SAN DIEGO -- People exposed to prolonged periods of shortened sleep have significant increases in blood pressure during nighttime hours, Mayo Clinic researchers report in a small study of eight participants. Results of the study will be presented Sunday, March 15, at the American College of Cardiology's 64th Annual Scientific Session in San Diego. In this study, eight healthy, normal weight participants, ages 19 to 36, participated in a 16-day inpatient protocol, consisting of a four-day acclimation period followed by nine days of either sleep restriction (four hours ...

A study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators suggests that bariatric surgery can significantly reduce the risk of asthma attacks - also called exacerbations - in obese patients with asthma. Their report, published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, is the first to find that significant weight reduction can reduce serious asthma-associated events. "We found that, in obese patients with asthma, the risk of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for asthma exacerbations decreased by half in the two years after bariatric ...

Media and popular culture might portray religion and science as being at odds, but new research from Rice University suggests just the opposite. Findings from the recently completed study "Religious Understandings of Science (RUS)" reveal that despite many misconceptions regarding the intersection of science and religion, nearly 70 percent of evangelical Christians do not view the two as being in conflict with each other. The research was presented by Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund today in Washington, D.C., during the American Association for the Advancement ...

Case Western Reserve researchers are part of an international team that has discovered that a common herpes drug reduces HIV-1 levels -- even when patients do not have herpes. Published online in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the finding rebuts earlier scientific assumptions that Valacyclovir (brand name, Valtrex) required the presence of the other infection to benefit patients with HIV-1. The result not only means that Valacyclovir can be used effectively with a broader range of HIV-1 patients, but also suggests promising new avenues for the development of HIV-fighting ...

Washington, D.C.-Two new papers from members of the MESSENGER Science Team provide global-scale maps of Mercury's surface chemistry that reveal previously unrecognized geochemical terranes -- large regions that have compositions distinct from their surroundings. The presence of these large terranes has important implications for the history of the planet. The MESSENGER mission was designed to answer several key scientific questions, including the nature of Mercury's geological history. Remote sensing of the surface's chemical composition has a strong bearing on this and ...

Among the facts so widely assumed that they are rarely, if ever studied, is the notion that wider hips make women less efficient when they walk and run. For decades, this assumed relationship has been used to explain why women don't have wider hips, which would make childbirth easier and less dangerous. The argument, known as the "obstetrical dilemma," suggests that for millions of years female humans and their bipedal ancestors have faced an evolutionary trade-off in which selection for wider hips for childbirth has been countered by selection for narrower hips for ...

WASHINGTON - A legal scholar and tobacco control expert says he has developed a research-based roadmap that allows for the immediate regulation of e-cigarettes. Writing in the March issue of Food and Drug Law Journal, Eric N. Lindblom, JD, senior scholar at the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, says his proposal would minimize the threats e-cigarettes pose to public health while still enabling them potentially help reduce smoking. "This approach could help to heal the current split in the public health community over e-cigarettes by addressing ...

New research led by University of York scientists highlights how poor connectivity of protected area (PA) networks in Southeast Asia may prevent lowland species from responding to climate change. Tropical species are shifting to higher elevations in response to rising temperatures, but there has been only limited research into the effectiveness of current protected area networks in facilitating such movements in the face of climate change. However, the new study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, focuses on the connectivity of the protected area network ...

The font type of written text and how easy it is to read can be influential when it comes to engaging people with important health information and recruiting them for potentially beneficial programmes, new research by The University of Manchester and Leeds Beckett University has found. Led by Dr Andrew Manley, a Chartered Sport and Exercise Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology at Leeds Beckett, the study - published in the latest issue of Patient Education and Counseling journal - assessed the extent to which the title and font of participant ...

With the socio-economic developments of the last decades, new emerging compounds have been produced, released and discharged through different point and diffuse sources in European rivers, lakes, and marine-coastal and transitional waters. Treated municipal wastewaters contain a multitude of organic chemicals including pharmaceuticals, hormones, and personal care products, which are continuously introduced into aquatic ecosystems. Their possible effects on the environment and human health is often unknown. The exposure of organisms, communities and humans to mixtures of ...

Although listening to music is common in all societies, the biological determinants of listening to music are largely unknown. According to a latest study, listening to classical music enhanced the activity of genes involved in dopamine secretion and transport, synaptic neurotransmission, learning and memory, and down-regulated the genes mediating neurodegeneration. Several of the up-regulated genes were known to be responsible for song learning and singing in songbirds, suggesting a common evolutionary background of sound perception across species. Listening to music ...

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a leading tool for imaging, measuring, and manipulating materials with atomic resolution - on the order of fractions of a nanometer. AFM images surface topography of a structure by "touching" and "feeling" its surface by scanning an extremely fine needle (the diameter of the tip is about 5 nanometers, about 1/100 of light wavelength or 1/10,000 of a hair) on the surface. This technique has been applied to image solid materials with nanometer resolution, but it has been difficult to apply AFM for a soft and large sample like eukaryotic ...

Metastatic melanoma is the leading cause of skin cancer deaths in the United States; once melanoma has spread (metastasized), life expectancy for patients can be dramatically shortened. At present, the reference therapy for patients diagnosed with metastatic melanoma is Dacarbazine (DTIC), which is associated with poor patient outcomes. In a study published in Molecular Cancer Research, March 12, 2015, the laboratory of Mary J.C. Hendrix, PhD, in collaboration with other scientists found that standard treatments for metastatic melanoma are not effective against a growth ...

An FDA-approved drug for high blood pressure, guanabenz, prevents myelin loss and alleviates clinical symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) in animal models, according to a new study. The drug appears to enhance an innate cellular mechanism that protects myelin-producing cells against inflammatory stress. These findings point to promising avenues for the development of new therapeutics against MS, report scientists from the University of Chicago in Nature Communications on Mar. 13. "Guanabenz appears to enhance the cell's own protective machinery to diminish the loss of ...

Almost all patients with a group of blood cancers called B-cell malignancies have two prominent "fingerprints" on the surface of leukemia and lymphoma cancers, called CD22 and CD19, Vallera explained. To develop the drug, Vallera and colleagues chose two antibody fragments that each selectively bind to CD19 and CD22. They used genetic engineering to attach these two antibodies to a potent toxin, the bacterial diphtheria toxin. When the antibody fragments bind to the two targets on the cancer cell, the entire drug enters the cell, and the toxin kills the cell. Vallera; ...

Boston, Mass., USA - Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher Bertha A. Chavez Gonzalez, Universidade de Minas Gerias, Lima, San Borja, Peru, will present a study titled "Birth Weight and Pregnancy Complications Associated With the Enamel Defects." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. This cross-sectional representative study ...

Boston, Mass., USA - Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher Aderonke A. Akinkugbe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, will present a study titled "Environmental Tobacco Smoke is Associated With Periodontitis in U.S. Non-smokers." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. Periodontitis affects approximately 47% of ...

Leading public health researchers today [Friday 13 March 2015] call for the sale of tobacco to be phased out by 2040, showing that with sufficient political support and stronger evidence-based action against the tobacco industry, a tobacco-free world - where less than 5% of adults use tobacco - could be possible in less than three decades. Writing in a major new Series in The Lancet, an international group of health and policy experts, led by Professors Robert Beaglehole and Ruth Bonita from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, call on the United Nations (UN) to ...

Estoril, Portugal: Treating respiratory disease is often difficult because drugs have to cross biological barriers such as respiratory tissue and mucosa, and must therefore be given in large quantities in order for an effective amount to reach the target. Now researchers from Germany, Brazil and France have shown that the use of nanoparticles to carry antibiotics across biological barriers can be effective in treating lung infections. Doing so allows better delivery of the drug to the site of infection, and hence prevents the development of antibiotic resistance which ...

Highlights Among pregnant women, the risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes--such as preterm delivery or the need for neonatal intensive care--increased across stages of chronic kidney disease. The risks of intrauterine death or fetal malformations were not higher in women with chronic kidney disease. An estimated 26 million people in the United States have chronic kidney disease. Washington, DC (March 12, 2015) -- Even mild kidney disease during pregnancy may increase certain risks in the mother and baby, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Political scientists at the University at Buffalo and Pennsylvania State University have published new research investigating how partisan differences in macroeconomic policy have contributed to substantial and rising economic inequality in the United States. The negative consequences of such policy decisions, researchers found, have a greater impact on people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, but are "significantly more muted" for those at the higher end of the spectrum. The study, "Partisan Differences in the Distributional Effects of Economic ...

WORCESTER, MA - A new "app" for finding and mapping chromosomal loci using multicolored versions of CRISPR/Cas9, one of the hottest tools in biomedical research today, has been developed by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This labeling system, details of which were published in PNAS and first presented at the American Society for Cell Biology/International Federation for Cell Biology annual meeting in Philadelphia in December, could be a key to understanding the spatial and temporal regulation of gene expression by allowing researchers to measure ...

Television advertisements for e-cigarettes may be enticing current and even former tobacco smokers to reach for another cigarette. That is the finding by researchers Erin K. Maloney, Ph.D. and Joseph N. Cappella, Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, as reported in the journal Health Communication (online, March 2015). The researchers studied more than 800 daily, intermittent, and former smokers who watched e-cigarette advertising, and who then took a survey to determine smoking urges, intentions, and behaviors. Using a standard ...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth's surface. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search of life as we know it. "This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "In its 25 years ...

CHICAGO --- A father's depression during the first years of parenting - as well as a mother's - can put their toddler at risk of developing troubling behaviors such as hitting, lying, anxiety and sadness during a critical time of development, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. This is one of the first studies to show that the impact of a father's depression from postpartum to toddlerhood is the same as a mother's. Previous studies have focused mostly on mothers with postpartum depression and found that their symptoms may impact their children's behavior during ...