EVANSTON, Ill. --- Why do some people immediately burst into laughter after a humorous moment, while others can barely crack a smile? New research examining emotional reactivity suggests one of the answers may lie in a person's DNA. In a new study linking a gene to positive emotional expressions such as smiling and laughing, researchers demonstrated that people with a certain genetic variant -- those with short alleles of the gene 5-HTTLPR -- smiled or laughed more while watching cartoons or subtly amusing film clips than people with long alleles. Previous research ...

VANCOUVER, Wash.--Washington State University researchers have found that the more hunter-gatherers smoke cannabis, the less they are infected by intestinal worms. The link suggests that they may unconsciously be, in effect, smoking medical marijuana. Ed Hagen, a WSU Vancouver anthropologist, explored cannabis use among the Aka foragers to see if people away from the cultural and media influences of Western civilization might use plant toxins medicinally. "In the same way we have a taste for salt, we might have a taste for psychoactive plant toxins, because these things ...

Cancer Research UK scientists have discovered how giving a class of drugs called AKT inhibitors in combination with radiotherapy might boost its effectiveness across a wide range of cancers, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation today*. Tumours often grow so quickly that some of the cells do not have access to the body's blood supply, causing them to become oxygen-starved. This rapid growth usually sends signals to the cells to die, but in cancers with faults in a gene called p53 -- present in at least half of all cancers -- this signal ...

A debate at this year's Euroanaesthesia meeting in Berlin will focus on whether laughing gas (nitrous oxide) should be banned from the operating room. The debate coincides with an article on the "Current place of nitrous oxide in clinical practice" published in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology, that concludes there is "no clinically relevant evidence for the withdrawal of nitrous oxide from the armamentarium of anaesthesia practice or procedural sedation." The article has been prepared by a special taskforce of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA), which ...

New research presented at this year's Euroanaesthesia conference in Berlin shows that American patients undergoing orthopaedic surgery* receive more treatments for pain and that their experience of pain differs in some aspects to orthopaedic patients internationally. The study is by Drs Winfried Meissner and Ruth Zaslansky, University Hospital Jena, Germany, and Dr C. Richard Chapman Utah, Pain Research Center, Salt Lake City, USA. All researchers are part of the international PAIN OUT** research group. Poorly controlled pain after surgery is a major problem internationally ...

Research presented at this year's Euroanaesthesia exploring the protective effect of various heart medications that patients are taking before undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery concludes that statins reduce the risk of death by two thirds, or 67 percent, while no consistent effects were seen for other medications. The study is reported by Assistant Professor Dr. Robert Sanders, Anesthesiology & Critical care Trials & Interdisciplinary Outcomes Network (ACTION), Department of Anesthesiology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WN, USA, and Drs. Puja Myles ...

In a head-to-head clinical trial comparing standard chemotherapy with the immunotherapy drug nivolumab, researchers found that people with squamous-non-small cell lung cancer who received nivolumab lived, on average, 3.2 months longer than those receiving chemotherapy. Squamous non-small cell lung cancer accounts for 25 to 30 percent of all lung malignancies. Results of the trial, reported in the May 31 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Society for Clinical Oncology 2015 annual meeting, also showed that after a year, the nivolumab ...

Using high-precision genetic tests to differentiate the thousands of bacteria that make up the human microbiome, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center suggest that they have found a possible -- and potentially surprising -- root cause of the increased frequency of certain eye infections among contact lens wearers. In a study report on their work to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology on May 31 in New Orleans, NYU Langone researchers say they have identified a diverse set of microorganisms in the eyes of daily contact lens wearers ...

CHICAGO, IL, MAY 31, 2015 -- Treating advanced melanoma patients with either a combination of the immunotherapy drugs nivolumab (Opdivo™) and ipilimumab (Yervoy™) or nivolumab alone significantly increases progression-free survival (PFS) over using ipilimumab alone, according to new findings from researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) simultaneously presented today at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting and published online in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Examining specific characteristics of each ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Removing more tissue during a partial mastectomy could spare thousands of breast cancer patients a second surgery, according to a Yale Cancer Center study. The findings were published online May 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. Nearly 300,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer each year; more than half undergo breast-conserving surgery with a partial mastectomy to remove the disease. However, between 20% and 40% of patients ...

CHICAGO -- Use of the targeted agent pacritinib significantly reduced the symptoms and burden of advanced myelofibrosis in patients, says a Mayo Clinic researcher who co-led PERSIST-1, the worldwide phase III clinical trial that tested the therapy. Specifically, pacritinib substantially reduced severe enlargement of the spleen, a typical feature of advanced myelofibrosis, in more than 20 percent of patients and alleviated debilitating side effects in more than 46 percent. Investigators further found that pacritinib could be used safely in patients with myelofibrosis who ...

CHICAGO -- Because of the significant benefit found in combining the targeted drug ibrutinib with standard chemotherapy for relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL), an interim analysis has closed the international HELIOS phase III clinical trial. Led by Mayo Clinic, researchers found that ibrutinib and chemotherapy (bendamustine and rituximab, known as BR) reduced the risk of death or cancer progression by almost 80 percent in patients with previously treated CLL or SLL, compared to use of BR alone. The announcement was made at ...

Alexandria, VA - As this summer's blockbuster movie season gets underway, EARTH Magazine asks an important question: In movies, "are geologists portrayed as heroes or villains?" The topic of how geologists are portrayed in film has been oft-debated around a campfire, or over a frosty beverage at the end of a day of fieldwork, but now four scientists bring some serious analysis to the subject in the June issue feature, "Rock Stars - Geologists on the Silver Screen." The authors - all geologists in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden ...

Hercules, CA -- May 29, 2015 -- Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Digital Biology Center at Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. have developed a rapid, scalable, and cost-effective method for chromosomal phasing that provides researchers with a new method to determine if genetic variants are linked on the same chromosome. Using Bio-Rad's Droplet Digital PCR (ddPCRTM) technology, the Drop-Phase method can rapidly determine the chromosomal phase of allelic markers hundreds of kilobases apart. This ability may provide new insights into the cause, penetrance, and severity ...

In a report of a proof-of-principle study of patients with colon and other cancers for whom standard therapies failed, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center say that mistakes in so-called mismatch repair genes, first identified by Johns Hopkins and other scientists two decades ago, may accurately predict who will respond to certain immunotherapy drugs known as PD-1 inhibitors. Such drugs aim to disarm systems developed by cancer cells to evade detection and destruction by immune system cells. Results of the trial with pembrolizumab, marketed as Keytruda, ...

The recent floods in Texas have caused some of the worst flooding since Hurricane Ike in 2008, causing the rainiest month in the state's history. What lessons have been learned from Ike's devastation of the Galveston and Houston area, and how have they helped in the prediction of future such storms? Researchers at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin have been studying computational models and simulations of hurricanes like Ike in order to predict the consequences of such natural disasters and better prepare ...

PHOENIX -- If you are over age 75, and taking an anticoagulant, the old standard may be the gold standard, Mayo Clinic researchers and collaborators have determined. In a study released online in April in the BMJ, a team of researchers from Mayo Clinic, and other collaborators, showed that for older patients, particularly individuals greater than 75 years of age, the risk of gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding is 3 to 5 times higher when taking newer anticoagulant medications dabigatran or rivaroxaban compared to when using warfarin. One of the most common reasons people ...

At a traditional stone-laying ceremony outside La Serena, Chile on April 14th, construction officially began of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). This ambitious international astrophysics project is slated to start scanning the heavens in 2022. When it does, LSST should open up the "dark universe" of dark matter and dark energy--the unseen substance and force, respectively, composing 95 percent of the universe's mass and energy--as never before. On April 2, 2015, the Director of LSST, Steven Kahn, along with astrophysicist Sarah Bridle and theoretical physicist ...

The study, published May 29 in the open access Nature Publishing Group journal Scientific Reports, reveals a direct link between the main culprit of Alzheimer's disease and memory loss. Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain tissue. These amyloid plaques are made up of an insoluble protein, 'Amyloid-beta' (Abeta), which forms small structures called 'oligomers' that are important in the disease progression. Although these proteins are known to be involved in Alzheimer's, little is understood about how they lead to memory ...

Stanford University scientists have created a new carbon material that significantly boosts the performance of energy-storage technologies. Their results are featured on the cover of the journal ACS Central Science. "We have developed a 'designer carbon' that is both versatile and controllable," said Zhenan Bao, the senior author of the study and a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. "Our study shows that this material has exceptional energy-storage capacity, enabling unprecedented performance in lithium-sulfur batteries and supercapacitors." According to ...

One of the main health targets proposed by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is to reduce by one-third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases such as cancer, stroke and dementia. The goals for 2016-2030 define premature mortality as deaths occurring among people aged 69 years old or younger. The proposed SDG target sends an unambiguous statement to UN member states that health provision for younger groups must be prioritised at the expense of people aged 70 or more, according to the international group of signatories of the letter published in The ...

May 29, 2015 - Researchers are exploring new approaches to designing prosthetic hands capable of providing "sensory feedback." Advances toward developing prostheses with a sense of touch are presented in a special topic article in the June issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). Emerging sensory feedback techniques will provide some sensation and enable more natural, intuitive use of hand prostheses, according to the review by ASPS Member Surgeon Paul S. Cederna, MD, of University ...

May 29, 2015 - As in adults, migraine surgery is effective for selected adolescent patients with severe migraine headaches that don't respond to standard treatments, reports a study in the June issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). ASPS Member Surgeon Bahman Guyuron, MD, Emeritus professor of plastic surgery at Case School of Medicine, Cleveland, and colleagues report good outcomes in an initial experience with migraine surgery in younger patients. They write, "Our data demonstrate ...

May 29, 2015 - People with dementia and other forms of cognitive impairment (CI) have altered responses to pain, with many conditions associated with increased pain sensitivity, concludes a research review in PAIN®, the official publication of the International Association for the Study of Pain. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. The available evidence questions the previous notion that people with CI have reduced pain sensitivity to pain. Rather, "It appears that those with widespread brain atrophy or neural degeneration...all show increased pain responses ...

The 54-question Trauma Symptoms Checklist for Children (TSCC) has been used for decades to test how trauma affects youth in hopes of developing the best treatment and support possible. But interpreting the results can be labor intensive and difficult because the work is done manually and involves a complex matrix from which to draw conclusions. Now, a Case Western Reserve University social work research team, led by Fredrick Butcher, PhD, a research associate at the Semi J. and Ruth W. Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education, has proposed and tested ...