BOSTON-The term "transgender" has made its way into mainstream media thanks to Caitlyn Jenner, previously known as Bruce Jenner, who came out as a transgender woman earlier this year. But for many physicians, or physicians-in-training, who do not typically treat transgender patients for issues specific to their gender identity, it's still a mystery. Joshua Safer, MD, FACP, endocrinologist at Boston Medical Center and associate professor of medicine and molecular medicine at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), and his colleague Dylan Thomas, MD, conducted an ...

Taking four pain pills an hour instead of four pills a day Need improved, understandable discharge instructions More than 9 million ambulatory surgeries performed annually on seniors CHICAGO --- Patients 65 and older who have ambulatory surgery are much more likely to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days than younger patients, regardless of their health before surgery, reports a new, large national Northwestern Medicine study. The likely cause, based on previous research, is difficulty understanding medication dosing and discharge instructions, as well ...

Results of a 2013 DREAM Challenge - a crowdsourcing initiative for systems biomedicine - have been published in Nature Biotechnology; Hundreds of scientists from around the world pooled their efforts to test how accurately they could predict the effect of toxic compounds in different individuals, or across a population; Combined results achieved a rough estimate of population effects, and methods emerged that may be able to provide real-world benefit in the hazard assessments of new compounds. 10 August 2015 - An international study published in Nature Biotechnology ...

Widespread drought-sensitive butterfly population extinctions could occur in the UK as early as 2050 according to a new study published today in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change. However, the authors conclude that substantial greenhouse gas emission reductions combined with better management of landscapes, in particular reducing habitat fragmentation, will greatly improve the chances of drought-sensitive butterflies flying until at least 2100. The study was led by Dr Tom Oliver from the UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) in collaboration with colleagues ...

An international research collaboration led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has identified the first gene in which mutations cause the common form of mitral valve prolapse (MVP), a heart valve disorder that affects almost 2.5 percent of the population. In a paper receiving advance online publication in Nature, the research team reports finding mutations in a gene called DCHS1 in affected members of three families in which MVP is inherited. "This work provides insights into the pathways regulating valve growth and development and implicates a previously ...

A new computational method developed by scientists from the University of Chicago improves the detection of genes that are likely to be causal for complex diseases and biological traits. The method, PrediXcan, estimates gene expression levels across the whole genome - a better measure of biological action than single mutations - and integrates it with genome-wide association study (GWAS) data. PrediXcan has the potential to identify gene targets for therapeutic applications faster and with greater accuracy than traditional methods. It is described online in Nature Genetics ...

JAMA Internal Medicine will publish a package of articles, along with an author interview podcast, focused on end-of-life, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The original investigation, research letter, special communication and commentaries are detailed below. In the first article, Marianne C. Snijdewind, M.A., of the VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, and coauthors1 looked at outcomes of requests for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide received by a clinic founded in 2012 to provide the option of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide for patients ...

For the past decade, cutting-edge health care providers and researchers have increasingly pushed to integrate care for mental health and substance use problems within primary medical care for children and adolescents. Their hope is that children and teens who suffer from mental and behavioral disorders would fare better if their pediatricians or family doctors took an active role in linking them with mental health care, particularly when these doctors team up with mental health clinicians to help meet the needs of their young patients. Now, a team of UCLA researchers ...

In research published in Nature Materials, a team led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan has developed a new hydrogel that works like an artificial muscle--quickly stretching and contracting in response to changing temperature. They have also managed to use the polymer to build an L-shaped object that slowly walks forward as the temperature is repeatedly raised and lowered. Hydrogels are polymers that can maintain large quantities of water within their networks. Because of this, they can swell and shrink in response to changes in ...

(Boston)-- Former National Football League (NFL) players who started playing tackle football before the age of 12 were found to have a higher risk of altered brain development compared to those who started playing at a later age. The study is the first to demonstrate a link between early exposure to repetitive head impacts and later life structural brain changes. Led by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), the study appears online in the Journal of Neurotrauma. The researchers examined 40 former NFL players ...

The invisible chemicals around and within us can tell many complicated stories. By sensing them, security agents can uncover explosive threats. By monitoring them in our breath, doctors can diagnose serious illnesses. And by detecting them on distant planets, astronomers may find signs of life. These chemicals sometimes reveal their secrets when probed with mid-infrared wavelength lasers. Nearly all chemicals, including explosives, industrial, and pollutants, strongly absorb light in the mid-infrared wavelength region, which is often called the "fingerprint region" for ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--It's an old joke that many fusion scientists have grown tired of hearing: Practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away -- and always will be. But now, finally, the joke may no longer be true: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor -- and it's one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near. Using these new commercially ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. (July 10,2015) - Just as nations around the globe carefully guard their defense secrets, so do plants. New research in the current issue of Nature, however, has revealed the molecular secrets of plants' defense mechanisms at the atomic level. The study, led by Michigan State University and Van Andel Research Institute, focuses on the plant hormone jasmonate and its interaction with three key proteins. The findings could help scientists develop dream crops that are better equipped to fend off pests, diseases and future challenges created by fluctuating ...

(Vienna, 6 August, 2015) Women who give birth to babies conceived by in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) are at increased risk of experiencing long-term symptoms of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD), according to the results of a study published in the UEG Journal.1 Researchers in Turkey compared two groups of women who had given birth to their first child at least 1 year earlier and found that those who had had IVF were three-times more likely to be diagnosed with GORD than those who had conceived naturally. No differences in GORD prevalence were reported between the women ...

Queen's University professor Nikolaus Troje (Psychology, Biology, School of Computing) believes that it is the consistency of the whole appearance rather than the attractiveness of the parts. "Most previous work on attractiveness focused on the effect of isolated features." says Dr. Troje. "The current study demonstrates how important it is that these features fit together well." Participants were shown schematic point-light displays that depict a person using 15 moving dots. The representation conveyed both the individual characteristics of a person's movements and their ...

Patients in advanced states of myocardial insufficiency generally lose their muscle mass and muscle strength. Indeed a fact that until now has negatively impacted the clinical course of the disease and that has resulted in poor prognoses for patients. Such pathological muscle loss impacts the skeletal muscles in particular. The responsible molecular signaling pathways have not yet been fully understood. One cause of this degenerative process lies in the system that regulates the blood pressure and salt/water supply in the body - the so-called renin-angiotensin-aldosterone ...

If the thought of a math test makes you break out in a cold sweat, Mom or Dad may be partly to blame, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers led by University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year and were more likely to be math-anxious themselves--but only when these parents provided frequent help on the child's math homework. Lead study author Erin A. Maloney ...

How do states decide what laws to adopt to prevent alcohol-impaired driving and keep their roads safe? A new study by public health researchers at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development finds that the severity of the problem within the state is not the most important predictor of whether states adopt new laws to restrict drunk driving - nor is the political makeup of the state government. Instead, the two strongest predictors of states adopting their first drunk driving laws were having a large population of young people and a neighboring ...

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say they have developed a method that could make a nasal spray flu vaccine effective for those under two and over 49 - two groups for which the vaccine is not approved. By studying the weakened flu virus that is the basis for the nasal spray vaccine in cells from human nasal and sinus cavities, the researchers say they have determined that the virus can be weakened (for young children) or strengthened (in older people) enough to create an appropriate immune response in people of all ages. A report on the findings ...

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 10, 2015 - People who live in areas of California with a higher density of marijuana dispensaries experience a greater number of hospitalizations involving marijuana abuse and dependence, a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analysis discovered. The National Institutes of Health-funded research, published online and scheduled for the Sept. 1 issue of the scientific journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, could be informative as more states consider legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use. It is the first analysis of the ...

SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 10, 2015 - A new technique developed by statisticians that is helping doctors optimize the dose of a new cancer treatment patients receive in phase I/ II clinical trials was presented today by Juhee Lee, assistant professor of applied mathematics and statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a session at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle. During a session titled Bayesian Dose-Finding in Two Treatment Cycles Based on the Joint Utility of Efficacy and Toxicity, Lee presented the "Optimal Two-Cycle Dose-Finding ...

SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 10, 2015 - Statisticians have combined state-of-the-art analytical techniques from the academic and business worlds to tackle the Big Data challenges confronting astrophysicists and astronomers as they explore the mysteries of our universe, Lars K.S. Daldorff and Siavoush Mohammadi today told an audience at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle. These technical advances--called automatic explorative analysis of data--have the potential of greatly aiding these scientists as they seek to understand our universe, as well as researchers ...

SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 10, 2015 - Statistical models are playing an increasingly important role in risk analysis and helping the United States and other countries around the globe mitigate the effects of natural and man-made disasters, said Siddhartha (Sid) Dalal during a presentation at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) yesterday in Seattle. Dalal presented a talk titled "Challenges in Risk Analysis of Complex Systems: From Space Shuttle Challenger and Dirty Bombs to Medical Drugs and Chemicals" at a luncheon sponsored by the American Statistical Association's ...

SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 10, 2015 - A new statistical model that businesses can use to approximate an upper limit on the appropriate amount of marketing dollars they should invest in retaining their most important customers was presented today at a session of the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle. Michael Braun, associate professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business, unveiled the new model in a presentation titled "Transaction Attributes and Customer Valuation" during a session focused on Big Data and customer analytics. ...

SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 10, 2015 - An analysis of pediatric primary health care accessibility and availability in multiple states that uncovered systematic disparities between and within states was presented today at a session of the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings(JSM 2015) in Seattle. During an invited presentation titled "Quantifying Disparities in Accessibility and Availability of Pediatric Primary Care with Implications for Policy Making," statistician Nicoleta Serban said the study shows disparities in wait times for pediatric primary care are not as significant as ...