Egg consumption may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, according to new research from the University of Eastern Finland. The findings were published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Type 2 diabetes is becoming increasingly widespread throughout the world. Research has shown that lifestyle habits, such as exercise and nutrition, play a crucial role in the development of the disease. In some studies, high-cholesterol diets have been associated with disturbances in glucose metabolism and risk of type 2 diabetes. In contrast, in some experimental studies, the consumption ...

An illuminating study compares the willingness of stage IV cancer patients, and their caregivers; to pay to extend their lives by one year against that of other end-of-life improvements. The research, led by members of the Lien Centre for Palliative Care (LCPC) and collaborators from the National Cancer Centre Singapore, was recently published in the journal, Palliative Medicine. Patients with advanced cancer or other life limiting illnesses often have to consider how much money they are willing to spend on high cost treatments that result in only moderate improvements ...

University of Adelaide researchers have shown there are two critical windows during the developmental pathway to adulthood when exposure to junk food is most harmful, particularly for female offspring. This work leads on from earlier findings which showed that mothers who eat junk food while pregnant are programming their babies to be addicted to a high fat, high sugar diet by the time they are weaned. Their latest laboratory studies reveal there may be a chance to turn around this junk food addiction in two critical windows--equating to late pregnancy and in adolescence ...

The use of technology in daily life is getting easier all the time as people accumulate knowledge and skills in information and communications technology. However, the most important thing in developing health care services, for example, is to take into account people's day to day lives and their subjective experience of the utility of using services. For example, people's previous bad experience of using a service is reflected for a long time in their use of the service in the future, and thus the dissemination of new service models is a lot slower than might be imagined. ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study suggests that symptoms of depression and insomnia are the strongest predictors of having frequent nightmares. Results show that 3.9 percent of participants reported having frequent nightmares during the previous 30 days, including 4.8 percent of women and 2.9 percent of men. Frequent nightmares were reported by 28.4 percent of participants with severe depressive symptoms and 17.1 percent of those with frequent insomnia. Further analysis that adjusted for potential confounders found that the strongest independent risk factors for nightmares were ...

Bethesda, MD (April 2, 2015) -- Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), the more severe form of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) that can progress to liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, is associated with leakiness of the intestinal wall, which in turn may worsen liver disease, according to research1 published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the new basic science journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. "Our study strengthens the clinical association between intestinal permeability and NASH, although we were unable to identify ...

Accurate blood pressure measurement (BP) is fundamental to the early diagnosis of hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, says a review published 1 April, 2015, in The Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (TOG). The diagnosis and management of hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, as well as obstetric haemorrhage, sepsis and safe abortion, are guided in part by the measurement of BP. These conditions contribute to more than half of all maternal deaths globally, so the accuracy of BP measurement is vital, the review concludes. The review explains that BP monitoring is the most ...

BATON ROUGE - LSU Psychology Professor Megan H. Papesh was part of a research team whose study appeared in the online-first edition of the Journal of Neuroscience on Wednesday, April 1. The research, jointly conducted by scientists from the Barrow Neurological Institute and Arizona State University, involves recording single-neuron activity in the brains of epilepsy patients who require electrodes implanted to monitor seizures. With the electrodes in place, processes such as perception and memory can be studied at the level of individual neurons. The research focused ...

As man-made threats to coral reefs mount and interest in conserving reef ecosystems grows, scientists have turned to studying extremely remote and uninhabited reefs in an effort to understand what coral reefs would be like in the absence of humans. A number of islands and atolls in the Pacific Ocean remain virtually untouched by human influence, situated hundreds of kilometers from the nearest human populations. A study published today by scientists at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UHM) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), the National ...

MADISON, Wis. - Clearing grasslands to make way for biofuels may seem counterproductive, but University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers show in a study today (April 2, 2015) that crops, including the corn and soy commonly used for biofuels, expanded onto 7 million acres of new land in the U.S. over a recent four-year period, replacing millions of acres of grasslands. The study -- from UW-Madison graduate student Tyler Lark, geography Professor Holly Gibbs, and postdoctoral researcher Meghan Salmon -- is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters and addresses ...

Use of a class of insecticides, called neonicotinoids, increased dramatically in the mid-2000s and was driven almost entirely by the use of corn and soybean seeds treated with the pesticides, according to researchers at Penn State. "Previous studies suggested that the percentage of corn acres treated with insecticides decreased during the 2000s, but once we took seed treatments into account we found the opposite pattern," said Margaret Douglas, graduate student in entomology. "Our results show that application of neonicotinoids to seed of corn and soybeans has driven ...

Delving into the world of the extremely small, researchers are exploring how biodegradable nanoparticles can precisely deliver anticancer drugs to attack neuroblastoma, an often-deadly children's cancer. By bringing together experts in pediatric oncology with experts in nanotechnology, researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia aim to thread the needle of delivering effective doses of cancer-killing agents while avoiding toxicity in healthy tissues. The team's new research shows that this approach inhibits tumor growth and markedly prolongs survival in animal ...

DENVER - Exercise and physical activity should be considered as therapeutic options for lung cancer as they have been shown to reduce symptoms, increase exercise tolerance, improve quality of life, and potentially reduce length of hospital stay and complications following surgery for lung cancer. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States with an estimated 160,000 deaths each year and worldwide there are 1.4 million deaths. In the last two decades lung cancer therapy has improved, but the overall 5-year survival rate is still quite low at 17%. ...

A particular molecular pathway permits stem cells in pediatric bone cancers to grow rapidly and aggressively, according to researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center. In normal cell growth, the Hippo pathway, which controls organ size in animals, works as a dam, regulating cell proliferation. What the researchers found is that the transcription factor of a DNA binding protein called sex determining region Y box 2, or Sox2 for short, which normally maintains cell self-renewal, actually releases the floodgates in the Hippo ...

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (April 2, 2015) - No home is perfect, but dysfunction in the home is now revealed to be especially dangerous for children at risk for asthma. A new study shows that children exposed to just one adverse childhood experience (ACE) had a 28 percent increased chance of developing asthma than those with no ACEs. The study, published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the scientific publication of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), used data from the National Survey of Children's Health. The survey drew from ...

Globally, residential development is a leading driver of natural resource consumption, native species decline and fossil fuel emissions. Today, residential development covers one out of every four acres of the land in the United States, and is predicted to more than double by 2100. In many communities, local governments and planners are adopting sustainable development practices to address residential development impacts on human well-being and the environment. These sustainable development practices include considerations of a healthy environment, a robust economy, ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Unlike some conditions, heart failure must be managed by patients taking prescriptions for the rest of their lives. Individuals who do not take their heart medication as prescribed have increased risks of mortality and hospitalization and higher health care costs. Numerous interventions have been designed to increase patients' adherence to medications; yet, no research has determined what intervention techniques are most effective. Now, a University of Missouri researcher found that interventions to encourage patients to take their medications as prescribed ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue researchers have identified a new class of chemical insecticides that could provide a safer, more selective means of controlling mosquitoes that transmit key infectious diseases such as dengue, yellow fever and elephantiasis. Known as dopamine receptor antagonists, the chemicals beat out the neurotransmitter dopamine to lock into protein receptors that span the mosquito cell membrane. Disrupting the mechanics of dopamine - which plays important roles in cell signaling, movement, development and complex behaviors - eventually leads to the ...

The snow is almost gone in the northeast and that means baseball season cannot be far behind. Like most seasons, some teams look like they will continue to dominate their competition while others may spring some surprises. This is the 18th year that NJIT Mathematical Sciences Professor and Associate Dean Bruce Bukiet has published his model's projections of how the standings should look at the end of the regular season. Over the years, Bukiet has applied mathematical analysis to compute the number of regular season games each Major League Baseball team should win. Though ...

WASHINGTON - In the workplace, age matters - but hiring or promoting based on age-related mental abilities can be a minefield, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. Older executives bring valuable skills to the job, such as higher "crystallized intelligence," which includes verbal ability and knowledge born of experience, according to a study published in APA's Journal of Applied Psychology. But compared with their younger counterparts, older executives show marked declines in "fluid intelligence," which involves the ability to ...

WORCESTER, MA - A novel molecule designed by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Virginia inhibits progression of a hard-to-treat form of recurring acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in patient tissue. The small molecule is one of the first designed to specifically target a cancer-causing transcription factor. Previously thought to be an undruggable target, this strategy may be used to design other novel molecules that can specifically inhibit cancer-causing transcription factors. Details of the work were published in Science. Transcription ...

The tobacco industry and regulatory authorities should support more relevant and less costly in vitro toxicology testing methods over unreliable animal testing, according to a review of research advances published this week in the comment pages of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Alternatives to Laboratory Animals The article by researchers from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) comes as the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee prepares to evaluate ...

Philadelphia, PA, April 1, 2015 - The rapid rise in popularity of energy drinks (EDs), particularly among adolescents (aged 10-19 years) and young adults, has serious implications for cardiac health. In an article published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, researchers focus on the pharmacology of EDs, adverse reactions to them, and how the marketing of these drinks as a means to relieve fatigue and improve physical and cognitive performance may be ignoring real dangers. An international research team led by Fabian Sanchis-Gomar, PhD, MD, of the Research Institute ...

While research shows that nearly all coral reef locations in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico will experience bleaching by mid-century, a new study showing in detail when and where bleaching will occur shows great variety in the timing and location of these harmful effects. The new research published today in Global Change Biology by NOAA scientists and colleagues provides the first fine-scale projections of coral bleaching, an important planning tool for managers. "Our new local-scale projections will help resource managers better understand and plan for the effects ...

A new genomic analysis of tissue from patients with prostate cancer has added more evidence that cells within metastases from such tumors can migrate to other body parts and form new sites of spread on their own. Results of the analysis undermine anew long-held beliefs that cells with metastatic potential originate solely from the original or primary site of a cancer, according to the scientists who performed the study. "The idea that metastatic tumors can seed and establish other metastatic tumors in patients is different from traditional theories that the primary ...