In a new register study in the scientific journal BMJ, researchers at Karolinska Institutet are able to dismiss previous claims that there is a link between the increased use of antibiotics in society and a coinciding rise in childhood asthma. The study includes half a million children and shows that exposure to antibiotics during pregnancy or early in life does not appear to increase the risk of asthma. Several previous studies have shown that if the mother is given antibiotics during pregnancy or if a small child is given antibiotics in early life, the child has an ...

CHICAGO - Researchers are using computed tomography (CT) and 3-D printing technology to recreate life-size models of patients' heads to assist in face transplantation surgery, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Physicians at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston performed the country's first full-face transplantation in 2011 and have subsequently completed four additional face transplants. The procedure is performed on patients who have lost some or all of their face as a result of injury or ...

CHICAGO - Hybrid imaging with positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET/CT) in the pituitary region of the brain is a promising tool for differentiating military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from those with mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI), according to a new study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The findings also lend support to the theory that many veterans diagnosed with PTSD may actually have hormonal irregularities due to pituitary gland damage from blast injury. MTBI ...

CHICAGO - Changes in brain connections visible on MRI could represent an imaging biomarker of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. As many as 5 million Americans are affected, a number expected to grow to 14 million by 2050, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Preventive treatments may be most effective before Alzheimer's disease is diagnosed, such as when a person is suffering from mild ...

CHICAGO - Some high school football players exhibit measurable brain changes after a single season of play even in the absence of concussion, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). "This study adds to the growing body of evidence that a season of play in a contact sport can affect the brain in the absence of clinical findings," said Christopher T. Whitlow, M.D., Ph.D., M.H.A., associate professor of radiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine and radiologist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center ...

(PHILADELPHIA) - Although prostate cancer can be successfully treated in many men, when the disease metastasizes to the bone, it is eventually lethal. In a study published online December 1st in the journal Cancer Research, researchers show that the receptor CCR5 best known for its role in HIV therapy, may also be involved in driving the spread of prostate cancer to the bone. "Because this work shows we can dramatically reduce metastasis in pre-clinical models, and because the drug is already FDA approved for HIV treatment- we may be able to test soon whether this drug ...

'Tis the season for toys. Children are writing lists full of them, and parents are standing in lines (or tapping on computers) trying to find them. Playing with toys this season or any other is an important way for children to develop, learn, and explore. But anyone planning to buy new toys, or anyone with toys already at home, should know that many toys pose an injury risk to children. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital have found that an estimated 3,278,073 children were treated in ...

A breast cancer vaccine developed at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is safe in patients with metastatic breast cancer, results of an early clinical trial indicate. Preliminary evidence also suggests that the vaccine primed the patients' immune systems to attack tumor cells and helped slow the cancer's progression. The study appears Dec. 1 in Clinical Cancer Research. The new vaccine causes the body's immune system to home in on a protein called mammaglobin-A, found almost exclusively in breast tissue. The protein's role in healthy tissue is unclear, ...

Nearly 55 percent of U.S. infants are placed to sleep with bedding that increases the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, despite recommendations against the practice, report researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other institutions. Soft objects and loose bedding--such as thick blankets, quilts, and pillows--can obstruct an infant's airway and pose a suffocation risk, according to the NIH's Safe to Sleep campaign. Soft bedding has also been shown to increase the risk of SIDS Infants should be ...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS -People may associate political correctness with conformity but new research finds it also correlates with creativity in work settings. Imposing a norm that sets clear expectations of how women and men should interact with each other into a work environment unexpectedly encourages creativity among mixed-sex work groups by reducing uncertainty in relationships. The study highlights a paradoxical consequence of the political correctness (PC) norm. While PC behavior is generally thought to threaten the free expression ...

Behavioural and drug interventions aiming to prevent people with prediabetes progressing to full blown type 2 diabetes are equally effective for both sexes at preventing progression and reducing weight, according to a new systematic review and meta-analysis. The research is by Dr Anna Glechner, Danube University Krems, Austria, and Dr Jürgen Harreiter, Medical University of Vienna, Austria, and colleagues. Prediabetes is a general term that refers to an intermediate stage between normal blood glucose control (normoglycaemia) and type 2 diabetes (high blood glucose ...

Using a patient's own rib cartilage (autologous) for rhinoplasty appears to be associated with low rates of overall long-term complications and problems at the rib site where the cartilage is removed, according to a report published online by JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery. Autologous rib cartilage is the preferred source of graft material for rhinoplasty because of its strength and ample volume. However, using rib cartilage for dorsal augmentation to build up the bridge of the nose has been criticized for its tendency to warp and issues at the cartilage donor site, such ...

The five-year survival rate for advanced-stage laryngeal cancer was higher than national levels in a small study at a single academic center performing a high rate of surgical therapy, including a total laryngectomy (removal of the voice box), to treat the disease, despite a national trend toward organ preservation, according to a report published online by JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery. The larynx is a common site of head and neck cancer with more than 10,000 cases annually. Over the past two decades, treatment for advanced-stage laryngeal cancer has shifted ...

The way that tetanus neurotoxin enters nerve cells has been discovered by UCL scientists, who showed that this process can be blocked, offering a potential therapeutic intervention for tetanus. This newly-discovered pathway could be exploited to deliver therapies to the nervous system, opening up a whole new way to treat neurological disorders such as motor neuron disease and peripheral neuropathies. The research in mice, published in Science and funded by the Medical Research Council, shows that proteins called nidogens that coat cell surfaces are key to tetanus neurotoxin ...

PITTSBURGH--The rise of social media has seemed like a bonanza for behavioral scientists, who have eagerly tapped the social nets to quickly and cheaply gather huge amounts of data about what people are thinking and doing. But computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and McGill University warn that those massive datasets may be misleading. In a perspective article published in the Nov. 28 issue of the journal Science, Carnegie Mellon's Juergen Pfeffer and McGill's Derek Ruths contend that scientists need to find ways of correcting for the biases inherent in the ...

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers have defined for the first time how the size of the immune response is controlled, using mathematical models to predict how powerfully immune cells respond to infection and disease. The finding, published today in the journal Science, has implications for our understanding of how harmful or beneficial immune responses can be manipulated for better health. The research team used mathematics and computer modeling to understand how complex signaling impacts the size of the response by key infection-fighting immune cells called ...

Given that some climate change is already unavoidable--as just confirmed by the new IPCC report--investing in empowerment through universal education should be an essential element in climate change adaptation efforts, which so far focus mostly in engineering projects, according to a new study from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) published in the journal Science. The article draws upon extensive analysis of natural disaster data for 167 countries over the past four decades as well as a number of studies carried out in individual countries ...

Nora Besansky, O'Hara Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the University's Eck Institute for Global Health, has led an international team of scientists in sequencing the genomes of 16 Anopheles mosquito species from around the world. Anopheles mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting human malaria parasites that cause an estimated 200 million cases and more than 600 thousand deaths each year. However, of the almost 500 different Anopheles species, only a few dozen can carry the parasite and only a handful of species are responsible ...

Certain species of mosquitoes are genetically better at transmitting malaria than even some of their close cousins, according to a multi-institutional team of researchers including Virginia Tech scientists. Of about 450 different species of mosquitoes in the Anopheles genus, only about 60 can transmit the Plasmodium malaria parasite that is harmful to people. The team chose 16 mosquito species that are currently found in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, but evolved from the same ancestor approximately 100 million years ago. Today, the 16 species have varying ...

A growing number of academic researchers are mining social media data to learn about both online and offline human behavior. In recent years, studies have claimed the ability to predict everything from summer blockbusters to fluctuations in the stock market. But mounting evidence of flaws in many of these studies points to a need for researchers to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets, according to computer scientists at McGill University in Montreal and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Such erroneous results ...

American presidents spend their time in office trying to carve out a prominent place in the nation's collective memory, but most are destined to be forgotten within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president, suggests a study on presidential name recall released today by the journal Science. "By the year 2060, Americans will probably remember as much about the 39th and 40th presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, as they now remember about our 13th president, Millard Fillmore," predicts study co-author Henry L. Roediger III, PhD, a human memory expert at Washington ...

High-tech genomics and traditional Chinese medicine come together as researchers identify the genes responsible for the intense bitter taste of wild cucumbers. Taming this bitterness made cucumber, pumpkin and their relatives into popular foods, but the same compounds also have potential to treat cancer and diabetes. "You don't eat wild cucumber, unless you want to use it as a purgative," said William Lucas, professor of plant biology at the University of California, Davis and coauthor on the paper to be published Nov. 28 in the journal Science. That bitter flavor in ...

Human-induced changes to Earth's carbon cycle - for example, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and ocean acidification - have been observed for decades. However, a study published this week in Science showed human activities, in particular industrial and agricultural processes, have also had significant impacts on the upper ocean nitrogen cycle. The rate of deposition of reactive nitrogen (i.e., nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel burning and ammonia compounds from fertilizer use) from the atmosphere to the open ocean has more than doubled globally over the last 100 years. ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass.(November 27, 2014, 2 PM) -- New catalysts designed and investigated by Tufts University School of Engineering researchers and collaborators from other university and national laboratories have the potential to greatly reduce processing costs in future fuels, such as hydrogen. The catalysts are composed of a unique structure of single gold atoms bound by oxygen to several sodium or potassium atoms and supported on non-reactive silica materials. They demonstrate comparable activity and stability with catalysts comprising precious metal nanoparticles ...

People affected by a common inherited form of autism could be helped by a drug that is being tested as a treatment for cancer. Researchers who have identified a chemical pathway that goes awry in the brains of Fragile X patients say the drug could reverse their behavioural symptoms. The scientists have found that a known naturally occurring chemical called cercosporamide can block the pathway and improve sociability in mice with the condition. The team at the University of Edinburgh and McGill University in Canada identified a key molecule - eIF4E - that drives excess ...