SAN FRANCISCO – July 9, 2014 – The first clinical trial to examine integrated low vision and mental health treatment has shown that the approach can reduce the incidence of depression by half among people with low vision due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The results of the study were published online today in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Low vision is a visual impairment that interferes with a person's ability to perform everyday tasks and cannot be corrected with glasses, contact lenses, medicine or surgery. A common ...

Depression is a common risk for people who have lost their vision from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), but a new study shows that a type of rehabilitation therapy can cut this risk in half. The study was funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health. "Our results emphasize the high risk of depression from AMD, and the benefits of multi-disciplinary treatment that bridges primary eye care, psychiatry, psychology, and rehabilitation," said Barry Rovner, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Sidney Kimmel Medical ...

Solar power and other sources of renewable energy can help combat global warming but they have a drawback: they don't produce energy as predictably as plants powered by oil, coal or natural gas. Solar panels only produce electricity when the sun is shining, and wind turbines are only productive when the wind is brisk. Ideally, alternative energy sources would be complemented with massive systems to store and dispense power – think batteries on steroids. Reversible fuel cells have been envisioned as one such storage solution. Fuel cells use oxygen and hydrogen as fuel ...

The occurrence of allergic diseases has risen dramatically in Western societies. One frequently cited reason is that children are less exposed to microorganisms and have fewer infections than previous generations, thereby delaying maturation of the immune system. A study by researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, monitored children until the age of three to examine maturation of the immune system in relation to allergic disease. All of the children lived in rural areas of the Västra Götaland Region, half of them on farms that produced milk. Lower ...

Molecular microbiologists from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) have discovered that mice lacking a specific component of the immune system are completely resistant to sepsis, a potentially fatal complication of infection. The discovery suggests that blocking this immune system component may help reduce inflammation in human autoimmune and hyper-inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Type 2 diabetes. The study was published online on June 23 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, a leading peer-reviewed scientific ...

Can thyroid hormone protect neuronal function and increase the survival rate of naturally aged animals? Prof. Ailing Fu and her team, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Southwest University, China performed an animal experiment in which aged mice were administered with low dose of levothyroxine for 3 consecutive months. Results showed that the aged rats exhibited an obvious improvement in cognitive and an increased rat survival rate from 60% to 93%. The underlying mechanism was demonstrated that levothyroxine treatment can increase the levels of choline acetyltransferase ...

Cholinergic inhibitors and N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonists can alleviate the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, but fail to affect irreversible cognitive dysfunction and effectively scavenge amyloid beta peptide in the brain. Amyloid beta peptide (Aβ) vaccines reduced and eliminated Aβ deposition in an Alzheimer's disease (AD) transgenic mouse model, and significantly improved behavioral and cognitive impairment. Dr. Yunpeng Cao and his team, First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, China immunized AD transgenic mouse models with Plp-Adeno-X-CMV-(Aβ3-10)10-CpG ...

In some countries, a region that can lay claim to being the birthplace of a country's political leader is likely to get preferential treatment – bias that shines out when the intensity of night lights is compared with that in other regions. This new approach to pinpointing regional favouritism has been developed by researchers from Monash University and the University of St Gallen. Using information on the birthplaces of political leaders in 126 countries, and satellite data on night-time light intensity from 38,427 subnational regions from 1992-2009, they established ...

Adolescents in southern Europe are less fit in terms of cardiorespiratory capacity, strength and speed-agility than their central-northern European peers. Moreover, southern adolescents are more obese and present higher levels of total and abdominal fat than those from the centre-north of Europe. These are some of the remarkable results from an ambitious study conducted by scientists from the University of Granada Department of Medical Physiology in collaboration with 25 other European research groups. The study compared the level of physical fitness of adolescents living ...

(CHICAGO) – Neurological scientists at Rush University Medical Center have found that using cinnamon, a common food spice and flavoring material, can reverse the biomechanical, cellular and anatomical changes that occur in the brains of mice with Parkinson's disease (PD). The results of the study were recently published in the June 20 issue of the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology. "Cinnamon has been used widely as a spice throughout the world for centuries," said Kalipada Pahan, PhD, study lead researcher and the Floyd A. Davis professor of neurology at Rush. "This ...

When a cell divides, it must first make a copy of its DNA, a fundamental step in the life cycle of cells that occurs billions of times a day in the human body. While scientists have had an idea of the molecular tools that cells use to replicate DNA—the enzymes that unzip the double-stranded DNA and create "daughter" copies—they did not have a clear picture of how the process works. Now, researchers at Rockefeller University have built the first model system to decipher what goes on at the "replication fork"—the point where DNA is split down the middle in order to create ...

Québec City, July 9, 2014 – A study published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience by Yves De Koninck and Robert Bonin, two researchers at Université Laval, reveals that it is possible to relieve pain hypersensitivity using a new method that involves rekindling pain so that it can subsequently be erased. This discovery could lead to novel means to alleviate chronic pain. The researchers from the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval and Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Québec (IUSMQ) were inspired by previous work on memory conducted some fifteen ...

EMBARGOED - July 9, 2014, 3:01 a.m. ET (Toronto) – An ongoing survey of Ontario students in grades 7 to 12 conducted for Canada's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) reveals a number of significant behavioural trends, including an alarming number of young people who are texting while driving. According to the 2013 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS) Mental Health and Well-Being Report, over one-third of licensed Ontario students in grades 10 to12 – an estimated 108,000 adolescent drivers – report texting while driving at least once in the past ...

Older kidney donors enjoy similar longevity and cardiovascular health as other healthy mature individuals, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Transplantation. The findings may provide some reassurance to older individuals considering donation and the transplant professionals caring for them. Over the past two decades, live kidney donation by individuals aged 55 years and older has become more common. Given the links between older age, kidney disease, and heart disease, the removal of a kidney could make older donors vulnerable to premature death ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio—The future health of the world's coral reefs and the animals that depend on them relies in part on the ability of one tiny symbiotic sea creature to get fat—and to be flexible about the type of algae it cooperates with. In the first study of its kind, scientists at The Ohio State University discovered that corals—tiny reef-forming animals that live symbiotically with algae—are better able to recover from yearly bouts of heat stress, called "bleaching," when they keep large energy reserves—mostly as fat—socked away in their cells. "We found that some coral ...

There is an increased risk of severe perineal tearing during childbirth in women who had such a tear in a previous delivery, suggests a new study published today (9 July) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG). This study, investigates among women who have had a third or fourth degree perineal tear, the mode of delivery in subsequent pregnancies and the recurrence of severe perineal tears. Most women tear to some extent during childbirth and in some women the tear may be more extensive. A third degree tear extends downwards from the ...

Think of your next exercise workout as a "fun run" or as a well-deserved break, and you'll eat less afterward. Think of it as exercise or as a workout and you'll later eat more dessert and snacks to reward yourself. These new findings from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab study involved two studies where adults were led on a 2 km walk around a small lake and were either told it was going to be an exercise walk or a scenic walk. In the first study, 56 adults completed their walk and were then given lunch. Those who believed they had been on an exercise walk served and ...

SALT LAKE CITY, July 9, 2014 – Collectors found the first two specimens of the prickly plant in 1974 and 1990 in west Texas. Then, for two decades, the 14-inch-tall plant was identified wrongly as one species, then another and then a third. Now – after a long search turned up a "pathetic, wilted" third specimen – a University of Utah botanist and her colleagues identified the spiny plant as a new, possibly endangered species and named it "from the heart" in Latin because it was found in Valentine, Texas, population 134 in 2010. Most new plant species are found in the ...

Hospitals across the country vary substantially in their use of minimally invasive surgery, even when evidence shows that for most patients, minimally invasive surgery is superior to open surgery, a new study shows. The finding represents a major disparity in the surgical care delivered at various hospitals, the study's authors say, and identifies an area of medicine ripe for improvement. "Some surgeons specialize in complex open operations, and we should endorse that expertise," says Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School ...

Astronomers have studied the carbon monoxide in a galaxy over 12 billion light years from Earth and discovered that it's running out of gas, quite literally, and headed for a 'red and dead' future. The galaxy, known as ALESS65, was observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in 2011 and is one of less than 20 known distant galaxies to contain carbon monoxide. Dr Minh Huynh from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) led the team on their search for galactic carbon monoxide in work published ...

Hand hygiene rates were found to be three times higher when auditors were visible to healthcare workers than when there were no auditors present, according to a study in a major Canadian acute care hospital. The study, titled, "Quantification of the Hawthorne effect in hand hygiene compliance monitoring using an electronic monitoring system: a retrospective cohort study," published today on-line in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal, by first author Dr. Jocelyn Srigley, who did the study as part of her Master's thesis while a Clinical Fellow in Infection Prevention and ...

SAN DIEGO – July 8, 2014 In a study published yesterday in the scientific journal Nature Immunology, a group at the La Jolla Institute (LJI) led by Pandurangan Vijayanand, Ph.D. identify new genes that likely contribute to asthma, a disease that currently affects over 200 million people world wide. An organism's genetic material, also known as its genome, can be divided into small sections or 'neighborhoods.' Scientists can determine which genetic neighborhoods in a cell are active, or primed for gene production, by looking for a marker on the genome called an enhancer. ...

VIDEO: NASA Goddard astrophysicists Ted Gull and Tom Madura discuss Eta Carinae and their new model of the Homunculus Nebula, a shell of gas and dust ejected during the star's mid-19th... Click here for more information. In the middle of the 19th century, the massive binary system Eta Carinae underwent an eruption that ejected at least 10 times the sun's mass and made it the second-brightest star in the sky. Now, a team of astronomers has used extensive new observations to create ...

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 12:20 p.m. EDT on July 8, 2014, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's ...

VIDEO: The animation begins with global infrared data showing the progression of the storm as it forms into a hurricane. Then GPM flies overhead measuring rain rates on the ground. GPM's... Click here for more information. The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory flew over Hurricane Arthur five times between July 1 and July 5, 2014. Arthur is the first tropical cyclone of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan ...