Some 10-15 percent of combat veterans struggle with wounds invisible to the naked eye: post-traumatic stress. Their lives are ridden with debilitating symptoms: insomnia, flashbacks, depression, anxiety, guilt, and ever-present tension. While there is no cure-all for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cognitive behavioral therapy -- which actively reprocesses traumatic events to reduce symptoms -- has seen some success. A new study from researchers at Tel Aviv University, Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and the National Institute of Mental Health suggests ...

On July 30, 2015, researchers from Sichuan University, Sun Yat-sen University, University of California, BGI, etc, reported the latest study on congenitalcataracts. The finding, published on Nature, identifies lanosterol as a key molecule in the prevention of lens protein aggregation and points to a novel strategy for cataract prevention and treatment. Cataracts are the most common cause of blindness worldwide, accounting for over half of all cases of blindness worldwide. Currently the only treatment is surgical removal of cataractous lenses. High concentrations of crystallin ...

If you have hypertension, it pays to include a pharmacist in a medical care team. That's the upshot from research by the University of Iowa that found patients with uncontrolled hypertension had better blood pressure control when being cared for by pharmacists working in care teams (with a physician, for example) than patients who relied mostly on a doctor for medication guidance. The researchers showed pharmacist-included care teams delivered more hands-on and tailored medication regimens to patients, which yielded more effective blood-pressure control results than ...

A new automated data mining system researched and developed at the University of Kent could lead to a dramatic increase in the detection of potentially illegal online sales of elephant ivory through eBay. Law enforcement agencies and conservationist are expected to make use of the system - developed by researchers from the University's Centre for Cyber Security - in their ongoing battle against illegal ivory sales. At the moment, identifying illegal elephant ivory being sold online is a laborious, tedious and expensive task, even for experts. A search for items ...

Teenagers suffering from severe obesity generally feel worse than their peers, but after undergoing gastric bypass nearly all experience improved mental health. One in five, however, still suffers from symptoms of depression - some quite seriously. These are the results of a new study from Lund University in Sweden, published in Obesity. The study is the largest two-year follow-up in the world regarding mental health in adolescents who have undergone a form of weight-loss surgery known as gastric bypass. It includes 88 Swedish adolescents, 13-18 years old, with an average ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 30, 2015 - Depressed people often find themselves preoccupied with guilty, shameful, or self-defeating thoughts for large parts of their day. These thoughts not only distract from other activities but also fail to resolve the underlying life issues. Further, the ideas that receive focused attention in these depressive ruminations are frequently quite distorted and lead to distress. The way that depressed people repetitively attend to these negative thoughts in an unproductive manner reflects the reasoning behind use of the term ruminations - because ...

Anyone who has ever watched a group of ants scurrying to carry a large crumb back to their nest has probably wondered how these tiny creatures manage the task. New research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, which appeared today in Nature Communications, explains how a balance of individual direction and conformist behavior enables ants to work together to move their food to in the desired direction. To lug a large object, a number of ants surround it - the back ones lift, those on the leading edge pull. How do they stay on track, instead of simply pulling all around ...

That is the conclusion of a major new review, written by leading world experts and published in the medical journal, Addiction. The review examined a wide range of measures that healthcare systems in different countries can adopt to help smokers to stop. It reviewed how effective they are and how much they cost, and offers a new tool to help governments and healthcare administrators calculate the cost - and affordability1 - of stop smoking treatments. The main findings of the review were: "Cytisine", a medicine currently only found in a few mostly Eastern European ...

New research by scientists at the University of York has given tea and coffee drinkers new information about why their favourite drinks taste as they do. The study led by Dr Seishi Shimizu, of the York Structural Biology Laboratory in the University's Department of Chemistry, shows that sugar has an important effect in reducing the bitterness of tea and coffee, not just by masking it but by influencing the fundamental chemistry. The research published in Food and Function reveals new insights into the way in which caffeine, sugar and water interact at the molecular ...

New research in the Open Access journal GigaScience presents a virtual package of data for biogas production, made reusable in a containerized form to allow scientists to better understand the production of biofuels. One of the promising areas in biofuels development is biogas, which has huge potential as a renewable and clean source of energy. Biogas is the production of methane gas through the anaerobic digestion (fermentation) of organic matter such as agricultural or food waste. Detailed knowledge on the functioning of the fermentation process is key for optimizing ...

A new blood test could help emergency room doctors quickly diagnose traumatic brain injury and determine its severity. The findings, published July 10 in the Journal of Neurotrauma, could help identify patients who might benefit from extra therapy or experimental treatments. "Compared to other proteins that have been measured in traumatic brain injury, BDNF does a much better job of predicting outcomes," says Frederick Korley, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and first author of the new paper. After ...

Philadelphia, July 30, 2015 - In a new national survey of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients, Health Union reveals a surprising lack of awareness of risk factors and knowledge of diagnosis stage among patients. Results demonstrate a severe impact on quality of life, employment, and ability to afford treatment. COPD, the third most common cause of death in the United States, describes a group of lung conditions that severely impact the breathing of nearly 15 million people in the U.S. (or six percent of the population) and more than 65 million worldwide. ...

WASHINGTON, DC, July 28, 2015 -- Recent research has shown that racial segregation in the U.S. is declining between neighborhoods, but a new study indicates that segregation is manifesting itself in other ways -- not disappearing. "We just can't get too excited by recent declines in neighborhood segregation," said lead author Daniel Lichter, the Ferris Family Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management and a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. "The truth is neighborhood segregation still remains high in America, and our study ...

This news release is available in French. By blocking the expression of a certain gene in patients, University of Montreal researchers have contributed to the demonstration of great decreases in the concentration of triglycerides in their blood, even in various severe forms of hypertriglyceridemia and regardless of the base values or the treatment the patient usually receives. The gene in question codes for the apoC-III protein. "Our study suggests that the proteine apoC-III plays a key role in the management of triglycerides. Triglycerides, like cholesterol, are lipids. ...

URBANA, Ill. - With many types of cancers, early detection offers the best hope for survival. However, research into new early-detection screenings, as well as possible interventional radiology and surgical treatments, has been hindered by the lack of a large animal model that would accurately reflect the types of cancers seen in human cells. For the last several years, researchers at the University of Illinois interested in improving screening programs for cancer have studied gene expression in mice, humans, and pigs in an effort to create a large-animal model that ...

Support for eliminating existing exemptions, except for medical reasons, from immunization laws was among the policy recommendations adopted last weekend at the summer meeting of the Board of Regents of the American College of Physicians (ACP). "Allowing exemptions based on non-medical reasons poses a risk both to the unvaccinated person and to public health," said Wayne J. Riley, MD, MPH, MBA, MACP, president of ACP, "Intentionally unvaccinated individuals can pose a danger to the public, especially to individuals who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons." The ...

A targeted therapy already used to treat advanced skin cancer is also effective against the most common subtype of the brain tumor medulloblastoma in adults and should be considered for treatment of newly diagnosed patients, according to research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The drug, called vismodegib, is designed to block a key protein in the sonic hedgehog (SHH) signaling pathway. The pathway is normally active during fetal development and is inappropriately switched on in about 30 percent of medulloblastoma tumors, including about 60 percent of tumors ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component, or organelle, that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell. The engineered ribosome may enable the production of new drugs and next-generation biomaterials and lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes function. The artificial ribosome, called Ribo-T, was created in the laboratories of Alexander Mankin, director of the UIC College of Pharmacy's Center for Biomolecular Sciences, ...

It's one thing to grow bacteria in a test tube, perform a screen in the lab, and find a mutation in the pathogen's genes. It's a whole other thing, and much rarer, to find the exact same mutation in nature--in this case, in E. coli in urine samples from some 500 patients suffering from relapsing urinary tract infections. The confluent discovery, by University Distinguished Professor Kim Lewis and his colleagues, was published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. It could put people with relapsing UTIs on the fast track for a new therapeutic regimen that Lewis described ...

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Using a climate model that can tag sources of soot from different global regions and can track where it lands on the Tibetan Plateau, researchers have determined which areas around the plateau contribute the most soot -- and where. The model can also suggest the most effective way to reduce soot on the plateau, easing the amount of warming the region undergoes. The work, which appeared in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in June, shows that soot pollution on and above the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau area warms the region enough to contribute to earlier ...

Following several years of research and collaboration, physicians and engineers at Johns Hopkins and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center say they have developed a computer platform that provides rapid, real-time feedback before and during facial transplant surgery, which may someday improve face-jaw-teeth alignment between donor and recipient. Surgeons performed the first successful transplant of facial features, including the jaw and teeth, in 2008, mainly relying on visual judgment. Since then, approximately 30 facial transplants have been done worldwide, ...

Brown dwarfs are relatively cool, dim objects that are difficult to detect and hard to classify. They are too massive to be planets, yet possess some planetlike characteristics; they are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions at their cores, a defining characteristic of stars, yet they have starlike attributes. By observing a brown dwarf 20 light-years away using both radio and optical telescopes, a team led by Gregg Hallinan, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, has found another feature that makes these so-called failed stars more like supersized planets--they ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC - The stem cells in our gut divide so fast that they create a completely new population of epithelial cells every week. But this quick division is also why radiation and chemotherapy wreak havoc on the gastrointestinal systems of cancer patients - such therapies target rapidly dividing cells. Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center found that a rare type of stem cell is immune to radiation damage thanks to high levels of a gene called Sox9. The discovery, which was made in mice and published in the journal ...

Washington, DC--The Endocrine Society today issued a Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) on strategies for treating Cushing's syndrome, a condition caused by overexposure to the hormone cortisol. The CPG, entitled "Treatment of Cushing's Syndrome: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline," was published online and will appear in the August 2015 print issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM), a publication of the Endocrine Society. Cushing's syndrome occurs when a person has excess cortisol in the blood for an extended period, according ...

Enrolling in an insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act is only the first step for consumers to be actively engaged in their health care, according to a new analysis from RAND Corporation researchers. To understand the issues facing consumers as well as the payers, providers and support organizations who work directly with them, RAND researchers conducted phone-based interviews with insurance companies, physician groups and community support nonprofit organizations. The analysis of the interviews shows more work is necessary to support consumers past the point of ...