Heart attack patients could be treated more quickly after Manchester research Clinical judgement, combined with an electrocardiogram (ECG) and blood test on arrival, is effective in reducing unnecessary hospital admissions for chest pain, a new study shows. The findings of a research group in Manchester, published in the Emergency Medicine Journal, could potentially make a huge difference to a large number of patients. Chest pain is the most common reason for emergency hospital admission. In Manchester, the incidence of premature death due to heart disease and stroke ...

PITTSBURGH -- The routine use of a molecular testing panel developed at UPMC greatly increases the likelihood of performing the correct initial surgery for patients with thyroid nodules and cancer, report researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI), partner with UPMC CancerCenter. The test, available at the UPMC/UPCI Multidisciplinary Thyroid Center and other diagnostic testing agencies, improved the chances of patients getting the correct initial surgery by 30 percent, according to the study published this month in the Annals of Surgery. "Before ...

Today, nearly 700,000 people in the U.S. are living with a brain tumor, and yet, when it comes to pinpointing causes or risk factors, scientists are still searching for answers. "Right now, we don't know who, we don't know when, and we don't know why people develop brain tumors," said Elizabeth M. Wilson, MNA, President and CEO, American Brain Tumor Association. "It's frustrating for the brain tumor community, and it's why the American Brain Tumor Association funds research to pursue answers to these questions, and it's why we host this national conference to provide ...

The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), the leading pan-European association representing medical oncology professionals, has expressed concern that the proposed EU General Data Protection Regulation [1] could make cancer research impossible and add a significant burden to both doctors and cancer patients. The proposed wording of the regulation [2] stipulates 'explicit and specific patient consent', meaning that researchers would have to approach patients every single time research is planned in order to consult their data or use tissue samples stored for research ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended computerized tomography (CT) lung screening for people at high risk for cancer, but a potential problem with CT is that many patients will have positive results on the screening test, only to be deemed cancer-free on further testing. Many policymakers have expressed concern that this high false-positive rate will cause patients to become needlessly upset. A new study of National Lung Screening Trial participant responses to false positive diagnoses, however, finds that those ...

PHILADELPHIA — For rats bearing human breast tumors, exposure to dim light at night made the tumors resistant to the breast cancer drug tamoxifen, according to data published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. The negative effects of dim light exposure on tamoxifen treatment were overcome by giving rats a melatonin supplement during the night. "Resistance to tamoxifen is a growing problem among patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer," said Steven M. Hill, PhD, professor of structural and cellular biology and the ...

Exposure to light at night, which shuts off nighttime production of the hormone melatonin, renders breast cancer completely resistant to tamoxifen, a widely used breast cancer drug, says a new study by Tulane University School of Medicine cancer researchers. The study, "Circadian and Melatonin Disruption by Exposure to Light at Night Drives Intrinsic Resistance to Tamoxifen Therapy in Breast Cancer," published in the journal Cancer Research, is the first to show that melatonin is vital to the success of tamoxifen in treating breast cancer. Principal investigators and ...

New York, NY - July 24, 2014 -- Keryx Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq:KERX) (the "Company") announced the publication of results from the long-term, randomized, active control Phase 3 study of Zerenex (ferric citrate), the Company's investigational oral ferric iron-based phosphate binder, for the treatment of hyperphosphatemia in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) on dialysis. The PERFECTED study (PhosphatE binding and iRon delivery with FErric CiTrate in EsrD) was published online today in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). This Phase ...

MIAMI – A new study suggests that Saharan dust played a major role in the formation of the Bahamas islands. Researchers from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science showed that iron-rich Saharan dust provides the nutrients necessary for specialized bacteria to produce the island chain's carbonate-based foundation. UM Rosenstiel School Lewis G. Weeks Professor Peter Swart and colleagues analyzed the concentrations of two trace elements characteristic of atmospheric dust – iron and manganese – in 270 seafloor samples collected along ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Primary care treatment of overweight and obese preschoolers works better when treatment targets both parent and child compared to when only the child is targeted, according to research published this week in Pediatrics and conducted at the University at Buffalo and Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo. Children enrolled in this study were overweight or obese and had one parent who participated in the study who also was overweight or obese, according to body mass index (BMI) measurements, calculated based on height and weight. During the course of the ...

NEW YORK, NY (July 24, 2014) – Scientists at The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute are one step closer to creating a viable cell replacement therapy for multiple sclerosis from a patient's own cells. For the first time, NYSCF scientists generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells lines from skin samples of patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis and further, they developed an accelerated protocol to induce these stem cells into becoming oligodendrocytes, the myelin-forming cells of the central nervous system implicated in multiple ...

Bushmeat, the use of native animal species for food or commercial food sale, has been heavily documented to be a significant factor in the decline of many species of primates and other mammals. However, a new study indicates that more than half of the species being consumed are birds, particularly large birds like raptors and hornbills. "By surveying not only the meat made available for sale but the meat that is being eaten inside the forest by hunters and brought to villages for consumption, we noted a significant percentage attributed to bird species," said Bethan ...

Citing many sobering examples of how wildlife loss leads to conflict among people around the world, a new article co-authored by Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Health & Ecosystems: Analysis of Linkages (HEAL) Program Director Dr. Christopher Golden, calls for an interdisciplinary approach to tackle global biodiversity decline. The harvest of wild animals directly supports about 15% of the world's people and provides protein for more than a billion of the world's poor. It should come as no surprise that today's unprecedented loss of wildlife, is bringing with it ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have gone looking for water vapor in the atmospheres of three planets orbiting stars similar to the sun -- and have come up nearly dry. The three planets, known as HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b, are between 60 and 900 light-years away from Earth and were thought to be ideal candidates for detecting water vapor in their atmospheres because of their high temperatures where water turns into a measurable vapor. These so-called "hot Jupiters" are so close to their star they have temperatures between 1,500 and 4,000 degrees ...

A sake brewery has its own microbial terroir, meaning the microbial populations found on surfaces in the facility resemble those found in the product, creating the final flavor according to research published ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. This is the first time investigators have taken a microbial census of a sake brewery. Many sake makers inoculate with both bacteria and yeast, says corresponding author David A. Mills of the University of California, Davis, but he and his colleagues investigated a sake brewery where inoculation ...

MADISON — A multi-institutional team of researchers has developed a new nanoscale agent for imaging the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. This safe, noninvasive method for assessing the function and properties of the GI tract in real time could lead to better diagnosis and treatment of gut diseases. Illnesses such as small bowel bacterial overgrowth, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease all occur in the intestine and can lead to serious side effects in patients with diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's. Until now, there hasn't been a good way to ...

People choosing between two or more equally positive outcomes experience paradoxical feelings of pleasure and anxiety, feelings associated with activity in different regions of the brain, according to research led by Amitai Shenhav, an associate research scholar at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. In one experiment, 42 people rated the desirability of more than 300 products using an auction-like procedure. Then they looked at images of paired products with different or similar values and were asked to choose between them. Their brain activity ...

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — July 24, 2014 — A new study led by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) provides insights into the interplay among bacteria, viruses and the immune system during HIV infection. Currently, doctors measure HIV-positive men's infectivity — their potential to infect others — based on their blood viral load. However, some men produce large amounts of virus in their semen despite having low levels in their blood. Researchers call this "compartmentalization," where different levels of the virus can be found in different parts of the body; in ...

Irvine, Calif., July 24, 2014 — A new study by University of California, Irvine and NASA scientists finds more than 75 percent of the water loss in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin since late 2004 came from underground resources. The extent of groundwater loss may pose a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought. This study is the first to quantify the amount that groundwater contributes to the water needs of western states. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water management agency, the basin ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., July 24, 2014 -- A novel combination of microscopy and data processing has given researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory an unprecedented look at the surface of a material known for its unusual physical and electrochemical properties. The research team led by ORNL's Zheng Gai examined how oxygen affects the surface of a perovskite manganite, a complex material that exhibits dramatic magnetic and electronic behavior. The new avenue to understand surface behavior could benefit researchers who are interested in using a wide ...

Excavations at an archaeological site at Kathu in the Northern Cape province of South Africa have produced tens of thousands of Earlier Stone Age artifacts, including hand axes and other tools. These discoveries were made by archaeologists from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa and the University of Toronto (U of T), in collaboration with the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa. The archaeologists' research on the Kathu Townlands site, one of the richest early prehistoric archaeological sites in South Africa, was published in the journal, PLOS ONE, ...

(Boston)—Boston University School of Medicine researchers may have found a way to delay or even prevent Alzheimer's disease (AD). They discovered that pre-treatment of neurons with the anti-aging protein Klotho can prevent neuron death in the presence of the toxic amyloid protein and glutamate. These findings currently appear in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Alzheimer's disease is the most frequent age-related dementia affecting 5.4 million Americans including 13 percent of people age 65 and older and more than 40 percent of people over the age of 85. In AD the ...

A new study has identified two factors that characterize sustainable university and college programs designed to increase the production of highly qualified physics teachers. Specifically, one or more faculty members who choose to champion physics teacher education in combination with institutional motivation and commitment can ensure that such initiatives remain viable. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) teacher shortages are especially acute in physics, and the study points the way for institutions seeking to increase the number of STEM graduates prepared ...

SAN FRANCISCO, July 24, 2014 -- Material items designed to create or enhance an experience, also known as "experiential products," can make shoppers just as happy as life experiences, according to new research from San Francisco State University. Researchers found such products satisfy a different, but equally powerful, psychological need than experiential purchases. While life experiences help consumers feel closer to others, experiential products such as books, sporting goods, video games or musical instruments allow them to utilize and develop new skills and knowledge, ...

(Boston)--Minority women who received the Human Papillomavirus Vaccination (HPV) even after becoming sexually active had lower rates of abnormal Pap test results than those who were never vaccinated. These findings appear in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases. Researchers from Boston University School of Public Health and School of Medicine conducted a cross-sectional study of 235 women age 21 to 30 undergoing routine cervical cytology testing. HPV status and demographic and behavioral characteristics were self-reported and verified with electronic medical records. "Although ...