Current guidelines do not distinguish between aspirin and more potent blood thinners for protecting against blood clots in patients who undergo major orthopedic operations, leaving the decision up to individual clinicians. A new analysis published today in the Journal of Hospital Medicine provides much-needed information that summarizes existing studies about which medications are best after different types of surgery. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo major orthopedic surgery such as hip and knee replacements and hip fracture repairs. Patients undergoing ...

Patients likely to benefit the most from antiviral therapy for influenza were prescribed these drugs infrequently during the 2012-2013 influenza season, while antibiotics may have been overprescribed. Published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and now available online, the findings suggest more efforts are needed to educate clinicians about the appropriate use of antivirals and antibiotics in the outpatient setting. Influenza is a significant cause of mortality and morbidity, resulting in more than 200,000 hospitalizations in the U.S. each year, on average. While annual ...

SALT LAKE CITY, July 17, 2014 – By measuring how fast Earth conducts electricity and seismic waves, a University of Utah researcher and colleagues made a detailed picture of Mount Rainier's deep volcanic plumbing and partly molten rock that will erupt again someday. "This is the most direct image yet capturing the melting process that feeds magma into a crustal reservoir that eventually is tapped for eruptions," says geophysicist Phil Wannamaker, of the university's Energy & Geoscience Institute and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "But it does not provide ...

Corticosteroid drugs that are given by inhalers to children with asthma may suppress their growth, evidence suggests. Two new systematic reviews published in The Cochrane Library focus on the effects of inhaled corticosteroid drugs (ICS) on growth rates. The authors found children's growth slowed in the first year of treatment, although the effects were minimised by using lower doses. Inhaled corticosteroids are prescribed as first-line treatments for adults and children with persistent asthma. They are the most effective drugs for controlling asthma and clearly reduce ...

CHICAGO --- After 50 years of being a mainstay cholesterol therapy, niacin should no longer be prescribed for most patients due to potential increased risk of death, dangerous side effects and no benefit in reducing heart attacks and strokes, writes Northwestern Medicine® preventive cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, M.D., in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial. Lloyd-Jones's editorial is based on a large new study published in the journal that looked at adults, ages 50 to 80, with cardiovascular disease who took extended-release niacin (vitamin B3) and laropiprant ...

Investigators have identified a gene that underlies a very rare but devastating autoinflammatory condition in children. Several existing drugs have shown therapeutic potential in laboratory studies, and one is currently being studied in children with the disease, which the researchers named STING-associated vasculopathy with onset in infancy (SAVI). The findings appeared online today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research was done at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), part of the National Institutes of Health. "Not ...

Big websites usually maintain their own "data centers," banks of tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers, all passing data back and forth to field users' requests. Like any big, decentralized network, data centers are prone to congestion: Packets of data arriving at the same router at the same time are put in a queue, and if the queues get too long, packets can be delayed. At the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, in August, MIT researchers will present a new network-management system that, in experiments, reduced the average ...

The choice of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) by women with breast cancer (BC) diagnosed in one breast has recently increased in the US but may confer only a marginal life expectancy benefit depending on the type and stage of cancer, according to a study published July 16 in the JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute. To assess the survival benefit of CPM, Pamela R. Portschy, of the Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and colleagues, developed a model simulating survival outcomes of CPM or no CPM for women with newly diagnosed ...

Medicare spending on breast cancer screening increased substantially between 2001 and 2009 but the detection rates of early stage tumors were unchanged, according to a new study published July 16 in the JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The effect of introduction of new breast cancer screening modalities, such as digital images, computer-aided detection (CAD), and use of ultrasound and MRI on screening costs among older women is unknown, although women over the age of 65 represent almost one-third of the total women screened in the US annually. There is ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Even mild traumatic brain injury may cause brain damage and thinking and memory problems, according to a study published in the July 16, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. For the study, 44 people with a mild traumatic brain injury and nine people with a moderate traumatic brain injury were compared to 33 people with no brain injury. All of the participants took tests of their thinking and memory skills. At the same time, they had diffusion tensor imaging scans, a type of MRI scan that is more sensitive ...

Older registered nurses are working longer than in the past, one reason that the nation's supply of RNs has grown substantially in recent years, according to a new study. Researchers found that from 1991 to 2012, among registered nurses working at age 50, 24 percent remained working as late as age 69. This compared to 9 percent during the period from 1969 to 1990. The findings are published online by the journal Health Affairs. "We estimate this trend accounts for about a quarter of an unexpected surge in the supply of registered nurses that the nation has experienced ...

Bottom Line: The long-lasting symptoms that many patients contend with following mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI), also known as concussion, may be posttraumatic disorder (PTSD) and not postconcussion syndrome (PCS). Authors: Emmanuel Lagarde, Ph.D., of the Université de Bordeaux, France, and colleagues. Background: Concussion accounts for more than 90 percent of all TBIs, although little is known about prognosis for the injury. The symptoms cited as potentially being part of PCS fall into three areas: cognitive, somatic and emotional. But the interpretation of symptoms ...

Bottom Line: Widespread military adoption of damage control resuscitation (DCR) policies has shifted resuscitation practices at combat hospitals during conflicts. Author: Nicholas R. Langan, M.D., and colleagues from the Madigan Army Medical Center, Tacoma, Wash. Background: Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) are the first prolonged conflicts the United States has been involved in since the Vietnam War. Medical and surgical advances have often emerged from the battlefields. One of the most important advancements in combat trauma care ...

AUDIO: People who smoke cigarettes commit suicide at higher rates than those who don't smoke. That's been known for years, but most scientists assumed the reason was that smoking rates were... Click here for more information. Cigarette smokers are more likely to commit suicide than people who don't smoke, studies have shown. This reality has been attributed to the fact that people with psychiatric disorders, who have higher suicide rates, also tend to smoke. But new research ...

HOUSTON – (July 16, 2014) – Rice University scientists have succeeded in analyzing transmembrane protein folding in the same way they study the proteins' free-floating, globular cousins. Rice theoretical biologist Peter Wolynes and his team at the university's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) have applied his energy landscape theory to proteins that are hard to view because they live and work primarily inside cell membranes. The method should increase the technique's value to researchers who study proteins implicated in diseases and possibly in the ...

Boulder, Colo. – A 25-year-long study published in Geology on 14 July provides the first quantitative measurement of in situ calcium-magnesium silicate mineral dissolution by ants, termites, tree roots, and bare ground. This study reveals that ants are one of the most powerful biological agents of mineral decay yet observed. It may be that an understanding of the geobiology of ant-mineral interactions might offer a line of research on how to "geoengineer" accelerated CO2 consumption by Ca-Mg silicates. Researcher Ronald Dorn of Arizona State University writes that over ...

DETROIT – Robot-assisted surgery to remove cancerous prostate glands is effective in controlling the disease for 10 years, according to a new study led by researchers at Henry Ford Hospital. The study also suggested that traditional methods of measuring the severity and possible spread of the cancer together with molecular techniques might, with further research, help to create personalized, cost-effective treatment regimens for prostate cancer patients who undergo the surgical procedure. The findings apply to men whose cancer has not spread beyond the prostate, and the ...

From a cognitive perspective, aging is typically associated with decline. As we age, it may get harder to remember names and dates, and it may take us longer to come up with the right answer to a question. But the news isn't all bad when it comes to cognitive aging, according to a set of three articles in the July 2014 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science. Plumbing the depths of the available scientific literature, the authors of the three articles show how several factors — including motivation and crystallized knowledge — can play important roles in supporting ...

The next time your children quibble about who gets to eat which part of a cake, call in some experts on the art of sharing. Mathematician Julius Barbanel of Union College, and political scientist Steven Brams of New York University, both in the US, published an algorithm in Springer's The Mathematical Intelligencer by which they show how to optimally share cake between two people efficiently, in equal pieces and in such a way that no one feels robbed. The cut-and-choose method to share divisible goods has been regarded as fair and envy-free since Biblical times, when ...

Forest cover in Borneo may have declined by up to 30% over the past 40 years, according to a study published July 16, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by David Gaveau from the Center for International Forestry Research, Indonesia, and colleagues. The native forests of Borneo have been increasingly impacted by logging, fire, and conversion to plantations since the early 1970s. Borneo lacks island-wide forest clearance and logging documentation, making forest conservation planning difficult, especially for selectively logged forests that have high conservation potential ...

At the fringe of the whale shark range, the volcanic Azore islands may play an increasing role for the north Atlantic population as sea surface temperatures rise, according to a study published July 16, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Pedro Afonso from University of the Azores and colleagues. Whale sharks prefer tropical waters in the range of 26-30º C, but studies have shown that this large filter-feeding shark seasonally aggregates at highly productive coastal sites, sometimes at the edge of their preferred water temperature range. Whale sharks have been ...

Removal of river water for irrigation and habitat fragmentation by irrigation dams were shown to be the principal factors contributing to the decline of the Indus river dolphin, according to a study published July 16, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Gill Braulik from the Wildlife Conservation Society and University of St. Andrews and colleagues. Many freshwater marine mammals are endangered due to rapidly degrading habitat and conservation of these megafauna species depends on maintaining intact habitat. This study used historical range data and information ...

LOS ANGELES (STRICTLY EMBARGOED UNTIL 2 P.M. EDT ON JULY 16, 2014) – Cardiologists at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute have developed a minimally invasive gene transplant procedure that changes unspecialized heart cells into "biological pacemaker" cells that keep the heart steadily beating. The laboratory animal research, published online and in today's print edition of the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine, is the result of a dozen years of research with the goal of developing biological treatments for patients with heart rhythm disorders who currently ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A survey of 142 men and 516 women with experience in field studies in anthropology, archaeology, geology and other scientific disciplines reveals that many of them – particularly the younger ones – suffered or witnessed sexual harassment or sexual assault while at work in the field. A majority of the survey respondents (64 percent) said they had experienced sexual harassment (inappropriate sexual remarks, comments about physical beauty or jokes about cognitive sex differences, for example). And more than 20 percent reported they had been the victims ...

PHILADELPHIA—Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that patients taking prescription potassium supplements together with loop diuretics for heart failure have better survival rates than patients taking diuretics without the potassium. Moreover, the degree of benefit increases with higher diuretic doses. The team, including senior author Sean Hennessy, PharmD, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology in Penn's Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CCEB), report their findings in a study published online July ...