Ann Arbor, Mich. -- Adults who undergo a minimally invasive technique to treat atrial fibrillation are significantly less likely to die from a heart attack or heart failure, according to a long-term study by the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center. More than 4 million people have atrial fibrillation, an age-related heart rhythm disorder that can cause a fluttering sensation in the chest and impair the heart's ability to pump blood. The study published in Heart Rhythm shows cardiovascular mortality dropped by 60 percent among adults who had their normal ...

Earth and Mercury are both rocky planets with iron cores, but Mercury's interior differs from Earth's in a way that explains why the planet has such a bizarre magnetic field, UCLA planetary physicists and colleagues report. Measurements from NASA's Messenger spacecraft have revealed that Mercury's magnetic field is approximately three times stronger at its northern hemisphere than its southern one. In the current research, scientists led by Hao Cao, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar working in the laboratory of Christopher T. Russell, created a model to show how the dynamics ...

Wallerian degeneration is a subject of major interest in neuroscience. A large number of genes are differentially regulated during the distinct stages of Wallerian degeneration: transcription factor activation, immune response, myelin cell differentiation and dedifferentiation. Although gene expression responses in the distal segment of the sciatic nerve after peripheral nerve injury are known, differences in gene expression between the proximal and distal segments remain unclear. Dr. Dengbing Yao and co-workers from Nantong University, China used microarrays to analyze ...

The use of iodine-125 (125I) in cancer treatment has been shown to relieve patients' pain. Considering dorsal root ganglia are critical for neural transmission between the peripheral and central nervous systems, Dr. Tengda Zhang and colleagues from Institute of Radiation Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, China assumed that 125I could be implanted into rat dorsal root ganglia (DRG) to provide relief for neuropathic pain. 125I seeds with different radioactivity (0, 14.8, 29.6 MBq) were implanted separately into the vicinity of the L5 DRG. Experimental results ...

Progress in developing robust therapies for spinal cord injury (SCI), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and peripheral nerve injury has been slow. A great deal has been learned over the past 30 years regarding both the intrinsic factors and the environmental factors that regulate axon growth, but this large body of information has not yet resulted in clinically available therapeutics. Prof. Lemmon and his team from University of Miami in USA proposed this therapeutic bottleneck has many root causes, but a consensus is emerging that one contributing factor is a lack of standards ...

Between 3 and 6% of schoolchildren suffer from an arithmetic-related learning disability. Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich now show that these children are also more likely to exhibit deficits in reading and spelling than had been previously suspected. Addition and subtraction, multiplication and division are the four basic operations in arithmetic. But for some children, learning these fundamental skills is particularly challenging. Studies show that they have problems grasping the concepts of number, magnitude, and quantity, and that they ...

Nearly one in every twenty elderly American adults is being financially exploited – often by their own family members. This burgeoning public health crisis especially affects poor and black people. It merits the scrutiny of clinicians, policy makers, researchers, and any citizen who cares about the dignity and well-being of older Americans, says Dr. Janey Peterson of Weill Cornell Medical College in the US. She led one of the largest American studies¹ ever on elder abuse, the findings of which appear in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer. With ...

Embryonic stem cells can develop into a multitude of cells types. Researchers would like to understand how to channel that development into the specific types of mature cells that make up the organs and other structures of living organisms. One key seems to be long chains of sugars that dangle from proteins on surfaces of cells. Kamil Godula's group at the University of California, San Diego, has created synthetic molecules that can stand in for the natural sugars, but can be more easily manipulated to direct the process, they report in the Journal of the American ...

Washington, DC—Today scientists unveiled the first high-resolution map of the carbon stocks stored on land throughout the entire country of Perú. The new and improved methodology used to make the map marks a sea change for future market-based carbon economies. The new carbon map also reveals Perú's extremely high ecological diversity and it provides the critical input to studies of deforestation and forest degradation for conservation, land use, and enforcement purposes. The technique includes the determination of uncertainty of carbon stores throughout the country, which ...

Scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago have synthesized a catalyst that improves their system for converting waste carbon dioxide into syngas, a precursor of gasoline and other energy-rich products, bringing the process closer to commercial viability. Amin Salehi-Khojin, UIC professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, and his coworkers developed a unique two-step catalytic process that uses molybdenum disulfide and an ionic liquid to "reduce," or transfer electrons, to carbon dioxide in a chemical reaction. The new catalyst improves efficiency and ...

Spintronics is an emerging field of electronics, where devices work by manipulating the spin of electrons rather than the current generated by their motion. This field can offer significant advantages to computer technology. Controlling electron spin can be achieved with materials called 'topological insulators', which conduct electrons only across their surface but not through their interior. One such material, samarium hexaboride (SmB6), has long been theorized to be an ideal and robust topological insulator, but this has never been shown practically. Publishing in Nature ...

In a paper published online today in the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature, Northeastern researchers Evan Kodra and Auroop Ganguly found that while global temperature is indeed increasing, so too is the variability in temperature extremes. For instance, while each year's average hottest and coldest temperatures will likely rise, those averages will also tend to fall within a wider range of potential high and low temperate extremes than are currently being observed. This means that even as overall temperatures rise, we may still continue to experience extreme ...

Johns Hopkins researchers say they have discovered a chemical alteration in a single human gene linked to stress reactions that, if confirmed in larger studies, could give doctors a simple blood test to reliably predict a person's risk of attempting suicide. The discovery, described online in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that changes in a gene involved in the function of the brain's response to stress hormones plays a significant role in turning what might otherwise be an unremarkable reaction to the strain of everyday life into suicidal thoughts and behaviors. "Suicide ...

PHILADELPHIA – Use of electroacupuncture (EA) – a form of acupuncture where a small electric current is passed between pairs of acupuncture needles – produces significant improvements in fatigue, anxiety and depression in as little as eight weeks for early stage breast cancer patients experiencing joint pain related to the use of aromatase inhibitors (AIs) to treat breast cancer. The results of a randomized, placebo-controlled trial examining the intervention led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are published online this ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (Wednesday, July 30, 2014)—A diet rich in soy may help feminine hearts, but timing matters, finds a new study published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society. Lifelong soy consumption, similar to the diet of women in Asia, produces the least atherosclerosis. Switching to a Western diet after menopause, similar to Asian migrants to North America, leads to just as much atherosclerosis as a lifelong Western diet, and switching to soy from a Western diet after menopause helps only if there isn't much atherosclerosis ...

Finland's love of milk has been traced back to 2500 BC thanks to high-tech techniques to analyse residues preserved in fragments of ancient pots. The Finns are the world's biggest milk drinkers today but experts had previously been unable to establish whether prehistoric dairy farming was possible in the harsh environment that far north, where there is snow for up to four months a year. Research by the Universities of Bristol and Helsinki, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B today [30 July], is the first of its kind to identify that dairying took place at ...

TORONTO -- Eating tree nuts appears to help reduce two of the five markers for metabolic syndrome, a group of factors that raise the risk for heart disease and other health problems such as diabetes and strokes, a new research paper says. The paper found a "modest decrease" in blood fats known as triglycerides and blood sugars among people who added tree nuts to their diets compared to those who ate a control diet. The paper, by Dr. John Sievenpiper, a physician and researcher in the Clinical Nutrition and Risk Factor Modification Centre of St. Michael's Hospital, was ...

The Milky Way is smaller than astronomers previously thought, according to new research. For the first time, scientists have been able to precisely measure the mass of the galaxy that contains our solar system. Researchers have found that the Milky Way is approximately half the weight of a neighbouring galaxy – known as Andromeda – which has a similar structure to our own. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the two largest in a region of galaxies which astronomers call the Local Group. Scientists say that Andromeda's extra weight must be present in the form of ...

A 'kitemark' that identifies randomized-controlled trials reviewed by specially trained peer reviewers would improve public trust in the robustness of clinical trials, according to an opinion piece in the open access journal BMC Medicine. Jigisha Patel, BioMed Central's Medical Editor argues that peer review should be recognized as a professional skill in the clinical medical field. The article was openly peer reviewed and the reports published alongside, as is the case for all BMC Medicine articles. Peer review and its effectiveness is the subject of much heated debate ...

Astronomers at the University of British Columbia have collaborated with international researchers to calculate the precise mass of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, dispelling the notion that the two galaxies have similar masses. While it was previously thought that the two galaxies weighed the same because of their similar size and structure, researchers found that neighboring Andromeda is about twice as heavy as our own Milky Way. "Most of the weight of these galaxies is present in the form of invisible dark matter," says Yin-Zhe Ma, a postdoctoral fellow in ...

PITTSBURGH—Does the Milky Way look fat in this picture? Has Andromeda been taking skinny selfies? It turns out the way some astrophysicists have been studying our galaxy made it appear that the Milky Way might be more massive than it's neighbor down the street, Andromeda. Not true, says a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by an international group of researchers, including Matthew Walker of Carnegie Mellon University's McWilliams Center for Cosmology. In the paper, they demonstrate a new, more accurate method for measuring ...

These results conflict with a recent study published in BMJ's Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health suggesting that seven or more daily portions of fruits and vegetables were linked to lowest risk of death. There is growing evidence that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption is related to a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer. However, the results are not entirely consistent. So a team of researchers based in China and the United States decided to examine the association between fruit and vegetable intake and risk of all-cause, cardiovascular, ...

Folate is a naturally occurring form of vitamin B found in food, while folic acid is synthetically produced and used in fortified foods and supplements. It is well known that taking folic acid before and during early pregnancy reduces the risk of neural tube defects like spina bifida. The current recommended dose is 400 ìg (micrograms) a day, but it is still not clear exactly how much daily folic acid is needed to prevent neural tube defects. A previous study carried out in Ireland showed the risk of a having a child with a neural tube defect increased as red blood ...

Gillian Prue, from the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Queen's University of Belfast, says that the human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is common in men and can lead to genital warts and the development of some head and neck, anal or penile cancers. She says incidence of this has increased in the past two decades with HPV causing 5% of all human cancers. Since September 2008 a free vaccination has been available for 12-13 year old girls in the UK with a catch up programme for girls up to age 18. Australia, the US, Austria and parts of Canada have introduced a vaccination ...

A study published today [Weds July 30] in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry indicates that middle-aged adults with a history of problem drinking are more than twice as likely to suffer from severe memory impairment in later life. The study highlights the hitherto largely unknown link between harmful patterns of alcohol consumption and problems with memory later in life – problems which may place people at a high risk of developing dementia. The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Exeter Medical School with support from the NIHR Collaboration ...