In contrast to the general population, low body mass index has been associated with premature death in patients with rheumatoid arthritis -- a situation known as the "obesity paradox." A new Arthritis & Rheumatology study shows that weight loss, as opposed to low body mass index per se, is a strong predictor of mortality in these patients. The study also found that the greater the rate of weight loss, the higher the risk of early death. The findings suggest that there isn't a biologically protective role of obesity, and they indicate that patients with rheumatoid arthritis ...

Unique person-specific cues--such as the presence of a specific friend or hearing a specific song--appear to have a robust effect on craving addictive substances, a recent study shows. The study also found that person-specific cues may have a longer effect on craving than more general substance-specific cues, such as the presence of bottles, syringes, or lighters. The study included 132 outpatients beginning treatment for alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, or opiate addiction. Using mobile technologies, participants were questioned 4 times per day relative to craving, substance ...

Young people are just as likely to try electronic cigarettes as smoking, according to a new report from the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact at the University of Waterloo. The findings, published today in Tobacco Use in Canada: Patterns and Trends, reveal that approximately 20 per cent of youth between the ages of 15 and 19 experiment with vaping, the same number who try cigarettes. "E-cigarettes have become increasingly popular among Canadians," said David Hammond, lead author on the report and a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems ...

BIOMETRICS - 3-D face analysis ... Law enforcement and national security agencies could benefit from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology able to determine a person's age, race and gender with high fidelity. "Normally, computers estimate age by looking for wrinkles or estimate gender by looking at specific two-dimensional distances or 2-D texture," said Ryan Tokola of ORNL's Imaging, Signals and Machine Learning Group. ORNL's system allows users to employ the same set of features to estimate age with an error of less than five years, gender with 89 percent accuracy ...

(New York -- May 4, 2015) -- Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have a four-fold increase in their risk of developing intermediate-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to people of the same age who are not infected with HIV, according to results from the Longitudinal Study of the Ocular Complications of AIDS (LSOCA) presented today at the 2015 ARVO Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. The results of the study, led by the National Eye Institute-funded Studies of the Ocular Complications of AIDS Research Group, were also published online in ...

Scientists, conservationists and governments could have a new weapon in their struggle to gauge -- and halt -- the devastation of the wildlife trade on populations of prized animals: the very markets where the animals are bought and sold. Species that are disappearing as a result of the pet trade can be identified by changes in their market prices and trade volumes, a study led by researchers at Princeton University found. The researchers studied open-air pet markets on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and found that bird species that increased in price but decreased ...

Bad news, fans of rational political discourse: A study by an MIT researcher shows that attempts to debunk political rumors may only reinforce their strength. "Rumors are sticky," says Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT, and author of a paper detailing the study. "Corrections are difficult, and in some cases can even make the problem worse." More specifically, Berinsky found in an experiment concerning the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that rebuttals of political rumors about the supposed existence of "death panels" sometimes increased belief in the ...

ANN ARBOR--The main job of pollen is to help seed the next generation of trees and plants, but a new study from the University of Michigan and Texas A&M shows that the grains might also seed clouds. The unexpected findings demonstrate that these wind-carried capsules of genetic material might have an effect on the planet's climate. And they highlight a new link between plants and the atmosphere. Pollen has been largely ignored by atmospheric scientists who study aerosols--particles suspended in the air that scatter light and heat and play a role in cloud formation. "The ...

Since 2014 dulaglutide has been approved alone or in combination with other drugs for the treatment of adults with type 2 diabetes. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether this new drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies. IQWiG found a hint of minor added benefit for the combination with short-acting insulin with or without metformin. In contrast, an added benefit of dulaglutide versus the respective appropriate comparator therapy is not proven for the combination with ...

Studies have long associated low-income areas with poor oral health. But dental researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University of Washington sensed that other factors related to income may be at work -- in particular, education level. So they recently investigated how a parent or other caregiver's education level and dental habits affect children's dental health. With data from 423 low-income African-American kindergarteners and their caregivers from a CWRU dental school study in 2007, researchers tested the hypothesis that a caregiver's education ...

MAYWOOD, IL - Patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can, in rare cases, experience bleeding on the brain that causes a type of stroke called intracerebral hemorrhage. A Loyola University Medical Center case study demonstrates that a virus called varicella-zoster can cause inflammation of blood vessels in the brain. This inflammation, known as cerebral vasculitis, can cause both hemorrhagic and non-hemorrhagic strokes. The study by Daniel Vela Duarte MD, David Pasquale, MD, and senior author Murray Flaster, MD, PhD, was presented during a meeting of ...

Madrid, Spain - 3 May 2015: A new test has been developed to predict sudden cardiac death in hemodialysis patients in whom such forecasts were previously impossible. The novel method was presented at ICNC 12 by Dr Akiyoshi Hashimoto, a cardiologist at Sapporo Medical University in Japan. The test uses a combination of nuclear medicine, C-reactive protein and electrocardiogram (ECG). ICNC is organised by the Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT section of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology ...

HIV-1 replication requires the coordinated movement of the virus's components toward the plasma membrane of an immune cell, where the virions are assembled and ultimately released. A study in The Journal of Cell Biology reveals how a Rab protein that controls intracellular trafficking supports HIV-1 assembly by promoting high levels of an important membrane lipid. New HIV-1 particles assemble at specialized sites in the plasma membrane that are enriched in PIP2, a phospholipid component of the membrane that recruits a viral protein called Pr55Gag (Gag) that directs HIV-1 ...

What do you think is the biggest cause of death for firefighters on duty? Well if your first thought was burns or smoke inhalation you'd be wrong! According to research published in the June edition of Vascular Medicine "since 1977, sudden cardiac death has accounted for the largest share of on-duty deaths among firefighters - surpassing burns, trauma, asphyxiation and smoke inhalation." Although the number of deaths amongst firefighters is declining, cardiac death still counts for 42% of deaths in on-duty firefighters over the past 5 years. This is an astonishingly ...

Even non-professionals may someday be able to create high-quality video panoramas using multiple cameras with the help of an algorithm developed by a team of Disney researchers. Their method smooths out the blurring, ghosting and other distortions that routinely occur when video feeds from unstructured camera arrays are combined to create a single panoramic video. The algorithm corrects for the apparent difference in position of an object caused by different camera angles - known as parallax - and image warping that occurs because of slight timing differences between ...

Madrid, Spain - 4 May 2015: Patients with rheumatoid arthritis are at increased risk of a surprise heart attack, according to new research presented today at ICNC 12 by Dr Adriana Puente, a cardiologist in the National Medical Centre "20 de Noviembre" ISSSTE in Mexico City, Mexico. Risk was increased even when patients had no symptoms and was independent of traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking and diabetes. Dr Puente said: "Our study suggests that one quarter of patients with rheumatoid arthritis and no symptoms of heart disease could have a heart attack ...

New research from the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study shows that exposure to outdoor air pollution during the first year of life increases the risk of developing allergies to food, mould, pets and pests. The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, showed that the sensitivity to allergens was associated with exposure to traffic-related air pollution during infancy. "With the increasing rates of allergies amongst children in Canada and elsewhere, we were interested in determining if air pollution from traffic might ...

Two ocean hot spots have been found to be the potential drivers of the hottest summers on record for the Central US in 1934 and 1936. The research may also help modern forecasters predict particularly hot summers over the central United States many months out. The unusually hot summers of 1934/36 broke heat records that still stand today. They were part of the devastating dust bowl decade in the US when massive dust storms travelled as far as New York, Boston and Atlanta and silt covered the decks of ships 450km off the east coast. Research by Dr Markus Donat from the ...

Doping is damaging the image of sport without benefitting athletes' results, according to University of Adelaide research. Researchers from the University's School of Medical Sciences collated sporting records (including Olympic and world records) of male and female athletes across 26 sports, between 1886 and 2012. Comparisons were made between pre-1932 records (when steroids became available) and post, and it was found that the times, distances and other results did not improve as expected in the doping era. The findings were published in the Journal of Human Sport ...

Australian scientists have shown that a specific gene determines the development and function of important cells that bridge the gap between our fast-acting 'innate', and slower-acting 'adaptive', immune systems. STAT3, as it's known, helps shield us against a variety of fungal and bacterial infections, and understanding its role may help in finding ways to boost our defenses. Most of us barely give our immune system a thought, unless we are struck down by disease, or are born with an immunodeficiency that leaves us susceptible to constant attack. 'Primary immunodeficiencies', ...

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the main component of our genetic material. It is formed by combining four parts: A, C, G and T (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine), called bases of DNA combine in thousands of possible sequences to provide the genetic variability that enables the wealth of aspects and functions of living beings. Two more bases: the Methyl- cytosine and Methyl-adenine In the early 80s, to these four "classic" bases of DNA was added a fifth: the methyl-cytosine (mC) derived from cytosine. And it was in the late 90's when mC was recognized as the main ...

Offshore the Svalbard archipelago, methane gas is seeping out of the seabed at the depths of several hundred meters. These cold seeps are a home to communities of microorganisms that survive in a chemosynthetic environment - where the fuel for life is not the sun, but the carbon rich greenhouse gas. There is a large, and relatively poorly understood, community of methane-consuming bacteria in this environment. They gorge on the gas, control its concentration in the ocean, and stop it from reaching the ocean surface and released into the atmosphere. In the atmosphere ...

A new study shows how pharmacies might collaborate with physicians and families to reduce asthma-related illness. The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study found that pharmacies in neighborhoods with high rates of asthma-related emergency-room use and hospitalization filled fewer asthma controller medications compared to asthma rescue medications. Asthma-related illness is particularly common among people living in poverty or with limited access to medical care. Previous studies have shown that disparities in asthma rates are perpetuated by underuse of ...

As the realities of legalized marijuana take hold in four states and the District of Columbia, legislators and regulators could learn a lot from the successes -- and failures -- of the tobacco and alcohol industries in keeping their harmful products out of the hands of children and adolescents. So say three Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers in a commentary published May 4 in the journal Pediatrics. "The early days of marijuana legalization present a unique window of opportunity to create a regulatory environment that minimizes youth access," ...

A group of Cambridge computer scientists have set a new gold standard for openness and reproducibility in research by sharing the more than 200GB of data and 20,000 lines of code behind their latest results - an unprecedented degree of openness in a peer-reviewed publication. The researchers hope that this new gold standard will be adopted by other fields, increasing the reliability of research results, especially for work which is publicly funded. The researchers are presenting their results at a talk today (4 May) at the 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design ...