Dutch doctors withhold/withdraw treatment in a substantial proportion of elderly patients, reveals research published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics. But their decisions don't seem to be driven by ageism; rather, they are more likely based on considerations of comfort and respect and the avoidance of futile treatment, conclude the researchers. In a bid to assess whether certain age groups are more likely to have treatment withheld or withdrawn, the researchers looked at a sample of deaths, stratified according to whether end of life decisions were likely or ...

UK doctors are unlikely to be able to repay their student loans over the course of their working lives, amassing debts of more than £80,000 by the time they graduate, in some cases, finds research published in the online journal BMJ Open. What's more, there are clear gender differences in the amount of cash required to service these debts, the analysis shows, with women paying more in interest, despite earning less than men. The researchers base their findings on the average earnings of 4286 doctors working more than 30 hours a week, who had taken part in national ...

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) could provide an alternative non-drug treatment for people who do not wish to continue long-term antidepressant treatment, suggests new research published in The Lancet. The results come from the first ever large study to compare MBCT - structured training for the mind and body which aims to change the way people think and feel about their experiences - with maintenance antidepressant medication for reducing the risk of relapse in depression. The study aimed to establish whether MBCT is superior to maintenance antidepressant ...

TORONTO, ON, April 20, 2015 -- South Asian women are more likely to be diagnosed with later stage breast cancer compared to the general population, while Chinese women are more likely to be diagnosed with early stage cancer, according to a new study by Women's College Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). The findings, published today in the journal Current Oncology, confirm a strong link between ethnicity and breast cancer stage at diagnosis for Canadian women. An editorial by Dr. Aisha Lofters accompanies the paper and indicates that the ...

A new study by UC San Francisco has found that statins can help prevent disease in older adults but must be weighed against potentially serious side effects. Amid a projected cost of almost $900 billion for cardiovascular disease over the next decade in the U.S., statins are used by nearly half the elderly population in the nation. But in spite of the widespread use, there has been little systematic scrutiny of the potential risks of the drugs in older adults and whether those side effects could offset cardiovascular and other health benefits. For the statin study, ...

WASHINGTON -- Results from a second comprehensive analysis of mammography screening, this time using data from digital mammography, confirms findings from a 2009 analysis of film mammography: biennial (every two years) screening offers a favorable balance of benefits to harm for women ages 50 to 74 who have an average risk of developing breast cancer. A technical report of the analysis is posted on the US Preventive Services Task Force's website and is cited as one piece of evidence for its 2015 draft recommendations for breast cancer screening with mammography. The ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Researchers at Yale and the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System compared the number of drinks that men with HIV infection, versus those without it, needed to get a buzz. They found that HIV-infected men were more sensitive to the effects of alcohol than uninfected men. The study published April 17 in the journal AIDS and Behavior. Researchers know that HIV and alcohol can make for a dangerous mix. "Alcohol makes it more likely you're going to get HIV due to risky sexual behavior," said Dr. Amy C. Justice, professor of medicine and public health at Yale. ...

DALLAS, April 20, 2015 -- For the first time, the American Heart Association has issued recommendations for healthcare providers treating people older than 40 with congenital heart disease. "People born with congenital heart disease are living longer and fuller lives than ever before, and there are now more adults than children with congenital heart disease," said Ami Bhatt, M.D., lead author of the new scientific statement published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. "These patients often have a sense that their heart has been 'fixed' and they don't ...

WASHINGTON, DC - In order to help doctors treat the millions of people who experience their first seizure each year, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Epilepsy Society have released a new guideline on how to treat a first seizure. The guideline is published in the April 21, 2015, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), and will be presented at the AAN Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, April 18-25, 2015, which is the world's largest gathering of neurologists. One in 10 people worldwide have a first ...

WASHINGTON, DC, APRIL 20, 2015--A new guideline released today by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) and the American Epilepsy Society (AES) found that administering an antiepileptic medication immediately after a first seizure reduces the risk of having another seizure within two years. The guideline, authored by Allan Krumholz, MD, a professor of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and physician at the Maryland Epilepsy Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center, is the first to address treatment of a first seizure in adults. A previous ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 20, 2015) -- A significant proportion of children with chronic kidney disease (CKD) have unsuspected chromosomal imbalances, including DNA anomalies that have been linked to neurocognitive disorders, according to a new Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) study. The findings suggest that routine genetic screening of children with CKD could lead to earlier and more precise diagnoses, as well as to more personalized monitoring, prevention, and treatment. Details of the study were published today in the online issue of the Journal of Clinical investigation. "With ...

Every year, more than 120 million prescriptions are written worldwide for thiazide drugs, a group of salt-lowering medicines used to treat high blood pressure. These drugs are often work very well, and over decades have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But in some patients, thiazides are not effective; in others they lower blood pressure for a while and then stop working. The reasons for this have remained a mystery. Now, a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) has revealed a key mechanism for this failure. Paul Welling, ...

Following a first seizure, physicians should discuss with patients whether it is appropriate to prescribe medication to reduce risk of another seizure, according to new guidelines released at the American Academy of Neurology meeting. The guidelines, which were a collaboration of authors at several North American medical institutions including NYU Langone Medical Center, found adults who experience a first seizure may have risk of another seizure that's greatest within the first two years. Adults with prior neurological trauma, abnormalities on EEGs and imaging may be ...

Access to high-quality medicine is a basic human right, but over four billion people live in countries where many medications are substandard or fake. Marya Lieberman of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame and Abigail Weaver a postdoctoral associate in the University's Department of Civil Engineering and Environmental and Earth Sciences took up the challenge of how people in developing countries could detect low quality antimalarial drugs without expensive equipment and without handling dangerous chemicals. The solution they ...

MADISON, Wis. -- In a move that could improve the energy storage of everything from portable electronics to electric microgrids, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Brookhaven National Laboratory researchers have developed a novel X-ray imaging technique to visualize and study the electrochemical reactions in lithium-ion rechargeable batteries containing a new type of material, iron fluoride. "Iron fluoride has the potential to triple the amount of energy a conventional lithium-ion battery can store," says Song Jin, a UW-Madison professor of chemistry and Wisconsin Energy ...

Toronto, CANADA - Imagine living a healthy, normal life without the ability to re-experience in your mind personal events from your past. You have learned details about past episodes from your life and can recite these to family and friends, but you can't mentally travel back in time to imagine yourself in any of them. Cognitive scientists from Baycrest Health Sciences' Rotman Research Institute in Toronto had a rare opportunity to examine three middle-aged adults (two from the U.S., the other from the U.K.) who essentially live their lives in the "third person" because ...

Tryptophan is an amino acid, one of the building blocks of proteins. It is used extensively to study how proteins change their 3D structure, and also how they interact with other proteins and molecules. This is studied with a fluorescence technique called FRET, which measures the transfer of energy from tryptophan to another molecule. But in some cases, FRET data could be distorted because tryptophan transfers an electron instead of energy. Using a unique spectroscopic technique, scientists at EPFL have now confirmed for the first time that this is indeed the case. The ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (April 20, 2015) - A novel approach that allows real-time imaging of the immune system's response to the presence of tumors--without the need for blood draws or invasive biopsies--offers a potential breakthrough both in diagnostics and in the ability to monitor efficacy of cancer therapies. The method, developed in the lab of Whitehead Institute Member Hidde Ploegh and reported online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), harnesses the imaging power of positron emission tomography (PET), which is normally used to monitor ...

PHILADELPHIA, April 20, 2015 - New findings hidden within the complex machinery behind the vicious cycle of chronic inflammation and cancer are presented today by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, partner with UPMC Cancer Center, at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Fondazione RiMED, of Palermo, Italy. Inflammation is an important immune system tool that helps the body rid itself of foreign invaders, such as bacteria. ...

New analysis of world-famous 3.46 billion-year-old rocks by researchers from the University of Bristol, the University of Oxford and UWA (the University of Western Australia) is set to finally resolve a long running evolutionary controversy. The new research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, shows that structures once thought to be Earth's oldest microfossils do not compare with younger fossil candidates but have, instead, the character of peculiarly shaped minerals. In 1993, US scientist Bill Schopf described tiny carbon-rich ...

MADISON, Wis. -- If your home country is historically heterogeneous and you know it, crack a smile. People who live in countries built on centuries of migration from a wide range of other countries are more emotionally expressive than people in more insular cultures, according to research led by University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology Professor Paula Niedenthal. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared several social and demographic variables to the way people describe the rules for displaying emotion in dozens ...

A University of Colorado Boulder and North Carolina State University-led team has produced the first atlas of airborne microbes across the continental U.S., a feat that has implications for better understanding health and disease in humans, animals and crops. The researchers collected outdoor dust samples from roughly 1,200 homes in all 50 states from both urban and rural areas using a powerful DNA sequencing technique to identify specific bacteria and fungal species. While standard, culture-based surveys are able to detect only a handful of different species, the high-tech ...

The oceans and other water bodies contain billions of tons of dissolved uranium. Over the planet's history, some of this uranium was transformed into an insoluble form, causing it to precipitate and accumulate in sediments. There are two ways that uranium can go from a soluble to an insoluble form: either through the action of live organisms - bacteria - or by interacting chemically with certain minerals. Knowing which pathway was taken can provide valuable insight into the evolution and activity of microbial biology over Earth's history. Publishing in the journal PNAS, ...

New University of Washington research finds that children's early environments have a lasting impact on their responses to stress later in life, and that the negative effects of deprived early environments can be mitigated -- but only if that happens before age 2. Published April 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research is believed to be the first to identify a sensitive period during early life when children's stress response systems are particularly likely to be influenced by their caregiving environments. "The early environment has ...

MISSOULA - Many scientists assume that the growing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will accelerate plant growth. However, a new study co-written by University of Montana researchers suggests much of this growth will be curtailed by limited soil nutrients. The end result: By the end of the century, there may be more than an additional 10 percent of CO2 in the atmosphere, which would accelerate climate change. "If society stays on its current trajectory of CO2 emissions and the growth rates of plants don't increase as much as many models project, the result by ...