SAN ANTONIO, Texas, U.S.A. (March 30, 2015) -- Patients with chronic kidney disease may be treated with a class of medications called Renin Angiotensin Aldosterone System inhibitors (RAASI's). Although these drugs protect the heart and kidney, a significant percentage of patients develop a dangerous side effect -- high potassium levels in the blood (hyperkalemia). Elevated potassium puts patients at risk of death from cardiac arrhythmias. Lacking a drug to treat the problem, doctors either stop these beneficial drugs or may use kidney dialysis to quickly lower the potassium. At ...

If a lump is found in the breast of an adolescent girl, she often will undergo an excisional biopsy. However, breast cancer is rare in adolescents, and the vast majority of teenage breast lumps turn out to be benign masses that are related to hormones and often go away over time. A recent Loyola University Health System study published in the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine suggests that a breast ultrasound examination might eliminate the need for biopsy in many cases. Loyola radiologists studied 37 teen girls with a total of 45 breast lumps to determine whether ...

The DNA molecule is chemically unstable giving rise to DNA lesions of different nature. That is why DNA damage detection, signaling and repair, collectively known as the DNA damage response, are needed. The DNA damage response is immensely important, for example, for ensuring the highest possible quality of the DNA before replication - duplication of the DNA prior to cell division. If the damaged DNA is replicated, the risk of cancer and other diseases increases significantly due to mutations. All in all this may lead to the death of a cell itself. DNA repair consists ...

Fasting in combination with chemotherapy has already been shown to kill cancer cells, but a pair of new studies in mice suggests that a less-toxic class of drugs combined with fasting may kill breast, colorectal and lung cancer cells equally well. If shown to work in humans, this combination could replace chemotherapy and make fasting a potent component of a long-term strategy to treat cancer, according to senior author Valter Longo of USC. Human clinical trials in the United States and Europe are already studying the effectiveness and safety of Longo's strategy of ...

TORONTO, March 30, 2015 - In their latest brain imaging study on women at risk for Alzheimer's disease, York University researchers have found deterioration in the pathways that serve to communicate signals between different brain regions needed for performing everyday activities such as driving a car or using a computer. "We observed a relationship between the levels of deterioration in the brain wiring and their performance on our task that required simultaneous thinking and moving; what we see here is a result of communication failure," explains Professor Lauren Sergio ...

March 30, 2015 - New estimates suggest that 20 to 30 percent of opioid analgesic drugs prescribed for chronic pain are misused, while the rate of opioid addiction is approximately 10 percent, reports a study in the April issue of END ...

New guidelines from the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care to help prevent and manage obesity in children and youth recommend regular growth monitoring at routine health care visits as well as a focus on family lifestyles and health behaviours. The guidelines, published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal), are aimed at helping primary care practitioners address this major public health issue. Growth monitoring includes measuring weight, height or length, calculating body mass index and plotting these according to age using the measures on the WHO ...

SAN FRANCISCO--Located in the Marmara Sea, major earthquakes along the North Anatolian Fault (NAF) system have repeatedly struck what is current-day Istanbul and the surrounding region, but determining the recurrence rate has proven difficult since the faults are offshore. Cores of marine sediment reveal an earthquake history of the Cinarcik Segment, a main branch of NAF, and suggest a seismic gap where the next earthquake is likely to rupture, as detailed in a new study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). The area has experienced ...

Researchers have been fascinated for a long time by learning and memory formation, and many questions are still open. Bochum-based neuroscientists Prof Dr Denise Manahan-Vaughan and Dr Hardy Hagena have discovered a key building block for this complex process. A particular neurotransmitter receptor, namely the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5, is a switch for activating opposing forms of plasticity in the hippocampus, a brain region vital for memory forming. They reported in the current edition of "The Journal of Neuroscience". Synapses between neurons process different ...

While the body of evidence for feeding recommendations for children continues to evolve, one constant remains: Children do not eat enough vegetables. In fact, more than 90% of young children fail to meet vegetable recommendations, and these patterns often persist into adolescence and adulthood, making it important to understand the factors involved in establishing feeding patterns in early childhood. Are children not eating their vegetables because of texture, lack of role modeling, negative sensory experience, delayed introduction, bitter taste, infrequent exposure, rejection ...

A new star rating system can help hockey players to know just how well each helmet on the market can protect them from suffering head injuries and concussions during the course of a season. The "Hockey STAR" (Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risk) rating is an extension of a similar rating system developed for football helmets. It was developed by researchers from Virginia Tech in the US, led by Bethany Rowson, and reported on in Springer's journal Annals of Biomedical Engineering. More ice hockey players suffer concussion while playing hockey than their counterparts ...

Researchers at MIT and Northwestern University have developed a new peer-to-peer networking tool that enables sufferers of anxiety and depression to build online support communities and practice therapeutic techniques. In a study involving 166 subjects who had exhibited symptoms of depression, the researchers compared their tool with an established technique known as expressive writing. The new tool yielded better outcomes across the board, but it had particular advantages in two areas: One was in training subjects to use a therapeutic technique called cognitive reappraisal, ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Intensive care units across the United States vary widely in how they manage the care of patients who have set preexisting limits on life-sustaining therapies, such as authorizing do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders and prohibiting interventions such as feeding tubes or dialysis, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work is published in the current issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. "We've long known that end-of-life and critical care varies across nations, regions and centers, whether from ...

Bacteria have been discovered in the bladders of healthy women, discrediting the common belief that normal urine is sterile. This finding and its implications were addressed in an editorial published by researchers from Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine (SSOM) in the latest issue of European Urology. "Clinicians previously equated the presence of bacteria in urine to infections. The discovery of bacteria in the urine of healthy females provides an opportunity to advance our understanding of bladder health and disease," said Alan Wolfe, PhD, lead author ...

A key protein previously implicated in Lou Gehrig's disease and other neurological diseases plays an important role in the response to viral infection, according to a study led by scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai published today in Nature Immunology. Neurological diseases have long been associated with inflammation, part of the body's response to injury or infection that occurs when immune cells home in to attack invaders like bacteria and viruses, and to drive healing, but the link between them has not been understood. This new study result ...

The body's immune system fights disease, infections and even cancer, acting like foot soldiers to protect against invaders and dissenters. But it turns out the immune system has traitors amongst their ranks. Dr. Karin de Visser and her team at the Netherlands Cancer Institute discovered that certain immune cells are persuaded by breast tumors to facilitate the spread of cancer cells. Their findings are published advanced online on March 30 in the journal Nature. In Western countries about one in eight women will develop breast cancer. Of the women who die of this disease, ...

Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have captured images of the underlying biological activity within brain cells and their tree-like extensions, or dendrites, in mice that show how their brains sort, store and make sense out of information during learning. In a study to be published in the journal Nature online March 30, the NYU Langone neuroscientists tracked neuronal activity in dendritic nerve branches as the mice learned motor tasks such as how to run forward and backward on a small treadmill. They concluded that the generation of calcium ion spikes -- which ...

A lower percentage of children are eating fast food on any given day and calories consumed by children from burger, pizza and chicken fast food restaurants also has dropped, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Colin D. Rehm, Ph.D., M.P.H., formerly of the University of Washington, Seattle, now of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Boston, and Adam Drewnowski, Ph.D., of the University of Washington, Seattle, analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2003 to 2010 to examine ...

The medication glyburide, which has been increasingly used to treat gestational diabetes in pregnant women, was associated with higher risk for newborns to be admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit, have respiratory distress, hypoglycemia (low blood glucose), birth injury and be large for gestational age compared with infants born to women treated with insulin, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. The prevalence of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) in the United States has more than doubled during the last 20 years. Given the widespread and ...

Turns out, an apple a day won't keep the doctor away but it may mean you will use fewer prescription medications, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. The apple has come to symbolize health and healthy habits. But can apple consumption be associated with reduced health care use because patients who eat them might visit doctors less? Matthew A. Davis, D.C., M.P.H., Ph.D., of the University of Michigan School of Nursing, Ann Arbor, and coauthors analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2007-2008 and 2009-2010) ...

Scientists have developed tiny 'nanoneedles' that have successfully prompted parts of the body to generate new blood vessels, in a trial in mice. The researchers, from Imperial College London and Houston Methodist Research Institute in the USA, hope their nanoneedle technique could ultimately help damaged organs and nerves to repair themselves and help transplanted organs to thrive. The nanoneedles work by delivering nucleic acids to a specific area. Nucleic acids are the building blocks of all living organisms and they encode, transmit and express genetic information. ...

Characterizing associations between socioeconomic factors and children's brain development, a team including investigators from nine universities across the country reports correlative links between family income and brain structure. Relationships between the brain and family income were strongest in the lowest end of the economic range - suggesting that interventional policies aimed at these children may have the largest societal impact. The study, led by researchers at The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles and Columbia University Medical Center, ...

A new study has confirmed the existence of a positive feedback operating in climate change whereby warming itself may amplify a rise in greenhouse gases resulting in additional warming. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that in addition to the well understood effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth's temperature, researchers can now confirm directly from ice-core data that the global temperature has a profound effect on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. This means that as the Earth's temperature rises, the positive feedback in the ...

Hamilton, ON (March 30, 2015) - Researchers from McMaster University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York have discovered that a protein associated with neurodegenerative diseases like ALS also plays an important role in the body's natural antiviral response. The study, published today in Nature Immunology, offers new insight into the link between neurodegenerative disorders and inflammation, and provides a framework to explore more fully the possibility that viral infection may lead to onset of these diseases. Matthew Miller, an investigator at ...

There are electrical signals in the nervous system, the brain and throughout the human body and there are tiny magnetic fields associated with these signals that could be important for medical science. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have just developed a method that could be used to obtain extremely precise measurements of ultra-small magnetic fields. The results are published in the scientific journal Nature Physics. The tiny magnetic fields are all the way down on the atomic level. The atoms do not stand still, they revolve around themselves and the axis is ...