An analysis of publicly available outbreak data suggests that substandard vaccination compliance is likely to blame for the recent measles outbreak linked to Disneyland in California, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Without vaccination, measles is highly contagious. The recent outbreak started in December 2014, although the index case has not yet been identified. The rapid growth of cases indicates that a substantial percentage of the exposed population may be susceptible to measles infection due to lack of, or incomplete, vaccination, according ...

A study of brain aging finds that being male was associated with worse memory and lower hippocampal volume in individuals who were cognitively normal at baseline, while the gene APOE ?4, a risk factor for Alzheimer disease, was not, according to an article published online by JAMA Neurology. Typical cognitive aging may be defined as age-associated changes in cognitive performance in individuals free of dementia. To assess brain imaging findings associated with typical aging, the full adult age spectrum should be included, according to the study background. Clifford ...

Inadequate vaccine coverage is likely a driving force behind the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak, according to calculations by a research team at Boston Children's Hospital. Their report, based on epidemiological data and published online by JAMA Pediatrics, indicates that vaccine coverage among the exposed populations is far below that necessary to keep the virus in check, and is the first to positively link measles vaccination rates and the ongoing outbreak. By examining case numbers reported by the California Department of Public Health and current and historical ...

There are only five bodies in our solar system that are known to bear rings. The most obvious is the planet Saturn; to a lesser extent, rings of gas and dust also encircle Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. The fifth member of this haloed group is Chariklo, one of a class of minor planets called centaurs: small, rocky bodies that possess qualities of both asteroids and comets. Scientists only recently detected Chariklo's ring system -- a surprising finding, as it had been thought that centaurs are relatively dormant. Now scientists at MIT and elsewhere have detected a possible ...

March 16, 2015 - As more women veterans seek health care in the Veterans Administration (VA) system, effective approaches are needed to ensure that their unique needs are recognized and met. A special April supplement to Medical Care collects new studies from an ongoing research initiative to inform health care policy for women veterans. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. "The goal of this supplement is to disseminate new research findings related to the planning, organization, financing, provision, evaluation and improvement of health services and/or outcomes ...

URBANA - University of Illinois scientists have engineered a "jailbreaking" yeast that could greatly increase the health benefits of wine while reducing the toxic byproducts that cause your morning-after headache. "Fermented foods--such as beer, wine, and bread--are made with polyploid strains of yeast, which means they contain multiple copies of genes in the genome. Until now, it's been very difficult to do genetic engineering in polyploid strains because if you altered a gene in one copy of the genome, an unaltered copy would correct the one that had been changed," ...

NEW YORK, March 16, 2015 - Newer drug-coated stents that keep arteries open have similar long-term rates of death compared with traditional bypass surgery for patients with more than one diseased coronary artery. The findings come from a clinical registry study, led by cardiologists at NYU Langone Medical Center, which appears in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. In the study, a sample of over 9,000 patients who received the latest stents were no more likely to die in the few years following the procedure, compared to a matched sample of over ...

SAN DIEGO (March 16, 2015) -- Among patients with heart failure and atrial fibrillation, those who underwent catheter ablation were less likely to die, be hospitalized or have recurrent atrial fibrillation than patients taking a heart rhythm regulating drug, according to a study presented at the American College of Cardiology's 64th Annual Scientific Session. Catheter ablation was most successful in procedures where ablation was required in other areas in addition to the pulmonary vein, researchers said. Heart failure and atrial fibrillation often co-occur and are two ...

SAN DIEGO (March 16, 2015) -- Patients with atrial fibrillation who received ablation while they were already undergoing surgery to correct a leaky heart valve had fewer episodes of atrial fibrillation a year later compared to patients who had the valve surgery alone, according to a study presented at the American College of Cardiology's 64th Annual Scientific Session. The patients who received ablation along with mitral valve surgery had no more deaths, adverse cardiac events or hospitalizations than patients who only received the valve surgery alone, but they were ...

SAN DIEGO (March 16, 2015) -- Patients who underwent a simple conditioning procedure involving the inflation and deflation of a blood pressure cuff on the upper arm before coronary artery bypass grafting, known as heart bypass surgery, had no better long-term health outcomes than bypass patients who did not receive the conditioning, according to research presented at the American College of Cardiology's 64th Annual Scientific Session in San Diego. The study, the first large randomized controlled trial to investigate the effectiveness of remote ischemic preconditioning ...

Researchers have identified a new host of gene variants that could make people vulnerable to sporadic motor neurone disease, according to a report published today in the journal, Scientific Reports. Until recently, it was thought that genetics made little contribution to the disease - also termed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - and that the environment was mostly to blame. Currently two to three thousand Australians are living with this fatal disease. Motor neurone disease (MND) is a group of diseases in which the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord controlling ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...March 15, 2015 - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have developed a groundbreaking approach to determine sleep quality using their new breath sound analysis (BSA). This is less expensive and invasive than current polysomnography (PSG) technology, according to a new study published on PLOS Online. "One of the main goals of sleep medicine today is to improve early diagnosis and treatment of the 'flood" of subjects presenting with sleep disorders," says Prof. Yaniv Zigel Ph.D., head of the Biomedical Signal Processing Research Lab ...

Research shows that depictions of race on television news programs can strongly influence support for police among non-white viewers. The study was conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of Utah, Indiana University and the University of California, Los Angeles. "Black men and women - particularly black men - are over-represented as criminals or criminal suspects on TV news, and under-represented as law enforcement or authority figures, and as victims of crime," says Dr. Ryan Hurley, an assistant professor of communication at NC State ...

This news release is available in German. Leipzig/Berlin. A public and scientific discussion is currently taking place focusing on the question whether substances at low concentrations may lead to health impairments in humans. For this reason, an increasing number of experimental studies to test such effects are currently conducted using different chemicals. It was possible to demonstrate, for example, that even low quantities of benzo[a]pyrene can have effects on the protein pattern and hence the metabolism and signal pathways in cells, even though the concentration ...

WASHINGTON, March 16, 2015 -- It's been around for centuries but it seems like beer has never been more popular. Microbreweries are cranking out special stouts, IPAs, lagers and pilsners. And the flavors and aromas of each of those brews all come down to chemistry. This week, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, Reactions takes on craft beer chemistry. Sip on the video here: https://youtu.be/vW99JEaDApY. INFORMATION:Subscribe to the series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. The American Chemical ...

Cells have two different programs to safeguard them from getting out of control and developing cancer. One of them is senescence (biological aging). It puts cancer cells into a permanent sleep so they no longer divide and grow in an uncontrolled way. Now the research group led by Professor Walter Birchmeier (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, MDC, Berlin-Buch) has discovered that an enzyme known to be active in breast cancer and leukemia blocks this protection program and boosts tumor growth. They succeeded in blocking this enzyme in mice with breast cancer, ...

This news release is available in Spanish. The researchers explain that online health information searches are the third most popular activity in Google, with 170,000 searches performed every 5 seconds. Isabel Segura Bedmar of the UC3M Computer Science and Engineering Department points out that, "There is a lot of user-generated information these days, so social networks can be a valuable source of information on adverse effects of pharmaceutical drugs after the clinical trial stage is over and the drug is on the market." The large amount and variety of information ...

In the eyes of physicists, magnetic molecules can be considered as nanoscale magnets. Remotely controlling the direction in which they rotate, like spinning tops, may intuitively be difficult to achieve. However, Russian physicists have just demonstrated that it is theoretically possible to do so. They have shown that a change of direction in the circular polarisation of an external magnetic field leads to a change in the direction of the mechanical rotation of the molecule. These findings by Iosif Davidovich Tokman and Vera Il'inichna Pozdnyakova from the Institute for ...

(Boston)--Family support during deployment is an important protective factor against post-deployment suicidal ideation according to a new study in the journal Anxiety, Stress and Coping. Suicidal ideation includes thoughts that can range from fleeting consideration of suicide to the development of a specific plan for killing oneself. Research on suicidal ideation in veterans who served in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in Iraq has revealed a number of important predictors of suicidal ideation, including potentially ...

Millennials are anything but "newsless," passive, or uninterested in civic issues, according to a new comprehensive study of the information habits of people age 18-34. The research looks closely at how members of the Millennial generation learn about the world on different devices and platforms. The study finds that Millennials consume news and information in strikingly different ways than did previous generations. Contrary to popular perception, they keep up with news that is commonly referred to as "traditional" or "hard," as well as stories that connect them to hobbies, ...

Our modern epidemic of obesity has led to an alarming rise in the incidence of diabetes. More than 382 million people on the planet suffer from diabetes, predominantly type-2 diabetes. For these people, blood sugar surges -- glucose spikes after meals -- can be life threatening, leading to cardiovascular complications. A new Tel Aviv University study published in Diabetologia proposes a new way to suppress deadly glucose surges throughout the day -- eating a high-caloric breakfast and a more modest dinner. According to TAU's Prof. Daniela Jakubowicz and Dr. Julio Wainstein ...

March 16, 2015- Special redesigned labels for intravenous (IV) medication bags may help to prevent serious medication errors in the operating room, reports a study in the March issue of the Journal of Patient Safety. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. Based on trainee behaviors during OR simulations, "The results of this study provide additional evidence to support the use of opaque, white medication labels and the use of inverted text for highlighting key medication information on the label," writes Jamie L. Estock, MA, of the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System ...

March 16, 2015 - The shooting of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, MO, has ignited a global discussion about implicit racial bias. One group of people you might think would be immune from this hidden bias is clinical therapists, people trained to understand the human mind. But a new field study finds that the social identities of patients and their therapists affect the accuracy of the diagnosis: Therapists were twice as likely to misdiagnose mental illness when their patients were members of a disadvantaged, compared to an advantaged, group. In her own practice, Ora Nakash, ...

There is still no evidence of genetic difference between blacks and whites to account for the health disparities in cardiovascular disease (CVD), according to a new study by McGill University researchers. Published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the researchers suggest that after a decade of genetic studies, factors such as lifestyle, education and socio-economics - not genetics - are more promising avenues to understanding racial health disparities. The researchers focused on cardiovascular disease, the largest contributor to the racial mortality gap, and ...

Colon cancer is a heavily studied disease -- and for good reason. It is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide, and its numbers are on the rise, from 500,00 deaths in 1990 to 700,000 in 2010. This growth comes despite scientists' ever-increasing knowledge of the genetic mutations that initiate and drive this disease. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has found evidence of a new culprit in the disease, a protein called MSI2. Their findings provide a new target for potential therapeutic intervention in colorectal cancer ...