Despite recent significant gains in health care access throughout the nation, people of color continue to grapple with a disproportionate burden of chronic disease. Two studies in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) indicate that differences in how care is delivered to patients in various racial or ethnic groups have narrowed nationally, but health outcomes remain worse for blacks than for whites. In his editorial "How to Achieve Health Equity," also published in the just released NEJM, Marshall Chin, MD, MPH, the Richard Parrillo Family Professor ...

WASHINGTON -- A five-minute functional MRI (fMRI) test can pick up neuronal dysfunction in HIV-positive individuals who don't yet exhibit cognitive decline, say neuroscientists and clinicians at Georgetown University Medical Center. Their study in Neuroimaging: Clinical provides proof-of-concept that imaging can help track neural functioning in this population, known to be affected by the virus and potentially by the treatments meant to keep HIV at bay. The issue of neural dysfunction in the HIV-positive population is significant, says Georgetown neuroscientist Xiong ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Despite years of effort to help American seniors with high blood pressure, heart disease, or diabetes get their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar under control, new research shows wide gaps between older people of different ethnic backgrounds in all three of these key health measures. Black seniors in Medicare Advantage health plans are still much less likely than their white peers to have each of the three measures in check, according to a new study published in the December 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. If not well ...

Treatment of acute traumatic brain injury with the hormone progesterone provides no significant benefit to patients when compared with placebo, a NIH-funded phase III clinical trial has concluded. The results are scheduled for publication Dec. 10 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study, named ProTECT III, involved 49 trauma centers across the United States between July 2009 and November 2013. The study was originally planned to include 1,140 patients, but was stopped after 882 patients because safety monitors determined that additional enrollment would be ...

A study concluded that after five days of treatment with a novel formulation of progesterone acutely administered to patients with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), showed no clinical benefits. The paper entitled, "A Clinical Trial of Progesterone for Severe Traumatic Brain Injury," will be published online in The New England Journal of Medicine, December 10, 2014. This trial, referred to as SyNAPSe, reports on a large prospective randomized clinical trial that investigated the effects of progesterone administered to severe TBI patients," said Raj K. Narayan, ...

A new study out today in the journal Neurology shows that pregabalin is not effective in controlling the pain associated with lumbar spinal stenosis, the most common type of chronic lower back pain in older adults. "Chronic low back pain is one of the most common reasons why older adults go to the doctor and lumbar stenosis is the leading indication for surgery in this age group," said John Markman, M.D., director of the Translational Pain Research Program in the University of Rochester Department of Neurosurgery and lead author of the study. "While physicians have ...

Eczema, an itchy chronic inflammatory disease of the skin, was not associated overall with short stature in an analysis of data from several studies, although a small group of children and adolescents with severe eczema who do not get enough sleep may have potentially reversible growth impairment, according to a study published online by JAMA Dermatology. Eczema (atopic dermatitis) affects about 10 percent of children and adults in the United States. The disease results in a number of conditions that could impact growth in children and adolescents, such as sleep impairment, ...

Surgery to remove all or part of the pancreas and then transplant a patient's own insulin-producing islet cells appears to be a safe and effective final measure to alleviate pain from severe chronic pancreatitis and to help prevent surgically induced diabetes, according to a report published online by JAMA Surgery. Chronic pancreatitis (CP) is an inflammatory disease that over time leads to loss of function of the pancreas and manifests with intractable pain, malabsorption and diabetes. While medical management and pain control are the initial approaches to CP, some patients ...

MINNEAPOLIS - People who have sleep apnea or spend less time in deep sleep may be more likely to have changes in the brain that are associated with dementia, according to a new study published in the December 10, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study found that people who don't have as much oxygen in their blood during sleep, which occurs with sleep apnea and conditions such as emphysema, are more likely to have tiny abnormalities in brain tissue, called micro infarcts, than people with higher levels ...

A team of researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and environmental testing firm URS reports that a small subset of natural gas wells are responsible for the majority of methane emissions from two major sources -- liquid unloadings and pneumatic controller equipment -- at natural gas production sites. With natural gas production in the United States expected to continue to increase during the next few decades, there is a need for a better understanding of methane emissions during natural gas production. The study team ...

An interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists and neurosurgeons from the University of Rochester has used a new imaging technique to show how the human brain heals itself in just a few weeks following surgical removal of a brain tumor. In a study featured on the cover of the current issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, the team found that recovery of vision in patients with pituitary tumors is predicted by the integrity of myelin--the insulation that wraps around connections between neurons--in the optic nerves. "Before the study, we weren't able to ...

Researchers have long debated how and what our ancestors ate. Charles Darwin hypothesized that the hunting of game animals was a defining feature of early hominids, one that was linked with both upright walking and advanced tool use and that isolated these species from their closest relatives (such as ancestors of chimpanzees); modified versions of this hypothesis exist to this day. Other scholars insist that while our ancestors' diets did include meat, it was predominantly scavenged and not hunted. Still others argue that particular plant foods such as roots and tubers ...

NEW YORK, NY (December 10, 2014)--Columbia University Medical Center researchers have devised a way to replace the knee's protective lining, called the meniscus, using a personalized 3D-printed implant, or scaffold, infused with human growth factors that prompt the body to regenerate the lining on its own. The therapy, successfully tested in sheep, could provide the first effective and long-lasting repair of damaged menisci, which occur in millions of Americans each year and can lead to debilitating arthritis. The paper was published today in the online edition of Science ...

A 13-year decline in vegetation in the eastern and southeastern Amazon has been linked to a decade-long rainfall decline in the region, a new NASA-funded study finds. With global climate models projecting further drying over the Amazon in the future, the potential loss of vegetation and the associated loss of carbon storage may speed up global climate change. The study was based on a new way to measure the "greenness" of plants and trees using satellites. While one NASA satellite measured up to 25 percent decline in rainfall across two thirds of the Amazon from 2000 ...

NOAA and its partners today released three-dimensional sonar maps and images of an immigrant steamship lost more than 100 years ago in what many consider the worst maritime disaster in San Francisco history. On Feb. 22, 1901, in a dense morning fog, the SS City of Rio de Janeiro struck jagged rocks near the present site of the Golden Gate Bridge and sank almost immediately, killing 128 of the 210 passengers and crew aboard the ship. Fishermen in the area, hearing the ship's distress calls, helped rescue 82 survivors, many plucked from makeshift rafts and floating wreckage. ...

Athens, Ga. - The amount of weight a woman gains during pregnancy can be vitally important--especially if she's carrying a boy--according to a study by researchers at the University of Georgia released today in PLOS ONE, an open access peer-reviewed journal published by the Public Library of Science. Research by associate professor Kristen Navara in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences found that male fetuses are more likely to die if their mothers don't gain enough weight during pregnancy. "Fetuses are differentially susceptible to inadequate weight ...

Everything you know about crowdfunding is wrong, at least according to researchers at UC Santa Barbara. And that, they add, is good news for scientists. Crowdfunding is the practice of financing a project or venture through contributions from a large number of people, typically via the Internet. "There's this myth about how crowdfunding is supposed to work," said Jarrett Byrnes, a former postdoctoral associate at UCSB's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). "The myth is that going viral is the only way to have a successful crowdfunding campaign. ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine have found that drinking alcohol to fall asleep interferes with sleep homeostasis, the body's sleep-regulating mechanism. Alcohol is known to be a powerful somnogen, or sleep inducer, and approximately 20 percent of the U.S. adult population drinks alcohol to help fall asleep. The researchers, led by Mahesh Thakkar, Ph.D., associate professor and director of research in the MU School of Medicine's Department of Neurology, have studied alcohol's effects on sleep for more than five years. They ...

In light of the film Dinosaur 13, which describes the discovery and loss of the complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as "Sue" by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology reiterates its strong endorsement of the U.S. Federal laws and regulations that protect fossils on public lands, which are fully consistent with the professional standards held by paleontological scientists and with the ethics of the Society. Most vertebrate fossils are rare, many of them unique. The laws and regulations for collecting fossils on Federal ...

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are nuclear receptor proteins that regulate the expression of genes. PPAR agonists, which activate PPARs, are used to treat diabetes and elevated blood lipids. Mouse and human data suggest that PPAR agonists may be repurposed for treating alcohol dependence in humans. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are nuclear receptor proteins that regulate the expression of genes. Drugs that activate PPARs - PPAR agonists - are used to treat diabetes and elevated blood lipids. Given previous rodent research, ...

LA JOLLA--You've misplaced your cell phone. You start by scanning where you remember leaving it: on your bureau. You check and double-check the bureau before expanding your search around and below the bureau. Eventually, you switch from this local area to a more global one, widening your search to the rest of your room and beyond. When it comes to animals and food, a similar strategy is used to search for food ("foraging"). Now, Salk scientists have developed a mathematical theory--based on roundworm foraging--that predicts how animals decide to switch from localized ...

Loyola researchers and collaborators have reported promising results from a novel therapeutic approach for women with estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer. The new approach, a new drug class called gamma secretase inhibitors (GSI), specifically inhibits Notch and shuts down critical genes and cancer cells responsible for tumor growth. Kathy Albain, MD, FACP, who led the study, will present findings Dec. 11 during the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Existing cancer drugs are effective in killing mature breast cancer cells. But a handful of immature breast ...

Children exposed during pregnancy to elevated levels of two common chemicals found in the home--di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP) and di-isobutyl phthalate (DiBP)--had an IQ score, on average, more than six points lower than children exposed at lower levels, according to researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. The study is the first to report a link between prenatal exposure to phthalates and IQ in school-age children. Results appear online in the journal PLOS ONE. DnBP and DiBP are found in a wide variety of consumer products, from dryer sheets ...

Scientists have named the first definite horned dinosaur species from the Early Cretaceous in North America, according to a study published December 10, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Andrew Farke from Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology and colleagues. The limited fossil record for neoceratopsian--or horned dinosaurs--from the Early Cretaceous in North America restricts scientists' ability to reconstruct the early evolution of this group. The authors of this study have discovered a dinosaur skull in Montana that represents the first horned dinosaur from ...

Nearly 269,000 tons of plastic pollution may be floating in the world's oceans, according to a study published December 10, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marcus Eriksen from Five Gyres Institute and colleagues. Microplastic pollution is found in varying concentrations throughout the oceans, but estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics, both micro and macroplastic, lack sufficient data to support them. To better estimate the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world's oceans, scientists from six countries ...