King's College London researchers have found evidence that minocycline, a widely used antibiotic with anti-inflammatory properties, gave greater improvement in depressive symptoms in patients with treatment resistant depression with low-grade peripheral inflammation. Improvement in depressive symptoms In a four-week randomised clinical MINDEP (MINocycline in DEPression) trial, 39 patients with major depressive disorder were recruited from services linked to South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and via public advertisement. The trial took place at the NIHR / Wellcome Trust King's Clinical Research Facility at King's College Hospital. The patients, who were taking their routine antidepressant treatment, were split into two ...

New research suggests that a higher dietary intake of long chain omega-3 fatty acids in childhood may reduce the risk of developing subsequent asthma, but only in children carrying a common gene variant. The study, led by Queen Mary University of London, is in collaboration with the University of Bristol and University of Southampton, UK, and Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. In the UK, 1.1 million children (1 in 11) are currently receiving treatment for asthma and most adult asthma begins in childhood. The NHS spends around £1 billion a year treating and caring for people with asthma. Senior author, Professor Seif Shaheen from Queen Mary ...

Helping people to self isolate after testing positive for covid-19 must now be a top priority for the UK government, argue experts in The BMJ today. Dr Muge Cevik at the University of St Andrews and colleagues say the focus should be on those working in high exposure occupations, living in overcrowded housing, or without a home, and should include free and safe accommodation alongside adequate income support, job protection, and help with caring responsibilities. Most countries have used testing as a tool to interrupt transmission chains by encouraging ...

Access to legal cannabis stores is associated with a reduction in opioid related deaths in the United States, particularly those linked to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, finds a study published by The BMJ today. Opioids are 'morphine-type' drugs that relieve short-term (acute) pain and pain at the end of life. There is little evidence that they are helpful for long-term (chronic) pain, but they are often prescribed for this reason. This has led to widespread misuse and a sharp rise in overdose deaths, particularly in the United States. In 2018, there were more than 46,000 fentanyl related deaths, representing over two thirds of all US opioid related deaths that ...

A new study has shown that, while there is limited evidence for overall increased mortality in patients with atopic eczema, those with severe atopic eczema may have a greater risk of dying from several health issues compared with those without eczema, according to a new study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The research team, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and funded by the Wellcome Trust, compared the risk of dying in over 500,000 adults with atopic eczema with more than 2.5 million without eczema. Patients with severe atopic eczema had a 62% higher risk of dying compared to ...

27th of January, Wednesday, Hong Kong - Deep Longevity, a fully-owned subsidiary of Regent Pacific (HKEX: 0575), specializing in the development and the application of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) for aging and longevity research, today announced the publication of an article in END ...

The thought of eating insects is stomach turning for many, but new Edith Cowan University (ECU) research is shedding light on allergy causing proteins which could pose serious health risks for those suffering from shellfish allergy. The research, published in the journal Food Chemistry, identified 20 proteins found in cricket food products which could cause serious allergic reactions. The project was led by Professor Michelle Colgrave from ECU's School of Science and the CSIRO. Professor Colgrave said crickets and other insects could be the key to feeding ...

DALLAS (January 26, 2021) - Many people believe that they can't change their brains, or that their brain health will inevitably decline as they age. But the Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART) training protocol, created by researchers and clinicians at the Center for BrainHealth®, has been demonstrated over the past two decades to improve cognitive function and psychological well-being in laboratory participants. Recent research suggests that SMART can even make long-lasting improvements to people's brain health when given outside of the lab in short, informal training sessions. A paper detailing these findings was recently published in Military Medicine. The research was a collaboration between Leanne R. Young, PhD, of Applied Research Associates, ...

The widespread use of cashless payments including credit cards, debit cards, and mobile apps has made transactions more convenient for consumers. However, results from previous research have shown that such cashless payments can increase consumers' spending on unhealthy food. "Why Do Cashless Payments Increase Unhealthy Consumption? The Decision-Risk Inattention Hypothesis," a newly published article in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, explains this phenomenon by showing how changes in bodily responses to cashless payments influence consumers responses. Authors Joowon Park, Clarence Lee, and Manoj Thomas propose that cash and cashless payments elicit different levels of negative arousal when making shopping ...

The development of small hydropower dams is widespread throughout Brazil and elsewhere in the world, vastly overshadowing large hydropower projects. The proliferation of these smaller dams is a response to growing energy and security needs. Their expansion, however, threatens many of the remaining free-flowing rivers and biodiverse tropical regions of the world -- interrupting the migrations of freshwater fishes, on which millions of peoples' livelihoods depend. A new University of Washington paper published Jan. 11 in Nature Sustainability quantifies these tradeoffs between hydroelectric generation capacity and the impacts on river connectivity ...

Popular folklore and anecdotal evidence suggest that people in a hypnotic or suggestible state can experience sensory hallucinations, such as perceiving sounds and sights that are not actually there. Reliable scientific evidence of these experiences, however, has been notoriously challenging to obtain because of their subjective nature. New research published in the journal Psychological Science provides compelling evidence that hypnotic suggestions can help highly susceptible people "see" imaginary objects, equipping them with the missing details needed to solve an otherwise challenging visual puzzle. "Hypnosis holds intriguing effects on human behavior," said Amir Raz, a researcher at McGill University and coauthor on the paper. "The careful, systematic study of hypnotic phenomena can ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A new study led by a University at Buffalo researcher has identified how specific communication among different brain regions, known as brain connectivity, can serve as a biomarker for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The research relied on a deep architecture using machine-learning classifiers to identify with 99% accuracy those adults who had received a childhood diagnosis of ADHD many years earlier. "This suggests that brain connectivity is a stable biomarker for ADHD, at least into childhood, even when an individual's ...

Amid a sharp economic downturn in 2008, police departments around the United States experienced budget shortfalls that required them to enact cutbacks. A new study examined the effects on crime of budget shortfalls in two New Jersey cities--one of which laid off more than 10 percent of its police force while the other averted layoffs. The study found that the police layoffs were associated with significant increases in overall crime, violent crime, and property crime. The study, by researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Rutgers University, appears in Justice Evaluation Journal, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. "Our study suggests that sudden and drastic reductions in the size of a police force via layoffs of police officers ...

A new machine learning algorithm based on mammograms can estimate the risk of breast cancer in women more accurately than current risk models, according to a study from Adam Yala and colleagues. The algorithm, which was tested with datasets from three large hospitals located worldwide, could help clinicians design guidelines for breast cancer screening that meet the need for early detection while reducing false-positives, test costs, and other issues associated with overscreening. Mammograms are the most common method to screen for breast cancer, as more than 39 million procedures are performed in the U.S. annually. However, their widespread adoption has not gone without ...

Working to develop new treatments for osteoarthritis, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have genetically engineered cartilage to deliver an anti-inflammatory drug in response to activity similar to the bending of a knee or other motions that put stress on joints. Among the early symptoms of osteoarthritis is pain in response to such movements -- motions that involve the so-called mechanical loading of a joint. Joint pain that accompanies bending or lifting can make it difficult to perform normal activities. But by altering genes in cartilage cells in the laboratory, the researchers have been able to program them to respond to the mechanical stress associated with movement and weight-bearing ...

The blog "Ladyplanet. Natürlich Frau sein" is quite certain: "Our cycle is linked to that of the moon. The most obvious connection is the length of the two cycles," it says. The newspaper "Berliner Tagesspiegel" comes to the opposite conclusion: "The length of women's menstrual cycles is an average value, for some it lasts longer, for others it is shorter. Even one and the same woman can have cycles of different lengths. If they really were connected to the lunar cycle, all women would have their fertile days at the same time," the paper's knowledge section reads. So what is true? A team led by Würzburg chronobiologist Charlotte Förster has now used scientific methods to examine the connection between ...

Organelles continue to thrive after the cells within which they exist die, a team of University of Bristol scientists have found, overturning previous assumptions that organelles decay too quickly to be fossilised. As described in the journal Sciences Advances today [27 January], researchers from Bristol's School of Earth Sciences were able to document the decay process of eukaryotic algal cells, showing that nuclei, chloroplasts and pyrenoids (organelles found within chloroplasts) can persist for weeks and months after cell death in eukaryote cells, long enough to be preserved as fossils. Emily Carlisle, a PhD student from Bristol's School of Earth Sciences and co-author, was able to characterise the transformation of the organelles into ...

An analysis of long-term menstrual cycle records kept by 22 women for up to 32 years shows that women with cycles lasting longer than 27 days intermittently synchronized with cycles that affect the intensity of moonlight and the moon's gravitational pull. This synchrony was lost as women aged and when they were exposed to artificial light at night. The researchers hypothesized that human reproductive behavior may have been synchronous with the moon during ancient times, but that this changed as modern lifestyles emerged and humans increasingly gained exposure to artificial light ...

Larvae of a new malaria mosquito species are abundantly present in water containers in cities in Ethiopia. The mosquito, Anopheles stephensi, is the main malaria mosquito in India but only appeared on the African continent a few years ago. It has now been found in cities and towns in urban settings in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Djibouti. Researchers from the Radboud university medical center and the Armauer Hansen Research Institute in Ethiopia showed that the invading mosquito species is highly susceptible to local malaria strains. Malaria can therefore become an increasing problem for urban areas in ...

Pioneering work led by a joint China-UK consortium has revealed the origin of one of the world's most important ecosystems, the East Asian biodiversity "hotspot," thus solving a longstanding riddle as to what prompted its formation and evolution. In a recent study published in Science Advances, a joint research team led by scientists from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Bristol (UK) and the Open University (UK) has revealed the first direct mechanism explaining how the growth of mountains in Northern Tibet drastically altered climate, vegetation and plant diversity in East Asia. The researchers used an innovative climate model that simulates ...

(Embargoed for January 28, 2021 3 a.m. SPT; January 27th 2 pm EST, 2021) -- Note: this study is scheduled for publication in the Journal Science Translational Medicine) A study presented today by Dr. Nobuyuki Takahashi of the Center for Cancer Research (CCR), National Cancer Institute (NCI), Bethesda, Md. at the IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer Singapore demonstrates that small cell lung cancer (SCLC) may have an inherited predisposition and lays the foundation for understanding the interaction between genotype and tobacco exposure in exacerbating SCLC risk as well as potential therapeutic implications. Because tobacco is the dominant carcinogen, secondary causes of lung cancer are often diminished in perceived importance, especially in SCLC, the most lethal ...

A study has revealed for the first time the ancient origins of one of the world's most important ecosystems by unlocking the mechanism which determined the evolution of its mountains and how they shaped the weather there as well as its flora and fauna. It was previously thought Southern Tibet and the Himalaya were instrumental in turning the once barren land of eastern Asia into lush forests and abundant coastal regions which became home to a rich array of plant, animal and marine life, including some of the world's rarest species. But new findings, published today in the journal Science Advances, conversely show Northern Tibet played the more influential role in this transformation which began more than 50 million years ago. Scientists from a UK-China partnership, ...

By Elton Alisson  |  Agência FAPESP - Melatonin synthesized in the lungs acts as a barrier against SARS-CoV-2, preventing expression of genes that encode proteins in cells such as resident macrophages in the nose and pulmonary alveoli, and epithelial cells lining the alveoli, all of which are entry points for the virus. The hormone, therefore, prevents infection of these cells by the virus and inhibits the immune response so that the virus remains in the respiratory tract for a few days, eventually leaving to find another host. The discovery by researchers at the University ...

A study led by a University of Illinois Chicago researcher uses a new approach to measure precarious, or low-quality, employment in the United States. And, according to those findings, precarious employment has increased 9% between 1988 and 2016. Precarious employment, or P.E., is defined as low-quality employment, which is often characterized by low wages, job insecurity and irregular hours, making employment risky and stressful for the worker. In her study, "Changes in precarious employment in the United States: A longitudinal analysis," Vanessa Oddo, assistant professor in UIC's School of Applied Health Sciences, sought to create ...

People who are pregnant, breastfeeding or trying to conceive should be offered the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine based on ethical grounds, argue authors of a commentary in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). They discuss how health care providers and patients can use a shared decision-making approach to weigh the risks and benefits to decide on the right action for the individual. "Core principles of medical ethics hold that medical decisions or interventions should respect individuals' autonomy, be just, be beneficial (beneficence), and not cause harm (nonmaleficence)," writes Dr. Jonathan Zipursky, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the University ...