Philadelphia - Some at-risk patients opted out of comprehensive cancer gene screening when presented with the opportunity to be tested for the presence of genes linked to various cancers, according to a recent study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Basser Center for BRCA in Penn's Abramson Cancer Center. Concern for uncertainty and potential distress were cited among the most common reasons to refuse testing. The results, published in Genetics in Medicine, were released just weeks ahead of an announcement of ...

Following lifestyle guidelines about diet, physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight is associated with an improved likelihood of survival when diagnosed with bowel cancer. This is based on the findings of a large study of over 500,000 published in the open access journal BMC Medicine. Bowel cancer, also called colorectal cancer, is the second most common cancer in men and the third most common cancer in women worldwide, with 55% cases occurring in developed regions such as North America and Western Europe. Survival rates of bowel cancer have wide variations ...

Fans of The Lord of the Rings may disagree, but when it comes to exquisite excavation, the dwarves of Moria have nothing on the mighty fire ants of Georgia Tech. But Dan Goldman and Michael Goodisman aren't fascinated by the aesthetics of fire ant architecture alone. 'I have an interest in animals interacting with complex materials', explains Goldman, who has studied creatures such as sidewinder snakes and sandfish lizards moving through and across sand. With the ants on their doorstep, Goldman and Goodisman were intrigued to learn more about how the insects work together ...

"It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces", comments SISSA neuroscientist Alessandro Treves, "but it's very likely that our brains could get there long before. In fact, it's likely that the brain of rodents gets there very naturally every day". Treves coordinated a study just published in the journal Interface. Euclidean geometry is the kind of geometry we normally study at school, whereas non-Euclidean geometries are all those that reject one or more of Euclid's five postulates. A geometry that unfolds on a curved ...

New developments in personalised and precision medicine (PPM) could offer enormous gains in healthy life expectancy for Americans, but the incentives to develop them are weak, according to Dr Victor Dzau, President of the US Institute of Medicine, and colleagues [1], writing in a Personal View in The Lancet. PPM tailors medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient, according to their susceptibility to a particular illness. But PPM goes beyond just targeting therapies at individuals who are ill; it includes the ability to identify those at highest ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Surveys of loved ones who lost elderly relatives show that the perception of the quality of care for the dying in the United States has worsened over the last decade. For all the health care industry has done to try to make progress, huge gaps remain between how care is delivered and what patients and their loved ones want, reports a new study in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. "People are less satisfied with care at the close of life, and I think it's now urgent for us to start thinking about what interventions we can do to ...

DALLAS, May 6, 2015 -- People with hemorrhagic strokes (brain bleeds) are more likely to survive if they are treated at a comprehensive stroke center, according to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Hemorrhagic strokes, which account for about 13 percent of all strokes, are caused when a weakened blood vessel in the brain ruptures and bleeds in the surrounding brain. Comprehensive stroke centers typically have the specialists and trained personnel to deal with patients with these ruptures or other types of bleeding in the brain. They ...

Insurance coverage has increased across all types of insurance since the major provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect, with a total of 16.9 million people becoming newly enrolled through February 2015, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Researchers estimate that from September 2013 to February 2015, 22.8 million Americans became newly insured and 5.9 million lost coverage, for a net of 16.9 million newly insured Americans. Among those newly gaining coverage, 9.6 million people enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans, followed by Medicaid ...

Psychologists are to improve online health information on lung cancer after research showed that family members are more likely to search online to encourage loved ones to seek help. This is one of the outcomes from research by PhD student Julia Mueller based in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work at The University of Manchester (part of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre) who will present her study today, Thursday 7 May 2015, at the Annual Conference of the British Psychology Society being held in Liverpool. Julia Mueller said: "People displaying ...

The ulcer-causing bacterium Helicobacter pylori can directly interact with stomach stem cells, causing the cells to divide more rapidly, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The increased cell division was observed in mice, but the findings could explain why H. pylori is a risk factor for gastric cancer in humans, the researchers said. They used 3-D microscopy to identified colonies of the bacteria deep within human stomach glands, where stem cells and precursor cells that replenish the stomach's lining reside. One ...

MADISON, Wis. -- The suspicion that the federal Affordable Care Act reduces options for patients to choose their health care providers proves to be true, according to a new study co-authored by David Weimer, a professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, the quality of hospitals in insurance exchange networks was as good or better than those in commercial insurance networks. The study, just published in the May issue of the journal Health Affairs, compared the hospital networks available to California consumers ...

Creative athletes have been using geographic information systems to transform their running routes into kangaroos, robots and other works of art that they share online, and one romantic cyclist last year even spelled out "Will you marry me, Emily?" with his bike. A new mobile app developed at the University of Washington does the opposite. The Trace app turns a digital sketch that you draw on your smartphone screen -- a heart, maple leaf, raindrop, sailboat -- into a walking route that you can send to a friend or loved one. The recipient of the "gift" tells the app how ...

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have solved a long-standing mystery about the origin of one of the cell types that make up the ovary. The team also discovered how ovarian cells share information during development of an ovarian follicle, which holds the maturing egg. Researchers believe this new information on basic ovarian biology will help them better understand the cause of ovarian disorders, such as premature ovarian failure and polycystic ovarian syndrome, conditions that both result in hormone imbalances and infertility in women. Researchers at the ...

The Alaska salmon fishery is touted as one of the best in the world. When measured with an ecological yardstick, it is - fish stocks are healthy and the fishery is certified by the Marine Stewardship Council as consistently meeting rigorous biological standards. Fish are individually counted as they swim upstream to ensure there are enough to breed. But Alaska salmon falls short and lags behind some of the world's fisheries in how it benefits local fishermen, processing workers and nearby rural communities, according to a new assessment that ranks the vitality of a fishery ...

Diets of snakes from a temperate region in South America may depend more on phylogeny (ancestry) than ecology, according to a study published May 6, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Gisela Bellini from Instituto Nacional de Limnología, Argentina and colleagues. Some scientists believe that the deep history hypothesis based on phylogeny -- the history of evolution, or ancestry and relationships between snakes -- and ecological interactions from the competition-predation hypothesis may act together to determine the structure of snake communities. The authors ...

Post-surgical leaks that develop after a segment of the colon has been removed and stitched back together often are caused not by negligence or technical error but by bacteria in the bowel that elude antibiotics, according to new evidence about this devastating complication of gastrointestinal surgery. Such leaks, which can develop days or weeks after the procedure, allow the bowel's contents to spill into the abdomen and can cause pain, fever, sepsis and even death. In patients undergoing high risk surgery such as in the rectum, leak rates can approach 30 percent. ...

Berkeley -- A research team led by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a new mobile phone microscope that uses video to automatically detect and quantify infection by parasitic worms in a drop of blood. This next generation of UC Berkeley's CellScope technology could help revive efforts to eradicate debilitating diseases in Africa by providing critical information for health providers in the field. "We previously showed that mobile phones can be used for microscopy, but this is the first device that combines the imaging technology with ...

The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a growing problem in the United States and the world. New findings by researchers in evolutionary biology and mathematics could help doctors better address the problem in a clinical setting. Biologist Miriam Barlow of the University of California, Merced, and mathematician Kristina Crona of American University tested and found a way to return bacteria to a pre-resistant state. In research published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, they show how to rewind the evolution of bacteria and verify treatment options for a family ...

Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues have developed a mobile phone microscope to measure blood levels of the parasitic filarial worm Loa loa. The point-of-care device may enable safe resumption of mass drug administration campaigns to eradicate the parasitic diseases onchocerciasis (river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis). Efforts to eliminate these diseases in Central Africa through community-wide administration ...

Just witnessing aggression or other bad behaviour at work can affect our well-being, but the right support from employers and colleagues can limit the consequences. That is the conclusion of research being presented today, Thursday 7 May 2015, by Dr Christine Sprigg from the Institute of Work Psychology at the Sheffield University Management School at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society in Liverpool. Dr Sprigg and her colleagues surveyed 127 British employees who had witnessed aggression at work. Employees were asked to complete a number of psychological ...

Psychologists are to improve online health information on lung cancer after research showed that family members are more likely to search online to encourage loved ones to seek help. This is one of the outcomes from research by PhD student Julia Mueller based in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work at The University of Manchester (part of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre) who will present her study today, Thursday 7 May 2015, at the Annual Conference of the British Psychology Society being held in Liverpool. Julia Mueller said: "People displaying ...

Children are more likely to display troublesome behaviour in families in which the father feels unsupported by his partner. The findings by Doctoral Researcher Rachel Latham from the University of Sussex will be presented today, Thursday 7 May 2015, at the Annual Conference of the British Psychology Society being held in Liverpool. The ways in which parents work together in their roles has been shown to be an important factor in relation to the behaviour of their children. However, few studies have distinguished between mothers' and fathers' perceptions of the support ...

How to protect your chicks from predators? Build a dome over them! There is tremendous diversity among the nests of birds, in nest location, structure, materials, and more, but we know very little about the forces that shaped the evolution of this incredible variety. In a new paper published this week in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, Zachary Hall, Sally Street, Sam Auty, and Susan Healy of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland test the hypothesis that domed-shaped nests arose as a result of some species transitioning to nesting on the ground, where the risk from ...

Viewing violent news events via social media can cause people to experience symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is one of the findings by Dr Pam Ramsden from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bradford that will be presented today, Thursday 7 May 2015, at the Annual Conference of the British Psychology Society being held in Liverpool. Dr Ramsden explained: "The negative effects of exposure to other people's suffering have long been recognised in roles such as professional healthcare workers. Various studies have documented the ...

NEWPORT, Ore. - A new study on the impact of 'drive-hunting' dolphins in the Solomon Islands is casting a spotlight on the increasing vulnerability of small cetaceans around the world. From 1976 to 2013, more than 15,000 dolphins were killed by villagers in Fanalei alone, where a single dolphin tooth can fetch the equivalent of 70 cents ($0.70 U.S.) - an increase in value of five times just in the last decade. Results of the Solomon Islands study are being reported this week online in the new journal, Royal Society Open Science. "In the Solomon Islands, the hunting ...