Low-dose lithium reduced involuntary motor movements - the troubling side effect of the medication most commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease (PD) - in a mouse model of the condition that is diagnosed in about 60,000 Americans each year. The third in a series of studies from the Andersen lab involving PD and low-dose lithium, the results add to mounting evidence that low-doses of the psychotropic drug could benefit patients suffering from the incurable, degenerative condition. This study, published online in Brain Research, involved Parkinsonian mice that were given ...

Cancer can be caused solely by protein imbalances within cells, a study of ovarian cancer has found. The discovery is a major breakthrough because, until now, genetic aberrations have been seen as the main cause of almost all cancer. The research, published today in the journal Oncogene, demonstrates that protein imbalance is a powerful prognostic tool, indicating whether or not patients are likely to respond to chemotherapy and whether a tumour is likely to spread to other sites. The findings also open the possibility of new therapies aimed at measuring and preventing ...

A new study points to the need for increased awareness of fertility preservation options for young patients with cancer. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study found that factors such as gender, education, and insurance status may impact whether patients and their physicians have discussions and take actions to preserve fertility during cancer treatment. Cancer and the therapies used to treat it can cause some patients to become infertile. Therefore, it's important for clinicians and young cancer patients to ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Many new mothers do not receive advice from physicians on aspects of infant care such as sleep position, breastfeeding, immunization and pacifier use, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Health care practitioner groups have issued recommendations and guidelines on all these aspects of infant care, based on research which has found that certain practices can prevent disease and even save lives. The study authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 1,000 new mothers, ...

The movies of Alfred Hitchcock have made palms sweat and pulses race for more than 65 years. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have now learned how the Master of Suspense affects audiences' brains. Their study measured brain activity while people watched clips from Hitchcock and other suspenseful films. During high suspense moments, the brain narrows what people see and focuses their attention on the story. During less suspenseful moments of the film clips, viewers devote more attention to their surroundings. "Many people have a feeling that we get lost in ...

Sleeping not only protects memories from being forgotten, it also makes them easier to access, according to new research from the University of Exeter and the Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language. The findings suggest that after sleep we are more likely to recall facts which we could not remember while still awake. In two situations where subjects forgot information over the course of 12 hours of wakefulness, a night's sleep was shown to promote access to memory traces that had initially been too weak to be retrieved. The research, published today in the ...

CHICAGO: Physicians at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia, Penn., have developed an analytical tool to identify surgical patients at risk for costly respiratory complications. This tool may help hospitals avoid those complications and their related costs as Medicare and commercial payers exert increasing pressure on them by eliminating payment for patient complications that occur after operations and may extend hospital stays. The investigators developed a scoring system to identify risk factors for ventilator dependence after major operations by using ...

CHICAGO: Long waitlist times often lead to a higher risk of death for children awaiting heart transplantation. However, the team at Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, cut wait times by revising their waitlist protocols for donor heart size and patient severity status. Results from this intervention were presented today at the 2015 American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) Conference in Chicago. As of July 2, 2015, more than 320 children nationwide were listed as candidates for heart transplantation, according to the Organ ...

CHICAGO: Surgical teams at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, are decreasing the rate of urinary tract infection (UTI) in their institution by paying scrupulous attention to the use of catheters before and immediately after operations. Their efforts are believed to be among the first reported in the country to target UTI prevention in the operating room (OR) by decreasing catheter utilization, according to a study presented today at the 2015 American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) Conference. The study was initiated ...

CHICAGO (July 26, 2015, 5 pm ET): As patient-safety and quality improvement efforts continue to gain momentum throughout health care, the need for accurate sources of information is crucial, yet the question remains: Is one resource better than another? According to two new studies presented today by researchers at the 2015 American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) National Conference in Chicago, ACS NSQIP provides more accurate data than administrative data for driving surgical quality improvement in hospitals. Currently, ...

DENVER - New research suggests concussion may not significantly impair symptoms or cognitive skills for one gender over another, however, women may still experience greater symptoms and poorer cognitive performance at preseason testing. The study released today will be presented at the Sports Concussion Conference in Denver, July 24 to 26, hosted by the American Academy of Neurology, the world's leading authority on diagnosing and managing sports concussion. The conference will feature the latest scientific advances in diagnosing and treating sports concussion from leading ...

Lincoln, Neb., July 24th, 2015 -- If you've lived between the year 1560 and the present day, more power to you. Literally. That's one of several conclusions reached by University of Nebraska-Lincoln ecologist John DeLong, who has co-authored the first study to quantify the relationship between human population growth and energy use on an international scale. The study compiled several centuries' worth of data from Great Britain, the United States and Sweden to profile the dynamics between a skyrocketing population and its consumption of energy from fossil fuels and ...

Looking at measurements of the vertebrae - the series of small bones that make up the spinal column - in newborn children, investigators at Children's Hospital Los Angeles found that differences between the sexes are present at birth. Results of the study, now online in advance of publication in the August issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, suggest that this difference is evolutionary, allowing the female spine to adapt to the fetal load during pregnancy. Using magnetic resonance imagining (MRI), the researchers found that vertebral cross-sectional dimensions, a key ...

When disease-resistant rice is invaded by disease-causing bacteria, a small protein produced by the bacteria betrays the invader. Upon recognizing that protein, the rice plants sense that a microbial attack is underway and are able to mount an immune response to fend off bacterial infection, reports a research team led by the University of California, Davis. Identification of the tiny protein, called RaxX, holds promise for developing more disease-resistant crop varieties and therapeutic treatments for blocking microbial infections in both plants and animals, said the ...

Grand Rapids, Michigan (July 24, 2015)--Scientists at Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) have revealed an important molecular mechanism in plants that has significant similarities to certain signaling mechanisms in humans, which are closely linked to early embryonic development and to diseases such as cancer. In plants as in animals and humans, intricate molecular networks regulate key biological functions, such as development and stress responses. The system can be likened to a massive switchboard--when the wrong switches are flipped, genes can be inappropriately turned ...

ORLANDO, Fla. (July 21, 2015) - A new peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Mammalogy by the Oxford University Press adds important insights to the debate over how long killer whales in human care live. The study found no difference in life expectancy between killer whales born at SeaWorld and a well-studied population of wild killer whales. The study, "Comparisons of life-history parameters between free-ranging and captive killer whale (Orcinus orca) populations for application toward species management," compares current published data for survival and ...

You don't think you're hungry, then a friend mentions how hungry he is or you smell some freshly baked pizza and whoaaa, you suddenly feel really hungry. Or, you've had surgery and need a bit of morphine for pain. As soon as you hit that button you feel relief even though the medicine hasn't even hit your bloodstream. These are two examples of the oft-studied placebo effect that demonstrate the amazing and still somewhat confounding powers of the human brain. Now, CU-Boulder graduate student Scott Schafer, who works in Associate Professor Tor Wager's Cognitive and Affective ...

The health of Colorado's bighorn sheep population remains as precarious as the steep alpine terrain the animals inhabit, but a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder has found that inbreeding--a common hypothesis for a recent decline--likely isn't to blame. Bighorn herds tend to be small and isolated in their mountain ecosystems, putting the animals at high risk for a genetic "bottleneck," said Catherine Driscoll, a graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at CU-Boulder and lead author of the study. Previous research ...

As well as the daily strain of their working lives, shift workers are probably also more likely than other people to develop cancer. While this has been well described for breast cancer, few studies had examined the correlation between shift work and prostate cancer. In a recent original article in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztbl Int 112: 463-70), Gael P. Hammer et al. show that shift workers do not develop prostate cancer more frequently than their colleagues who work during the day. Shift work is widespread: between approximately one in five and ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- John Leonard's group in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering specializes in SLAM, or simultaneous localization and mapping, the technique whereby mobile autonomous robots map their environments and determine their locations. Last week, at the Robotics Science and Systems conference, members of Leonard's group presented a new paper demonstrating how SLAM can be used to improve object-recognition systems, which will be a vital component of future robots that have to manipulate the objects around them in arbitrary ways. The system uses SLAM ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Since 2006, the team of researchers has sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of all the known species of butterflies in the Iberian peninsula (228) and its main populations. The result is a report that compiles more than 3500 genetic sequences of all the species, which have been compared to the genetic sequences of other European populations. The paper has 277 pages of supplementary material, including pictures and 80 maps of the geographical distribution of the butterfly genetic lineages identified. This is the first time ...

(Philadelphia, PA) - Patients who have lower extremity proximal deep vein thrombosis (LE-DVT), or a blood clot in their leg, are increasingly undergoing minimally invasive catheter-based blood clot removal - also referred to as catheter-directed thrombolysis (CDT) - rather than solely being treated with traditional blood-thinning medications (anticoagulation alone). This trend is due to recent literature showing reductions in lifestyle-limiting post-thrombotic complications of acute DVT in patients who undergo CDT compared to those that are treated with anticoagulation ...

This news release is available in German. Pathogenic bacteria develop killer machines that work very specifically and highly efficiently. Scientists from the University of Freiburg have solved the molecular mechanism of a fish toxin that could be used in the future as a medication to treat cancer. The scientists have now published their research in the journal Nature Communications. The Yersinia species of pathogens can cause the bubonic plague and serious gastrointestinal infections in humans. The pharmacologist Dr. Thomas Jank and his fellow researchers in the ...

La Jolla, Calif., July 23, 2015 - A new study by researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP), the National Cancer Institute, and the Chulabhorn Research Institute has found that blocking the activity of a key immune receptor, the lymphotoxin-beta receptor (LTβR), reduces the progression of liver cancer. The results, published today in the online edition of Gut, could provide new treatment strategies for the disease, which is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. "Our findings point to a new way to improve the treatment ...

After decades of overtreatment for low-risk prostate cancer and inadequate management of its more aggressive forms, patients are now more likely to receive medical care matched to level of risk, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco. In the first study to document updated treatment trends, researchers found that from 2010 to 2013, 40 percent of men with low-risk prostate cancer opted for active surveillance, in which the disease is monitored closely with blood tests, imaging studies and biopsies. Treatment is deferred unless these tests show evidence ...