Using social media to deliver both emotional and concise medical content as well as the need for heart transplants and organs resulted in a higher engagement with members, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014." "Social media has not been used extensively in the healthcare industry, and if we can effectively bridge the gap between health education and medicine using social networks and peer influence, we can potentially have many beneficial applications to the healthcare system," said Mohammad Soroya, lead author ...

Youths with a family history of alcohol and other drug use disorders have a greater risk of developing substance-use disorders (SUDs) themselves than their peers with no such family histories. A new study examines forebrain activity in youths with and without a family history of SUDs. Findings indicate that youths with a family history have forebrain regions that function less efficiently. Researchers and clinicians know that youths with a family history of alcohol and other drug use disorders (FH+) have a greater risk of developing substance-use disorders (SUDs) ...

Chronic misuse of alcohol results in measurable damage to the brain. A new study uses high-resolution structural magnetic resonance (MR) scans to compare the brains of individuals with a history of alcoholism versus those of healthy light drinkers. The abstinent alcoholics showed pronounced reductions in frontal and superior white matter tracts. Chronic misuse of alcohol results in measurable damage to the brain. Chronic drinking may be particularly damaging to the integrity of frontal white matter tracts, which can interfere with cognitive and inhibitory control ...

An alcohol metabolizing gene called ADH1B is strongly linked to risk for alcohol use disorders (AUDs). The His allele (genetic variant) at ADHD1B-rs1229984 is considered protective against AUDs. Experiencing adverse events during childhood, such as physical or sexual abuse or witnessing violence, is a well-documented risk factor for alcohol problems. A study of the effects of both the ADH1B gene and childhood adversity has found that under conditions of childhood adversity, the ADH1B His allele does not exert its protective effects against problem drinking in European-American ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- For such humble creatures, single-celled paramecia have remarkable sensory systems. Give them a sharp jab on the nose, they back up and swim away. Jab them in the behind, they speed up their swimming to escape. But according to new research, when paramecia encounter flat surfaces, they're at the mercy of the laws of physics. The findings, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, come from some surprising results in research performed in recent years by James Valles, professor and chair of physics at Brown University, and ...

University of Otago palaeontologists are rewriting the history of New Zealand's ancient whales by describing a previously unknown genus of fossil baleen whales and two species within it. Otago Department of Geology PhD student Robert Boessenecker and his supervisor Professor Ewan Fordyce have named the new genus Tohoraata, which translates as 'Dawn Whale' in Māori. The two whales, which lived between 27-25 million years ago, were preserved in a rock formation near Duntroon in North Otago. At that time the continent of Zealandia was largely or completely under ...

MADISON, Wis. - As the installation of photovoltaic solar cells continues to accelerate, scientists are looking for inexpensive materials beyond the traditional silicon that can efficiently convert sunlight into electricity. Theoretically, iron pyrite -- a cheap compound that makes a common mineral known as fool's gold -- could do the job, but when it works at all, the conversion efficiency remains frustratingly low. Now, a University of Wisconsin-Madison research team explains why that is, in a discovery that suggests how improvements in this promising material could ...

The most emergent form of heart attacks is decreasing nationwide, but this declining incidence could affect emergency departments' quality and timeliness of care. This is the key finding of a Vanderbilt University study released today in the American Journal of Cardiology and presented at the national American Heart Association meeting in Chicago this week. Using data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, the nation's largest database of information about emergency department visits, the researchers found that approximately 250,000 patients present in emergency ...

Philadelphia, PA, November 18, 2014 - Care gaps are emerging due to disharmony between healthcare reimbursement policies and evidence-based clinical guideline recommendations, cautions a group of Canadian physicians. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, they use the example of stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation (AF) to make a case for engaging with policy-makers to address the growing barriers to patients' access to optimal care. Stroke is a costly disease, imposing a significant human, societal, and economic burden. AF affects about one in eight people ...

Computerized cognitive training (CCT) has been widely promoted for older adults, but its effectiveness for cognitively health older adults has been unclear in systematic reviews to date. In a new systematic review and meta-analysis published in this week's issue of PLOS Medicine, Michael Valenzuela (Brain and Mind Research Institute, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) and colleagues evaluated 52 datasets in 51 studies and found a small overall effect of CCT (g = 0.22; 95% CI 0.15 to 0.29, where g END ...

Computer based 'brain training' can boost memory and thinking skills in older adults, but many programs promoted by the $1 billion brain training industry are ineffective, reveals new research by the University of Sydney. Published today in PLOS Medicine, the study shows that engaging older adults computer-based cognitive training (also known as brain training) can lead to improvements in memory, speed, and visuospatial skills. However, it has no impact on attention or executive functions such as impulse control, planning and problem solving. Brain degeneration ...

HOUSTON, Nov. 18, 2014 - The quest of University of Houston professor Richard Meisel to understand how and why males and females differ may one day lead to a more effective means of pest control - namely, the pesky house fly. Meisel, an assistant professor in the UH Department of Biology and Biochemistry, collaborated with several scientists on sequencing the house fly genome. The results were recently published in the open-access journal Genome Biology. "The house fly genome will be a useful resource for understanding how pest species are able to exist in their environment ...

WASHINGTON, DC-- Small volcanic eruptions might eject more of an atmosphere-cooling gas into Earth's upper atmosphere than previously thought, potentially contributing to the recent slowdown in global warming, according to a new study. Scientists have long known that volcanoes can cool the atmosphere, mainly by means of sulfur dioxide gas that eruptions expel. Droplets of sulfuric acid that form when the gas combines with oxygen in the upper atmosphere can remain for many months, reflecting sunlight away from Earth and lowering temperatures. However, previous research ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Nov. 18, 2014 -- Leave it to long-dead short-tailed shrew and flying squirrels to outfox climate-modelers trying to predict future habitats. Evidence from the fossil record shows that gluttonous insect-eating shrew didn't live where a species distribution technique drawn by biologists put it 20,000 years ago to survive the reach of glaciers, says University of Oregon geologist Edward B. Davis. The shrew is not alone. According to a new study by Davis and colleagues, fossil records of five ancient mammalian species that survived North America's last glacial ...

Hamilton, ON (Nov. 18, 2014) - McMaster University researchers have found new evidence that suggests patients with a history of adverse reaction to the blood thinner heparin may be ready for urgent heart surgery sooner with a combination of appropriate blood screenings and therapeutic plasma exchange. The study was published online today in Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology. The lead author is Dr. Theodore Warkentin, a professor in the Department of Medicine's Division of Hematology and Thromboembolism and the Department of Pathology and Molecular ...

The consumption of a diet high in fructose throughout adolescence can worsen depressive- and anxiety-like behavior and alter how the brain responds to stress, according to new animal research scheduled for presentation at Neuroscience 2014, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health. "Our results offer new insights into the ways in which diet can alter brain health and may lead to important implications for adolescent nutrition and development," said lead author Constance Harrell of ...

Washington, D.C. - November 18, 2014 - Lumosity is presenting new research today at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience conference on how altering cognitive task parameters affects learning rates. The study, titled "Optimizing Cognitive Task Designs to Improve Learning Rates in a Large Online Population," analyzed game play performance from 99,022 participants, and found that participants operating closer to their performance threshold earlier in their experience with a cognitive task tend to have faster learning rates - especially at higher levels of difficulty. "By looking ...

Ticagrelor halves risks of stents blocking with blood clots Study of 18,000 patients shows cost-effective drug could prevent premature deaths Reduces the risk of patients needing repeat operations Treating heart attack patients with ticagrelor reduces the risk of stents blocking with blood clots according to a ground breaking new study conducted by researchers from the University of Sheffield. The new findings confirm that treating heart attack patients with the pioneering drug ticagrelor, instead of the previous standard treatment clopidogrel, could halve the risks ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - In the 1970s, ecologists published results from one of the first whole-forest ecosystem studies ever conducted in Hubbard Brook, New Hampshire. In the paper, scientists reported that salamanders represent one of the largest sources of biomass, or food, of all vertebrates in the forest landscape. Now, using new sampling and statistical techniques not available during the past study, researchers at the University of Missouri have estimated that the population of salamanders in forested regions of the Missouri Ozarks are 2-4 times higher than originally thought, ...

NEW YORK (November 18, 2014) - The addition of mitral valve (MV) repair (a valve of the heart) to coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), a type of open-heart surgery, did not result in significant benefit to the patient and was associated with increased risk of neurological events. Therefore, the routine addition of MV repair to CABG in patients with moderate IMR did not demonstrate a clinically meaningful advantage. The Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network (CTSN) is reporting results for the first time from a clinical trial of patients who have a complication of ...

Over the last decade, neuroscientists have largely come to believe that physical pain and social pain are processed by the brain in the same way. But a new study led by the University of Colorado shows that the two kinds of pain actually use distinct neural circuits, a finding that could lead to more targeted treatments and a better understanding of how the two kinds of pain interact. For the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers used a technique recently borrowed from the computer science field by neuroscientists--multivariate pattern ...

WASHINGTON D.C., November 18, 2014 - On a quest to design an alternative to the two complex approaches currently used to produce electrons within microwave electron guns, a team of researchers from Euclid TechLabs and Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Nanoscale Materials have demonstrated a plug-and-play solution capable of operating in this high-electric-field environment with a high-quality electron beam. Unfamiliar with microwave electron guns? Perhaps best known within the realm of X-ray sources, microwave electron guns provide a higher current and much higher ...

Medications, such as chemotherapy, are often limited by their tendency to be detrimental to healthy cells as an unintended side effect. Now research in the November 18th issue of Cell Press's Biophysical Journal offers a new computational model that can help investigators design ways to direct drugs to their specific targets. A major problem with many cancer drugs is the harmful effects they can have on normal cells. Similarly, treatments for a variety of other diseases can have side effects by acting on cells that are not meant to be targeted. Researchers have tried ...

A mother's "TLC" not only can help soothe pain in infants, but it may also impact early brain development by altering gene activity in a part of the brain involved in emotions, according to new study from NYU Langone Medical Center. By carefully analyzing what genes were active in infant rat brains when the mother was present or not present, the NYU researchers found that several hundred genes were more, or less, active in rat infants experiencing pain than in those that were not. With their mothers present, however, fewer than 100 genes were similarly expressed. According ...

(BOSTON) - A major challenge faced by the pharmaceutical industry has been how to rationally design and select protein molecules to create effective biologic drug therapies while reducing unintended side effects - a challenge that has largely been addressed through costly guess-and-check experiments. Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University offer a new approach, in a study published today in Biophysical Journal. "I believe that biology is the technology of this century," said the study's senior author and Wyss Institute ...