatment may need to be reconsidered. During the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually June 8-10, Margaret Cychosz, from the University of Maryland, will discuss the need to better understand these variations. Her presentation, "Reconsidering variability in child speech production," will take place ...

Neural replay during waking rest may contribute to memory consolidation of action sequences in humans, according to a study published June 8 in the journal Cell Reports. Brain imaging results revealed fast, repeated reactivation of a neural network representing a behavioral sequence that people were learning--approximately 20 times the speed of the new memory--especially while they were taking breaks from practice. "This is the first demonstration of wakeful neural replay of a newly learned skill elicited by practice in humans," says senior study author Leonardo G. Cohen (@LeonardoGCohen) ...

What The Study Did: The findings of this observational study of the association of race/ethnicity with COVID-19 infection rates and the interaction of pre-COVID experiences of food insecurity suggest that the association varied over time and across racial/ethnic groups. Authors: Mare Sarr, Ph.D., of  Pennsylvania State University in University Park, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.12852) Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media ...

What The Study Did: This study tracked COVID-19 outcomes for 543 individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities who were receiving support services from an organization providing residential services in the five boroughs of New York. Authors: Scott D. Landes, Ph.D., of Syracuse University in New York, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.12862) Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

What The Study Did: Researchers found differences in sociodemographic and clinical characteristics by entry location for SARS-CoV-2 testing within a safety-net health system. White and English-speaking individuals disproportionately initiated testing via telehealth visits, while Black, Native American and non-English-speaking patients disproportionately initiated testing through the emergency department.  Authors: Rohan Khazanchi, B.A,. Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute in Minneapolis, is the  corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.12857) Editor's ...

CHICAGO --- Some leaders in health care have called for an end to annual health check visits, saying they're a waste of time for patients and overworked primary care physicians and don't reduce the risk of death. A new Northwestern Medicine study found while there is no clear proof that regular check-ups help adults live longer or prevent cardiovascular events like heart attacks or strokes, they still have many health benefits - especially for at-risk populations - and should continue. Routine check-up visits (they don't have to necessarily be done annually) ...

Decisions made now will determine whether economies win or lose money as the coal industry changes over the next couple of decades. Countries including Australia and Indonesia could lose billions of dollars if they continue to invest in new coal mines and exports as the world moves away from fossil fuels. These are the conclusions of a new analysis led by a team from Imperial College London and including researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Deloitte, which is published today in the journal Joule. The team combined data on coal resources and demand in an economic model of trade and prices. ...

BOSTON -- Death rates from chronic conditions like lung disease and cardiovascular disease and so-called "diseases of despair" such as opioid overdoses are known to be higher in rural areas than in large cities, with differing economic, social and political circumstances influencing people's access to care. To examine disparities in mortality rates for all causes of death, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital used a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) database to analyze all deaths occurring in the U.S. between 1999 and 2019. They found that age-adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) declined in both rural and urban populations, but that the gap between the death rates dramatically widened as white individuals aged 25 to ...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a severe, fatal neurodegenerative disorder causing loss of motor neurons and voluntary muscle action. While mouse studies have identified potential treatments, these drugs have typically done very poorly in human trials. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, working in collaboration with Pfizer, now report a high-throughput target and drug discovery platform using motor neurons made from ALS patients. Using the platform, they confirmed two known targets and identified an existing class of drugs -- agonists to the dopamine D2 receptor -- as potential novel treatments. The researchers, led by Clifford Woolf, MD, PhD, director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children's, and first authors Xuan Huang, PhD, and Kasper Roet, PhD, ...

A multidisciplinary team led by researchers from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) identifies the genomic cellular map associated with hippocampal sclerosis, a major histopathological condition of temporal lobe epilepsy. The study, published in Cell Reports, identifies cell-type specific transcriptional signatures of hyper-excitability and neurodegeneration, providing grounds for improved diagnosis. While the presence of sclerosis is essential for identifying temporal lobe epilepsy (the most common form of drug-resistant epilepsy), it is also detected in some cases of dementia associated ...

Since March 2020 the Cancer Genomics and BioComputing of Complex Diseases Laboratory at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University has been dedicated to the study of COVID-19. Motivated in particular to study the evolution of coronaviruses, the lab, led by Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern, has characterized and compared sequences of numerous relevant viruses. In their most recent study, published in the journal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), the research team focused on patterns of genetic coding used by viruses which infect a single or narrow range of hosts compared to those which infect a multiple or broad range of hosts. It was discovered that "promiscuous", or multiple-host, viruses utilize significantly non-optimal codons (the DNA ...

Mobility analyses show: Only a small proportion of all vehicles are responsible for the majority of the kilometers driven. We are talking above all about long-distance trucks that transport goods all over Europe. If these continue to be fueled with fossil energy, it will hardly be possible to sufficiently reduce CO2 emissions in road traffic. Synthetic fuels from surplus renewable electricity can make a significant contribution to such frequent driver applications. With electric mobility, hydrogen mobility and synthetic fuels, Empa's future mobility demonstrator, "move", is investigating ...

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo used smart watches and a dedicated app to monitor 169 subjects before and during Israel's second COVID-19 lockdown (October 2020). The watches and app provided the researchers with accurate daily data for measuring quality of life parameters, such as mood, stress, duration and quality of sleep, heart rate at rest, meeting others and physical exercise. The study was conducted by a group of experts from the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University led by Dr. Erez Shmueli, Dr. Dan Yamin, Shay Oved and Merav Mofaz, in collaboration with TAU's Prof. Noga Kronfeld Schor of the School of Zoology at the George S. Wise ...

BOSTON - Last year, people who smoked had a variety of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, with some increasing their smoking to help them cope and others quitting to potentially lessen their vulnerability to COVID-19. That's the finding of new research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine and conducted by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "Studies have shown that alcohol and opioid use increased during the pandemic, but little is known about how smokers responded," says lead author Nancy A. Rigotti, MD, director of MGH's Tobacco Research and Treatment Center and professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "They might have increased ...

Rising temperatures are increasingly affecting the quality of life in many regions, setting new challenges for architects, urban planners and healthcare systems. Researchers at KAUST have analyzed discomfort due to outdoor heat across Saudi Arabia and neighboring regions to help understand and combat the problem. "Living conditions in the Kingdom have been particularly affected by the changing climate," says Hari Dasari, first author of the paper. He also emphasizes the unique challenges facing the Hajj pilgrimage visits by several million people each year. Between 2014 and 2018, the Hajj occurred in summer months when the ...

UNF archaeology researchers are uncovering the lost Indigenous NE Florida settlement of Sarabay Jacksonville, Fla. - The University of North Florida archaeology team is now fairly confident they have located the lost Indigenous northeast Florida community of Sarabay, a settlement mentioned in both French and Spanish documents dating to the 1560s but had not been discovered until now. The type and amounts of Indigenous pottery the team is finding combined with the type and dates for European artifacts as well as cartographic map evidence strongly supports this location as the late 16th/early 17th century Mocama settlement. The researchers have opened large excavation blocks with many exciting ...

The "miracle of life" is most obvious at the very beginning: When the fertilized egg cell divides by means of furrows into blastomeres, envelops itself in an amniotic sac, and unfolds to form germ layers. When the blastomeres begin to differentiate into different cells - and when they eventually develop into a complete organism. "We wanted to find out whether the later differences between the various cells are already partly hard-wired into the fertilized egg cell," says Dr. Jan Philipp Junker, who heads the Quantitative Developmental Biology Lab at the ...

Researchers from Skoltech and Ludwig Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Germany have studied the fundamental properties of halide perovskite nanocrystals, a promising class of optoelectronic materials. Using a combination of theory and experiment, they were able to show and explain an intricate connection between composition, light-induced lattice dynamics, and stability of the materials. The paper was published in the journal Nature Communications. Perovskite nanocrystals (PNCs) are semiconductor nanocrystals that, thanks to their unique properties, have found a number of applications in optoelectronics, for instance, in lasers and LEDs. PNCs have a much higher photoluminescence quantum ...

Accelerated cognitive decline in patients with and without existing dementia is one of the most disturbing outcomes of hospitalizations for older adults, affecting at least 2.6 million Americans every year. But the condition, known as delirium, is believed to be preventable in up to 40 percent of hospital-acquired cases, and researchers at UC San Franciso wanted to see if simple tweaks, like avoiding nighttime interruptions to promote sleep, nixing certain prescription drugs, and promoting exercise and social engagement, could decrease its incidence. In a June 8, 2021, study in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, the researchers followed approximately 22,700 inpatients aged 50 and ...

MELVILLE, N.Y., June 8, 2021 -- As face coverings have become more and more ubiquitous during the coronavirus pandemic, their effects on nearly every aspect of life have been called into question. For one, a better understanding of the impacts of face masks and shields on acoustic transmission in classrooms could help optimize educational settings. During the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually June 8-10, Laura and Rich Ruhala, from Kennesaw State University, will talk about how various types of face coverings may affect ...

MELVILLE, N.Y., June 8, 2021 -- In a disaster, time is of the essence when searching for potential victims who may be difficult to find. Unmanned aerial vehicles make the perfect platform for state-of-the-art technology allowing emergency crews to find those in need and provide situational awareness over a large area. During the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually June 8-10, Macarena Varela, from Fraunhofer FKIE, will describe how a system using an array of microphones and advanced processing techniques could be a lifesaver for disaster victims. The session, "Bearing Estimation of Screams Using a Volumetric Microphone Array Mounted on a UAV," will take place Tuesday, June 8, at 10:35 a.m. Eastern U.S. During ...

Variants of viruses, such as that causing COVID-19, can now be quickly studied in the laboratory, even before they emerge in nature and become a major public health challenge. The University of Queensland, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Monash University, and Queensland Health have developed a technology to manipulate viruses synthetically allowing rapid analysis and mapping of new potential virus variants. UQ's lead researcher Professor Alexander Khromykh said the technology was ideal for use during a global pandemic such as COVID-19. "This technique should give us the ability to answer questions about whether potential virus variants are susceptible to a particular drug or vaccine, even before they emerge ...