CHICAGO - Women who take a common type of medication to control their blood pressure are not at increased risk of developing breast cancer due to the drug, according to new study by researchers at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Murray, Utah. Researchers analyzed the records of more than 3,700 women who had no history of breast cancer, and who had long-term use of calcium channel blocker medications to control their blood pressure. Researchers found only a minimal increase in risk in one study and a 50 percent reduced risk in a second, leading them ...

Chicago, Ill. - November 19, 2014 - A powerful new app is directly connecting single ventricle heart defect patients to their doctors, dramatically improving their monitoring while they recover from heart surgery at home. Girish Shirali, MBBS, FACC, FASE, Co-Director of the Ward Family Heart Center at Children's Mercy Kansas City, will report today on how the technology is changing patient care at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2014. The tablet-based app, called CHAMP (Cardiac High-Acuity Monitoring Program), is a more automated, accurate and simplified ...

A study at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) finds that a support group addressing the psychological and educational needs of people recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has a strong positive impact on their lives. Ninety percent of participants indicated that as a result of the free group, they could make informed choices about their RA. The study findings were presented in the "Innovations in Rheumatologic Care" session at the American College of Rheumatology annual meeting on November 19 in Boston. "The Early RA Support and Education program, a part ...

Retrieving memory content under stress does not work very well. However, stress can be helpful when it comes to saving new information -- especially those that are emotionally relevant in stressful situations. At the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, a team of cognitive psychologists headed by Prof Dr Oliver T. Wolf study these correlations. The RUB's science magazine RUBIN reports on the results. Faked Job Interview Triggers Stress The team tested how well people remember items from a faked job interview that was conducted either in a friendly or a stress-triggering atmosphere ...

Electronic cigarettes offer smokers a realistic way to kick their tobacco smoking addiction. In a new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, scientists at KU Leuven report that e-cigarettes successfully reduced cravings for tobacco cigarettes, with only minimal side effects. Electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) were developed as a less harmful alternative to tobacco cigarettes. They contain 100 to 1,000 times less toxic substances and emulate the experience of smoking a tobacco cigarette. In an 8-month study, the KU Leuven ...

COLUMBIA, MD and WASHINGTON, DC (November 19, 2014) - Today, the National Center for Healthy Housing (NCHH) and Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University released Healthcare Financing of Healthy Homes Services: Findings from a 2014 Survey of State Reimbursement Policies, a report documenting current Medicaid reimbursement practices for environmental health services in the homes of lead-exposed children and people with asthma and highlighting opportunities for increasing access to these benefits. "ASTHO applauds NCHH and Milken Institute ...

In his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein predicted that there are such things as gravitational waves. In fact, the very existence of these waves is the linchpin of the entire theory. Despite the great lengths that physicists have gone to in recent decades, however, they still have not managed to detect them directly with a measurement. This could largely be due to the fact that this requires a level of precision that it is practically impossible to achieve with today's measuring devices. Ultimately, it is all about measuring the tiniest of compressions and extensions ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2014--When the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded this October to three Japanese-born scientists for the invention of blue light emitting diodes (LEDs), the prize committee declared LED lamps would light the 21st century. Now researchers from the Netherlands have found a novel way to ensure the lights of the future not only are energy efficient but also emit a cozy warmth. "We demonstrated a seemingly simple - but in fact sophisticated - way to create LED lights that change in a natural way to a cozy, warm white color when dimmed," said Hugo ...

Blueberries are super stars among health food advocates, who tout the fruit for not only promoting heart health, better memory and digestion, but also for improving night vision. Scientists have taken a closer look at this latter claim and have found reason to doubt that the popular berry helps most healthy people see better in the dark. Their report appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry. Wilhelmina Kalt and colleagues note that studies published decades ago provided the first hints that blueberries might improve people's night vision. Later lab experiments ...

A new report from the Research Alliance for New York City Schools gives a first look at patterns of college enrollment, persistence, and completion for New York City high school students. "It is rare to be able to track students' trajectories through high school and post-secondary education," said James J. Kemple, executive director of the Research Alliance. "This is the first such study focused on New York City, and it has revealed some encouraging signs, as well as areas in need of greater attention. The findings provide a strong foundation for learning more about the ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. --U.S. children's hospitals delivering the highest-quality care for children undergoing heart surgery, also appear to provide care most efficiently at a low cost, according to research led by the University of Michigan and presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago. Congenital heart defects are the most common birth defects, and each year more than 30,000 congenital heart operations are performed across U.S. children's hospitals. Congenital heart defects are also one of the most expensive pediatric conditions to ...

A Georgia Tech professor is offering an alternative to the celebrated "Turing Test" to determine whether a machine or computer program exhibits human-level intelligence. The Turing Test - originally called the Imitation Game - was proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950. In practice, some applications of the test require a machine to engage in dialogue and convince a human judge that it is an actual person. Creating certain types of art also requires intelligence observed Mark Riedl, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, ...

Empagliflozin (trade name Jardiance) has been approved since May 2014 for adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus in whom diet and exercise alone do not provide adequate glycaemic control. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether the drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies in these patient groups. According to the findings, such an added benefit is not proven: For four of five research questions, the manufacturer presented no relevant data in its dossier. For the fifth ...

Following a 5,000 km long ocean survey, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents a new way to measure how the acidification of water is affecting marine ecosystems over an entire oceanic basin. As a result of man-made emissions, the content of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans has increased dramatically during recent decades. In the ocean, the accumulating CO2 is gradually acidifying the surface waters, making it harder for shelled organisms like corals (Figure 1) and certain open sea plankton to build their calcium carbonate ...

Flexible electronic sensors based on paper -- an inexpensive material -- have the potential to some day cut the price of a wide range of medical tools, from helpful robots to diagnostic tests. Scientists have now developed a fast, low-cost way of making these sensors by directly printing conductive ink on paper. They published their advance in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Anming Hu and colleagues point out that because paper is available worldwide at low cost, it makes an excellent surface for lightweight, foldable electronics that could be made and ...

Now that car makers have demonstrated through hybrid vehicle success that consumers want less-polluting tailpipes, they are shifting even greener. In 2015, Toyota will roll out the first hydrogen fuel-cell car for personal use that emits only water. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, explains how hydrogen could supplant hybrid and electric car technology -- and someday, even spur the demise of the gasoline engine. Melody M. Bomgardner, a senior editor at C&EN, notes that the first fuel-cell vehicles ...

Exposure to peanut proteins in household dust may be a trigger of peanut allergy, according to a study published today in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The study was conducted in 359 children aged 3-15 months taking part in the NIH-sponsored Consortium for Food Allergy Research (CoFAR) study. These children were at high risk of developing a peanut allergy based on having likely milk or egg allergy or eczema. The study found that the risk of having strong positive allergy tests to peanut increased with increasingly higher amounts of peanut found in ...

UCLA biochemists have created the largest-ever protein that self-assembles into a molecular "cage." The research could lead to synthetic vaccines that protect people from the flu, HIV and other diseases. At a size hundreds of times smaller than a human cell, it also could lead to new methods of delivering pharmaceuticals inside of cells, or to the creation of new nanoscale materials. The protein assembly, which is shaped like a cube, was constructed from 24 copies of a protein designed in the laboratory of Todd Yeates, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry. ...

A new treatment for Marfan syndrome, a rare genetic disease that can lead to heart problems, works as well as the currently recommended medical therapy, beta blockers, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Angela Sharkey, M.D., professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University, and a study author, said researchers found losartan, which had been more effective in an animal model of Marfan syndrome, was equally effective to a high dose of the beta blocker atenolol. "While there may be certain patients who respond better to one drug or another, ...

Researchers from the University of Melbourne found unlike other laser treatments, this new faster laser did not result in damage to the retina, the sensitive light detecting tissue at the back of the eye. Associate Professor Erica Fletcher from the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience said this was the first report detailing how this new laser treatment may improve eye health in those with AMD. In the early stages, the disease is characterised by the presence of small fatty deposits called drusen and thickening in a membrane at the back of the eye. Published this ...

Barcelona, Spain: A new drug that targets not only common cancer-causing genetic mutations in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but also a form of the mutation that causes resistance to treatment, has shown promising results in patients in a phase I/II clinical trial. The research will be presented today (Friday) at the 26th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Barcelona, Spain. Approximately 10-15% of Caucasian and 30-35% of Asian patients with NSCLC have a mutation in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which ...

If it's help a woman needs, maybe she should wear high heels. That's the message from Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, after he observed how helpful men are towards women in high heels versus those wearing flat, sensible shoes. The study, published in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the first ever to investigate how the height of a woman's shoe heel influences how men behave towards her. Research across various cultures has shown at length how important physical features, such as body size and the style and color ...

Approximately 40 percent of the earth's surface is covered by drylands in which average annual precipitation is lower than evaporation. The changes projected to unfold in these areas in the course of climate change are alarming. Greater variations in annual and seasonal precipitation will lead to more frequent droughts and, presumably, longer drought periods. This means that drylands are among those areas most severely affected by climate change. Research has thus far not adequately addressed the question of how strongly annual plant growth in pasture landscapes - hence ...

Time ravages mountains, as it does people. Sharp features soften, and bodies grow shorter and rounder. But under the right conditions, some mountains refuse to age. In a new study, scientists explain why the ice-covered Gamburtsev Mountains in the middle of Antarctica looks as young as they do. The Gamburtsevs were discovered in the 1950s, but remained unexplored until scientists flew ice-penetrating instruments over the mountains 60 years later. As this ancient hidden landscape came into focus, scientists were stunned to see the saw-toothed and towering crags of much ...

Researchers from China, the Philippines and LSTM have today published a new systematic review of reminder systems to improve patient adherence to tuberculosis (TB) treatment. Reminder systems include prompts in advance of a forthcoming appointment to help ensure the patients attend, and also actions when people miss an appointment, such as phoning them or arranging a home visit. This review is the latest in a suite of reviews produced by authors from the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, hosted at LSTM, evaluating interventions to improve adherence to TB treatment. Effective ...