Very old persons often have chronic problems, such as physical immobility, unsteady gait, and mental impairments. In such patients, these risks have to be considered and their treatments adapted accordingly. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International in its current issue introduces two original articles on the subject of geriatric medicine. The study reported by Wolfgang von Renteln-Kruse et al. (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112: 103) investigated the clinical treatment of geriatric patients with cognitive impairment, who require an appropriate environment and appropriate care. ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- A Duke University study proposes a strategy to better use limited public health care dollars for protecting more people from a sexually transmitted infection called human papillomavirus (HPV) and the cancers it can cause. Public health programs that devote a portion of their funding to encourage more boys to be vaccinated against HPV -- rather than merely attempting to raise coverage among girls -- may ultimately protect more people for the same price, the study suggests. The findings appear online in the journal Epidemics. Whether vaccinating boys against ...

A novel therapeutic approach for an existing drug reverses a condition in elderly patients who are at high risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found. The drug, commonly used to treat epilepsy, calms hyperactivity in the brain of patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a clinically recognized condition in which memory impairment is greater than expected for a person's age and which greatly increases risk for Alzheimer's dementia, according to the study published this week in NeuroImage: Clinical. The ...

WASHINGTON - Both physicians and patients overestimate the risk of heart attack or death for possible acute coronary syndrome (ACS) as well as the potential benefit of hospital admission for possible ACS. A survey of patient and physician communication and risk assessment, along with an editorial, were published online last week in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Quantifying Patient-Physician Communication and Perceptions of Risk During Admissions for Possible Acute Coronary Syndromes" and "Lost in Translation: Physician Understanding and Communication of Risk to Patients ...

LSU Professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy Ward Plummer and Jiandi Zhang, in collaboration with their colleagues from the Institute of Physics, Beijing, China, have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 112, pg. 2367) titled "Classification of Charge Density Waves based on their Nature." This work is a result of a collaboration funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Charge Density Waves, or CDWs, are observed in many solids, especially in low-dimensional systems. The existence of CDWs was first predicted in the ...

For the first time in the world, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) were able to enroll patients at other hospitals into an acute stroke clinical trial. The research was published in a recent issue of the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, a publication of the American Neurological Association. "One of the main drawbacks of conducting clinical trials for stroke is that we traditionally are limited to patients who arrive at large stroke centers that have the expertise to treat stroke quickly to minimize damage ...

Women are more attracted to war heroes than regular soldiers or men who display heroic traits in other fields, such as in sports or natural disaster work, according to new research from the University of Southampton and partners in Europe. The findings also suggest that men did not find heroism to be a sexually attractive trait in women. In the study, published online in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, 92 women studying in the UK were presented with hypothetical profiles of the opposite sex, representing varying levels of heroism in different contexts such ...

Women who give birth in a public hospital are more confident parents compared to women who have babies privately, a new Australian study has found. A joint study by Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland, surveyed more than 6400 mums in Queensland, and found women who birth in the public sector were more likely to receive after-hospital health care, in turn boosting their confidence as a new parent, than women in the private system. Associate Professor Yvette Miller from QUT's Faculty of Health and one of the authors of the study published ...

At the centre of the image is the open star cluster NGC 6193, containing around thirty bright stars and forming the heart of the Ara OB1 association. The two brightest stars are very hot giant stars. Together, they provide the main source of illumination for the nearby emission nebula, the Rim Nebula, or NGC 6188, which is visible to the right of the cluster. A stellar association is a large grouping of loosely bound stars that have not yet completely drifted away from their initial formation site. OB associations consist largely of very young blue-white stars, which ...

New York University researchers have devised a computer model to explain how a neural circuit learns to classify sensory stimuli into discrete categories, such as "car vs. motorcycle." Their findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, shed new light on the brain processes underpinning judgments we make on a daily basis. "Categorization is vital for survival, such as distinguishing food from inedible things, as well as for formation of concepts, for instance 'dog vs. cat,' and relationship between concepts, such as hierarchical classification of animals," ...

Chestnut Hill, MA (March 9th, 2015): Feedback - the objective response, opinion, or input - is something most of us experience either at work or amongst friends to bodies of work or projects that are complete. But in the world of creative processes - where no one knows what the finished product should look like - feedback is inherently different, and more constructive, according to new research by a Boston College professor who says the findings should be utilized in the corporate world. "Traditionally when we think about feedback, we think about the manager who knows ...

In an era of $1,000-a-pill medications, a new approach may be needed to finance an emerging breed of highly expensive pharmaceuticals and vaccines, according to a new RAND Corporation analysis. In other industries, it is common for suppliers to encourage investment through approaches such as equipment leases or supplier-financed credit. Health care could learn from such approaches, according to Dr. Soeren Mattke, lead author of the analysis and a senior scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. Instead of paying upfront for the cost of a treatment -- $20 ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The anti-inflammatory class of drugs NSAIDs have shown great promise in preventing cancers including colon, esophagus and skin. However, they can increase the risks of heart attacks, ulcers and rare but potentially life-threatening bleeds. A new study suggests there may be ways to reduce these dangerous side effects. Collaborators from the University of Michigan, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Alabama looked at naproxen, which is known to have a lower cardiovascular risk than other NSAIDs. Naproxen, like most NSAIDs and aspirin, ...

An Antarctic octopus that lives in ice-cold water uses an unique strategy to transport oxygen in its blood, according to research published in Frontiers in Zoology. The study suggests that the octopus's specialized blood pigments could help to make it more resilient to climate change than Antarctic fish and other species of octopus. The Antarctic Ocean hosts rich and diverse fauna despite inhospitable temperatures close to freezing. While it can be hard to deliver oxygen to tissues in the cold due to lower oxygen diffusion and increased blood viscosity, ice-cold waters ...

Studying the intricate fractal patterns on the surface of cells could give researchers a new insight into the physical nature of cancer, and provide new ways of preventing the disease from developing. This is according to scientists in the US who have, for the first time, shown how physical fractal patterns emerge on the surface of human cancer cells at a specific point of progression towards cancer. Publishing their results today, 11 March, in the Institute of Physics and Germany Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, they found that the distinctive repeating fractal ...

Voices in people's heads are far more varied and complex than previously thought, according to new research by Durham and Stanford universities, published in The Lancet Psychiatry today. One of the largest and most detailed studies to date on the experience of auditory hallucinations, commonly referred to as voice hearing, found that the majority of voice-hearers hear multiple voices with distinct character-like qualities, with many also experiencing physical effects on their bodies. The study also confirmed that both people with and without psychiatric diagnoses hear ...

During pregnancy, the mother supplies the fetus with nutrients and oxygen via the placenta. If placental development is impaired, this may lead to growth disorders of the embryo or to life-threatening diseases of the mother such as preeclampsia, a serious condition involving high blood pressure and increased urinary protein excretion. Now, Dr. Katharina Walentin and Professor Kai Schmidt-Ott of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch have discovered a new molecular signaling pathway which regulates the development of the placenta. Perturbations ...

In a study published in The Lancet on March 10, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) report that patients with a genetic sensitivity to warfarin - the most widely used anticoagulant for preventing blood clots - have higher rates of bleeding during the first several months of treatment and benefited from treatment with a different anticoagulant drug. The analyses from the TIMI Study Group, suggest that using genetics to identify patients who are most at risk of bleeding, and tailoring treatment accordingly, could offer important safety benefits, particularly ...

VANCOUVER, Wash.--Washington State University researchers have found a mechanism in the brain that facilitates the pathologically powerful role of memory in drug addiction. Their discovery opens a new area of research for targeted therapy that would alter or disable the mechanism and make drug addiction less compulsive. Turning off the mechanism is "diminishing the emotional impact or the emotional content of the memory, so it decreases the motivation to relapse," said Barbara Sorg, a professor of neuroscience at Washington State University, Vancouver. Her findings appear ...

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have uncovered new clues about the risk of cancer from low-dose radiation, which in this research they define as equivalent to 100 millisieverts or roughly the dose received from ten full-body CT scans. They studied mice and found their risk of mammary cancer from low-dose radiation depends a great deal on their genetic makeup. They also learned key details about how genes and the cells immediately surrounding a tumor (also called the tumor microenvironment) affect cancer ...

La Jolla, Calif., March 9, 2015 - Researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) have discovered a mechanism that explains why some breast cancer tumors respond to specific chemotherapies and others do not. The findings highlight the level of glutamine, an essential nutrient for cancer development, as a determinant of breast cancer response to select anticancer therapies, and identify a marker associated with glutamine uptake, for potential prognosis and stratification of breast cancer therapy. "Our study indicates that a protein called RNF5 ...

McGill researchers have discovered, for the first time, the importance of a key epigenetic regulator in the development of the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with learning, memory and neural stem cells. Epigenetic regulators change the way specific genes function without altering their DNA sequence. By working with mutant mice as models, the research team, led by Prof. Xiang-Jiao Yang, of McGill's Goodman Cancer Center & Department of Medicine, McGill University Health Center, was able to link the importance of a specific epigenetic regulator known as BRPF1 ...

The combination of stress and heavy depression can significantly increase heart patient's risk of death or heart attack, according to new research in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal. The study examined the effect of high stress levels and high depressive symptoms among nearly 5,000 heart patients. Researchers concluded that risk is amplified when both conditions are present, thus validating the concept of a "psychosocial perfect storm." "The increase in risk accompanying high stress and high depressive symptoms ...

A review of nutrition and weight-loss interventions for people with impaired mobility found strategies are sorely lacking for people with neurological disabilities, according to a team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic. Interventions are overwhelmingly geared toward muscular disorders, leaving a gap in approaches that could help people with neurological disabilities become more active, eat healthier and lose weight, they conclude. The researchers wanted to learn more about interventions for people who, because of limited mobility, ...

Identifying loss of dignity and lack of respectful treatment as preventable harms in health care, researchers at Johns Hopkins have taken on the ambitious task of defining and ensuring respectful care in the high-stakes environment of the intensive care unit (ICU). Their novel, multi-method approach is presented in a dedicated supplement to the journal Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. "In health care the importance of respect and dignity is often invoked, but has not been clearly defined in regard to treatment in the ICU," says Jeremy Sugarman, the Harvey M. Meyerhoff ...