In the central nervous system, serotonergic transmission is critically regulated by serotonin reuptake through the serotonin transporter. As a crucial pharmacological target of antidepressants, the role of erotonin transporter in treatment of major depression is well-established. Dr. Chaokun Li and co-workers from Xinxiang Medical University in China cloned the human brain serotonin transporter into Xenopus oocytes, to establish an in vitro expression system. Two-electrode voltage clamp recordings were used to detect serotonin transporter activity. Their results show that ...

Epinephrine has been shown to be a first-choice drug for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Nevertheless, its β-adrenergic effect probably increases myocardial oxygen consumption and leads to severe cardiac and cerebral injuries; moreover, epinephrine does not elevate long-term survival rates. The American Heart Association and the European Resuscitation Council recently recommended that vasopressin can be used for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, instead of epinephrine. However, the guidelines do not discuss the effects of vasopressin during cerebral resuscitation. According ...

When repairing nerves with adhesives, most researchers place glue directly on the nerve stumps, but this method does not fix the nerve ends well and allows glue to easily invade the nerve ends. Ordinarily, nerve conduits are cylindrical. However, it is difficult to insert the nerve ends into the conduit because the nerve is soft and there is frictional resistance. Xiangdang Liang and co-workers from the General Hospital of Chinese PLA designed a special conduit for the adhesive technique and defined the best parameters for its use through in vitro testing, and then repaired ...

The result of every possible measurement on a quantum system is coded in its wave function, which until recently could be found only by taking many different measurements of a system and estimating a wave function that best fit all those measurements. Just two years ago, with the advent of a technique called direct measurement, scientists discovered they could reliably determine a system's wave function by "weakly" measuring one of its variables (e.g. position) and "strongly" measuring a complementary variable (momentum). Researchers at the University of Rochester have ...

WASHINGTON, August 28, 2014 — Works of art can take years to create and just seconds to deface. It happened to Mark Rothko's "Black on Maroon" while on display at the Tate Modern gallery in London in 2012. A vandal tagged the painting, landing him two years in jail. Restoration experts teamed up with Dow Chemical to create a cleanser that would get rid of the graffiti and leave the art intact. Learn all about it in this episode of Speaking of Chemistry. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGR_AxXdSk0 . INFORMATION: Speaking of Chemistry is a production ...

Parents have long told their children to mind their Ps and Qs, and remember to say thank you. Now the evidence is in on why it matters. A UNSW Australia-led study has shown for the first time that thanking a new acquaintance for their help makes them more likely to seek an ongoing social relationship with you. "Saying thank you provides a valuable signal that you are someone with whom a high quality relationship could be formed," says UNSW psychologist Dr Lisa Williams, who conducted the research with Dr Monica Bartlett of Gonzaga University in the US. The study, to ...

Human articular cartilage defects can be treated with nasal septum cells. Researchers at the University and the University Hospital of Basel report that cells taken from the nasal septum are able to adapt to the environment of the knee joint and can thus repair articular cartilage defects. The nasal cartilage cells' ability to self-renew and adapt to the joint environment is associated with the expression of so-called HOX genes. The scientific journal Science Translational Medicine has published the research results together with the report of the first treated patients. ...

Bethesda, MD (Aug. 28, 2014) — A subset of patients with stage III colon cancer had improved survival rates when treated with irinotecan-based therapy, according to a new study in Gastroenterology1, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. When added to the standard chemotherapy treatment — fluorouracil and leucovorin — adjuvant irinotecan therapy improved overall survival rates for patients with the CpG island methylator phenotype (CIMP). CIMP is seen in about 10 to 20 percent of colorectal cancers. Patients with CIMP-negative tumors, however, ...

Are political speeches manipulative and strategic? They could be – when politicians say one thing in public, and privately believe something else, political scientists say. Saddam Hussein's legacy of recording private discussions offers researchers a fascinating insight: both into the consistency of this controversial leader's public and private rhetoric and into the bigger picture of conflict and national security during his regime. New research into the similarity between political leaders' public statements and private beliefs, using Saddam Hussein's transcripts, appeared ...

OTTAWA, August 28, 2014 – One in every 200 Ontarians has been diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with the number of people living with the disease increasing by 64 per cent between 1999 and 2008, according to a study by researchers at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), and the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. That puts Ontario in the 90th percentile for IBD prevalence in the world. The study, published this week in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, is the first and largest Canadian study ...

People aged 70 and over who identify themselves as 'old' feel worse about their own health in societies where they perceive they have lower value than younger age groups. New research from psychologists at the University of Kent, titled 'Being old and ill' across different countries: social status, age identification and older people's subjective health, used data from the European Social Survey. Respondents, who were all aged 70 and over, were asked to self-rate their health. The researchers found that those living in societies where older people have lower status were ...

Twenty seven per cent of rheumatoid arthritis patients in the study who were on a class of drugs known as anti-TNF therapies did not take them as prescribed in the first six months. Patients from Manchester Royal Infirmary were among those from 60 hospitals around the UK involved in the study. Researchers from the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Genetics and Genomics at The University of Manchester, who led the study, warned that failure to take the drugs correctly, known as 'non-adherence', reduced their effectiveness and may lead to a worsening of patients' disease. ...

Manchester scientists are working out how to safely increase the radiotherapy dose given to lung cancer patients – potentially offering improved local control and survival. Standard treatment for locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer is a combination of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Traditionally this is planned in a one-size-fits-all manner but the radiation dose may not always be enough to stop tumour growth. The potential to increase the radiation dose to the cancerous tissue varies between patients and depends on the size and location of the tumour in relation ...

Philadelphia, PA, August 28, 2014 – Dyslexia, the most commonly diagnosed learning disability in the United States, is a neurological reading disability that occurs when the regions of the brain that process written language don't function normally. The use of non-invasive functional neuroimaging tools has helped characterize how brain activity is disrupted in dyslexia. However, most prior work has focused on only a small number of brain regions, leaving a gap in our understanding of how multiple brain regions communicate with one another through networks, called functional ...

More than 25 million kilometres of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050. Many of these roads will slice into Earth's last wildernesses, where they bring an influx of destructive loggers, hunters and illegal miners. Now, an ambitious study has created a 'global roadmap' for prioritising road building across the planet, to try to balance the competing demands of development and environmental protection. The map has two components: an 'environmental-values' layer that estimates that natural importance of ecosystems and a 'road-benefits' layer that estimates the potential ...

This news release is available in German. Cars, planes and many electronic products are now built with the help of sophisticated assembly lines. Mobile assembly carriers, on to which the objects are fixed, are an important part of these assembly lines. In the case of a car body, the assembly components are attached in various work stages arranged in a precise spatial and chronological sequence, resulting in a complete vehicle at the end of the line. The creation of such an assembly line at molecular level has been a long-held dream of many nanoscientists. "It would ...

Biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have assigned a number of 435-million-year-old fossils to a new genus of predatory arthropods. These animals lived in shallow marine habitats and were far less eye-catching than related forms found in Jurassic strata. Before they sank to the bottom of their shallow marine habitat and were fossilized some 435 million years ago, these arthropods preyed on other denizens of the Silurian seas – although they were not exactly inconspicuous, possessing a bivalved carapace and multiple abdominal limbs. A group of ...

Breast cancer can be classified into ten different subtypes, and scientists have developed a tool to identify which is which. The research, published in the journal Genome Biology, could improve treatments and targeting of treatments for the disease. Cancer arises due to genetic changes which cause normal cells to develop into tumors. As we learn more about breast cancer, we are seeing that it is not one single disease – the mutations in the genes that cause different cancers are not alike, and this is why tumors respond differently to treatment and grow at different ...

Many of the world's most important crop-producing countries will be fully saturated with pests by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a new study led by the University of Exeter. More than one-in-ten pest types can already be found in around half the countries that grow their host crops. If this spread advances at its current rate, scientists fear that a significant proportion of global crop-producing countries will be overwhelmed by pests within the next 30 years. Crop pests include fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects, nematodes, viroids ...

Three papers published in The Lancet Psychiatry, The Lancet, and The Lancet Oncology reveal that around three-quarters of cancer patients who have major depression are not currently receiving treatment for depression, and that a new integrated treatment programme is strikingly more effective at reducing depression and improving quality of life than current care. An analysis of data from more than 21 000 patients attending cancer clinics in Scotland, UK, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, found that major depression is substantially more common in cancer patients than ...

Hamilton, ON (August 27, 2014) – Keeping a healthy heart may have as much to do with the quality of health care you have available as it does you avoiding risk factors such as smoking, bad diet and little exercise. A large international study led by researchers at the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences has found a that low-income countries which have people with the lowest risk factors for cardiovascular problems have the highest rates of cardiovascular events and death, while the high-income countries of people with ...

MINNEAPOLIS – A new treatment under investigation for multiple sclerosis (MS) is safe and tolerable in phase I clinical trials, according to a study published August 27, 2014, in Neurology® Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation, a new online-only, freely accessible, specialty medical journal. The publication is part of the Neurology® family of journals, published by the American Academy of Neurology. The phase I studies were the first to test the drug candidate in humans. Studies with animals showed that the drug, which is called anti-LINGO-1, or BIIB033, may be able to ...

Bottom Line: A multidisciplinary program (called a "bundle") that spanned the phases of perioperative care helped reduce surgical site infections (SSIs) in patients undergoing colorectal surgery (CRS) at an academic medical center. Author: Jeffrey E. Keenan, M.D., of the Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C., and colleagues. Background: SSIs are associated with increased complications, length of hospital stay, readmission rates and health care costs. Efforts that have used systematic approaches, called bundles, that aim to incorporate best practices across the ...

Bottom Line: Photodynamic therapy (PDT, which uses topical agents and light to kill tissue) appears to better clear actinic keratoses (AKs, a common skin lesion caused by sun damage) at three months after treatment than cryotherapy (which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze lesions). Author: Gayatri Patel, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of California Davis Medical Center, in Sacramento, and colleagues. Background: AKs are rough, scaly lesions on the skin typically found on individuals with fair complexions who have had lots of sun exposure. The lesions have the potential ...

Bottom Line: Cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) levels of β-amyloid 42(Aβ42) are associated with the diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD) and (Aβ) accumulation in the brain independent of apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene makeup. Authors: Ronald Lautner, M.D., of Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden, and colleagues. Background: With the emergence of biomarker dementia diagnostics, interest in CSF biomarkers associated with AD, including Aβ42 and tau proteins, is increasing. The APOE gene is the most prominent susceptibility gene for late-onset AD. For the ...