Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have created an in vitro, live-cell artificial vessel that can be used to study both the application and effects of devices used to extract life-threatening blood clots in the brain. The artificial vessel could have significant implications for future development of endovascular technologies, including reducing the need for animal models to test new devices or approaches. The findings are published in the current online issue of the journal Stroke. Cerebrovascular disease covers a group of dysfunctions ...

Early indicators of the malaria parasite in Africa developing resistance to the most effective drug available have been confirmed, according to new research published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites with a mutation to the gene Ap2mu were less sensitive to the antimalarial drug artemisinin. A study in 2013, also led by the School, suggested an initial link between a mutation in the ap2mu gene and low levels of malaria parasites remaining in the blood ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Previous research published by researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and three other institutions showed that when children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and serious physical aggression were prescribed both a stimulant and an antipsychotic drug, along with teaching parents behavior management techniques, they had a reduction of aggressive and serious disruptive behavior. Now, L. Eugene Arnold and Michael Aman, professors emeritus at the Nisonger Center at Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center, and their colleagues ...

RICHMOND, Va. (April 17, 2015) -- In a recent study, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine researchers predicted which cirrhosis patients would suffer inflammations and require hospitalization by analyzing their saliva, revealing a new target for research into a disease that accounts for more than 30,000 deaths in the United States each year. The findings could trigger a change in the way researchers study chronic liver disease and associated microbiota, the network of tiny organisms in the human body such as bacteria and fungi that can either bolster an ...

This news release is available in German. Bonn, April 16 /Tokyo, April 17, 2015 - An international team of researchers at German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have revealed in a collaborative study - published today in NEURON, that neurons in the eye change on the molecular level when they are exposed to prolonged light. The researchers could identify that a feedback signalling mechanism is responsible for these changes. The innate neuronal property might be utilized to protect neurons from degeneration ...

By combining two highly innovative experimental techniques, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have for the first time simultaneously observed the structure and the correlated function of specific proteins critical in the repair of DNA, providing definitive answers to some highly debated questions, and opening up new avenues of inquiry and exciting new possibilities for biological engineering. Scientists who study biological systems at the molecular level have over the years looked to the structure of protein molecules--how the atoms are organized--to ...

In anticipation of the forthcoming 2015 White House Conference on Aging (WHCoA), The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) has produced a special issue of The Gerontologist that outlines a vision for older adults' economic and retirement security, health, caregiving, and social well-being for the next decade and beyond. And because this year also marks the 50th anniversary of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Older Americans Act, as well as the 80th anniversary of Social Security, articles within the issue also explore ways to safeguard the continuing success of these programs. The ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Many years of research have shown that for students from lower-income families, standardized test scores and other measures of academic success tend to lag behind those of wealthier students. A new study led by researchers at MIT and Harvard University offers another dimension to this so-called "achievement gap": After imaging the brains of high- and low-income students, they found that the higher-income students had thicker brain cortex in areas associated with visual perception and knowledge accumulation. Furthermore, these differences also correlated ...

Geneva, Switzerland, 17 April 2015 -- Cancer DNA circulating in the bloodstream of lung cancer patients can provide doctors with vital mutation information that can help optimise treatment when tumour tissue is not available, an international group of researchers has reported at the European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The results have important implications for the use of cancer therapies that target specific cancer mutations, explains Dr Martin Reck from the Department of Thoracic Oncology at Lung Clinic Grosshansdorf, Germany, who presented ...

Geneva, Switzerland, 17 April 2015 -- Almost one in four patients (24%) with advanced lung cancer in Europe, Asia and the US are not receiving EGFR test results before being started on treatment, researchers report at the European Lung Cancer Conference. Medical Oncologist James Spicer from King's College London at Guy's Hospital, London, and colleagues studied how widely hospitals had implemented testing for mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor gene among lung cancer patients. Targeted therapies can more effectively treat cancers that are known to carry ...

Recent research published in The Diabetes Educator by Dr. Shiela Strauss, associate professor of nursing and co-director of the Statistics and Data Management Core for NYU's Colleges of Nursing and Dentistry, along with a team of NYU researchers, reveals differing perceptions among adult populations at-risk for diabetes that may offer new approaches to diabetes education and prevention. "We found that there are differences in the perceptions of those who are at risk for diabetes that depend on the specific characteristics that place them at risk," said Strauss. Illness ...

A team from Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University have devised a 3-D printer that layers together laser-cut sheets of fabric to form soft, squeezable objects such as bunnies, doll clothing and phone cases. These objects can have complex geometries and incorporate circuitry that makes them interactive. "Today's 3-D printers can easily create custom metal, plastic, and rubber objects," said Jim McCann, associate research scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh. "But soft fabric objects, like plush toys, are still fabricated by hand. Layered fabric printing is one ...

Disney Research has demonstrated that battery-free, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be used to cheaply and unobtrusively determine how people use and interact with daily objects, enabling new types of interactive play, smart homes and work environments, and new methods for studying consumer shopping habits. RFID tags are designed to simply report an identifying code when energized by an RFID reader, but a Disney Research team directed by Dr. Alanson Sample showed that the radio frequency signals transmitted by these tags provide a unique RF signature which ...

An international team of scientists have put forward a blueprint for a purely space-based system to solve the growing problem of space debris. The proposal, published in Acta Astronautica, combines a super-wide field-of-view telescope, developed by RIKEN's EUSO team, which will be used to detect objects, and a recently developed high-efficiency laser system, the CAN laser that was presented in Nature Photonics in 2013, that will be used to track space debris and remove it from orbit. Space debris, which is continuously accumulating as a result of human space activities, ...

Half of all patients who survive a cardiac arrest experience problems with cognitive functions such as memory and attention. This has been shown by a major international study led from Lund University. Surprisingly, however, a control group comprising heart attack patients had largely the same level of problems. This suggests that it is not only the cardiac arrest and the consequent lack of oxygen to the brain that is the cause of the patients' difficulties. The study led by Lund University involved 950 cardiac arrest patients in Europe and Australia. Six months after ...

This news release is available in Japanese. It seems unnatural that a species could survive without having sex. Yet over the ages, evolution has endowed females of certain species of amphibians, reptiles and fish with the ability to clone themselves, and perpetuate offspring without males. Researchers at the at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) found that in species where females have evolved the ability to reproduce without males relatively recently, fertilization is still ensuring the survival of the maximum number of healthy ...

Scientists at the Vetmeduni Vienna investigated whether stomach ulcers in cattle are related to the presence of certain bacteria. For their study, they analyzed bacteria present in healthy and ulcerated cattle stomachs and found very few differences in microbial diversity. Bacteria therefore appear to play a minor role in the development of ulcers. The microbial diversity present in the stomachs of cattle has now for the first time been published in the journal Veterinary Microbiology. Gastritis and stomach ulcers in humans are often caused by the bacterium Helicobacter ...

Breast cancer patients often display mild cognitive defects even before the initiation of chemotherapy. A new study by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich researchers now attributes the syndrome to post-traumatic stress induced by diagnosis of the disease. A large number of studies have shown that cancer patients very often exhibit mild deficits of attention, memory and other basic cognitive functions. The phenomenon has generally been attributed to putative side-effects of chemotherapeutic drugs on the brain, and the condition is therefore popularly referred ...

WASHINGTON --Droperidol is safe and effective for calming violent and aggressive emergency patients, and the negative effects that garnered a black box warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are actually quite rare. A new study of the once ubiquitous, now scarce, sedating agent was published online Wednesday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("The Safety and Effectiveness of Droperidol for Sedation of Acute Behavioral Disturbance in the Emergency Department"). "In our study, the two side effects that led to the black box warning - QT prolongation and torsades ...

CLEVELAND -- Anthony J. Furlan, MD, Chairman of Neurology and Co-Director of the Neurological Institute at University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, who writes an accompanying editorial for five studies about endovascular stroke therapy published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM.org April 17), says these randomized clinical trials represent a breakthrough in showing the benefits of endovascular therapy for acute ischemic strokes. "Now even endovascular skeptics will be convinced," Dr. ...

MANHATTAN, KANSAS -- The key to better cellphones and other rechargeable electronics may be in tiny "sandwiches" made of nanosheets, according to mechanical engineering research from Kansas State University. Gurpreet Singh, assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering, and his research team are improving rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The team has focused on the lithium cycling of molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2, sheets, which Singh describes as a "sandwich" of one molybdenum atom between two sulfur atoms. In the latest research, the team has found ...

The death toll in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was most likely between 1.2 million and 2.8 million -- or between 13 percent and 30 percent of the country's population at the time -- according to a forthcoming article by a UCLA demographer. April 17 is the 40th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge's capture of the capital of Cambodia -- beginning a four-year period that many consider to be a genocide. For decades, researchers have sought to pinpoint the death toll from political executions, disease, starvation and forced labor inflicted under the Khmer Rouge. Conventional ...

When the stakes are high, people in positions of low power may perform better by using self-affirmations to boost their confidence, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. "Most people have experienced a time in their lives when they aren't performing up to their potential. They take a test or have a performance review at work, but something holds them back," says lead researcher Sonia Kang, Ph.D. "Performance in these situations is closely related to how we are expected to behave." The researchers conducted three experiments ...

Geneva, Switzerland, 17 April 2015 -- Many people still dangerously underestimate the health risks associated with smoking even a few cigarettes a day, despite decades of public health campaigning, French researchers have reported at the European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The results demonstrate powerfully that the war against smoking is far from over, says oncologist Dr Laurent Greillier from Hopital Nord in Marseille, France, who presented the results at the conference. Greillier and colleagues analysed data from a representative survey ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- When a hospital patient's heart stops, the drama starts, as doctors and nurses work furiously at resuscitation. And at many hospitals, that's the cue for someone to pull a curtain and hurry the patient's loved ones out of the room. But some hospitals allow those family members to stay, and watch the cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and other attempts to save the patient's life that the medical team makes. Now, a study has shown for the first time on a national scale that patients do just as well after a cardiac arrest at those hospitals, compared ...