An analysis of edible medical marijuana products from 3 major metropolitan areas found that many had lower amounts of key substances than labeled, which may not produce the desired medical benefit, while others contained significantly more of a certain substance than labeled, placing patients at risk of experiencing adverse effects, according to a study in the June 23/30 issue of JAMA. As the use of cannabis (marijuana) for medical purposes has expanded, a variety of edible products for oral consumption has been developed. An estimated 16 percent to 26 percent of patients ...

In a proof-of-concept study, a team led by a Johns Hopkins researcher reports that the vast majority of edible cannabis products sold in a small sample of medical marijuana dispensaries carried labels that overstated or understated the amount of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Though the scope of the study was small, the researchers say, the results of the study suggest some medical cannabis patients could be unintentionally overdosing or are being cheated by mislabeled products. "If this study is representative of the medical cannabis market, we may have hundreds ...

BOSTON, June 23 -- In a Viewpoint published today in the Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA), researchers from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and Boston Children's Hospital call on the federal government to drop restrictions on total fat consumption in the forthcoming 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Co-authors Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., Dr.P.H., dean of the Friedman School, and David Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D., director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children's Hospital, highlight a key, ...

ANN ARBOR--A months-long literature search that involved tracking down century-old scientific papers and translating others from Czech and French helped University of Michigan ecologist Meghan Duffy answer a question she'd wondered about for years. The early studies helped Duffy determine that the microscopic aquatic parasite she first observed as a graduate student, and which her research team had recently collected in more than a dozen southeast Michigan lakes, is the same fungus-like organism that a French biologist first described in 1903. "The longer historical ...

U.S. consumers are often urged to "buy American," and some special interest groups even claim that buying foreign products is inappropriate, or even immoral. But when it comes to buying domestic products, positive feelings for one's own country may play a more important role than negative feelings toward another, according to a new study in the Journal of International Marketing. "National identity--feeling proud to be, say, an American--and believing that Americans should not buy foreign products influence attitudes toward domestic products, but the impact of national ...

More than four out of five counselors who treat patients for substance abuse have experienced some form of patient-initiated workplace violence according to the first national study to examine the issue, led by Georgia State University Professor Brian E. Bride. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, is the first to measure the extent of workplace violence in substance abuse treatment centers across the United States. Bride and his co-authors analyzed a large, national sample of Substance Use Disorder counselors from the National Institutes ...

Everyone in China knows global automobile brands such as Ford and Chevrolet. But do those brands really sell better than local ones such as Senova or Eado? The answer is yes, and the reason lies in a complicated mix of brand recognition and local culture, according to a new study in the Journal of International Marketing. "In countries such as China with strong class divisions, internationally recognized brands can be a way of conveying wealth, prestige, and status," write authors M. Berk Talay (University of Massachusetts), Janell D. Townsend (Oakland University), and ...

ANN ARBOR--A University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues are forecasting a slightly below-average but still significant "dead zone" this summer in the Chesapeake Bay, the nation's largest estuary. The 2015 Chesapeake Bay forecast calls for an oxygen-depleted, or hypoxic, region of 1.37 cubic miles, about 10 percent below the long-term average. The forecast was released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which sponsors the work. Farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste is the main source of the nitrogen and phosphorus ...

CAMDEN, N.J. -- How do we remember colors? What makes green... green? As Sarah Allred explains, while color perception universally involves the practice of categorizing colors according to basic labels, the influence of categorization on color memory remains largely unknown and understudied. 'So that leaves a lot of questions unanswered,' says Allred, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Camden. ''Do we remember colors just as we saw them?', 'Does time affect how we remember colors?', 'Are some colors easier to remember than others?'' Thanks ...

Just because more men pursue careers in science and engineering does not mean they are actually better at math than women are. The difference is that men think they are much better at math than they really are. Women, on the other hand, tend to accurately estimate their arithmetic prowess, says Shane Bench of Washington State University in the U.S., leader of a study in Springer's journal Sex Roles. There is a sizeable gap between the number of men and women who choose to study and follow careers in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics ...

Unauthorized immigrants pay billions more into Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund each year than they withdraw in health benefits, according to research from Harvard Medical School, the Institute for Community Health and the City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College. The study appeared last Thursday as an "online first" article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. In 2011 alone, unauthorized immigrants paid in $3.5 billion more than they utilized in care. Unauthorized immigrants generated an average surplus of $316 per capita ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards "the Internet of things" -- the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes -- or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge. Last ...

Many primary care physicians - the top prescribers of prescription pain pills in the United States - don't understand basic facts about how people may abuse the drugs or how addictive different formulations of the medications can be, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests. This lack of understanding may be contributing to the ongoing epidemic of prescription opioid abuse and addiction in the U.S. Reporting online June 23 in the Clinical Journal of Pain, the researchers found that nearly half of the internists, family physicians and general ...

A scientific collaboration, involving the Manchester Centre for Genomic Medicine (MCGM) at Saint Mary's Hospital, UK, and the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM) in Naples, Italy, has pinpointed the genetic cause of a rare form of blindness, which can present itself as a key-hole shaped defect in the eye in newborn babies. The condition is known as inherited retinal dystrophy associated with ocular coloboma. Coloboma is one of a number of developmental genetic disorders that collectively represent important causes of visual disability affecting one ...

Weight-conscious consumers are often drawn to foods such as Clif Bars and Wheaties, whose packaging suggests that they promote fitness. But according to a new study in the Journal of Marketing Research, such "fitness branding" encourages consumers to eat more of those foods and to exercise less, potentially undermining their efforts to lose or control their weight. "Unless a food was forbidden by their diet, branding the product as 'fit' increased consumption for those trying to watch their weight," write authors Joerg Koenigstorfer (Technische Universität München) ...

Does your thirteen-year-old daughter rush headlong toward that Taylor Swift poster she sees in Target? Chances are, the thrill she feels at seeing the poster will carry over to the unrelated notebooks, protractors, and pencil boxes nearby, says a new study in the Journal of Marketing Research. "Marketers typically don't consider that the emotions produced in one marketing message may be influencing more than just our feelings toward the targeted product," write authors Jonathan Hasford (Florida International University), David M. Hardesty (University of Kentucky), and ...

Consumers might like variety when it comes to products to buy, but will using a product in a variety of circumstances and in a variety of ways lead consumers to like it more? Probably not, says a new study in the Journal of Marketing Research. According to the study, the more a consumer uses a product for different purposes or in different situations, the more likely he or she will report being unsatisfied with their purchase. "Consumers often use the same product in the same way in multiple situations, and these situations may differ in variety," write authors Jordan ...

Given that depression is characterized by intense and frequent negative feelings, like sadness, it might seem logical to develop interventions that target those negative feelings. But new research suggests that even when depressed people have the opportunity to decrease their sadness, they don't necessarily try to do so. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Our findings show that, contrary to what we might expect, depressed people sometimes choose to behave in a manner that increases rather than ...

If the packaging has an appealing design, primary school children also reach for healthy foods. This was revealed in a study in cooperation with the Research Institute for Child Nutrition in Dortmund under the direction of scientists from the University of Bonn. The results are being published in advance online in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The final version will be published shortly. Children are especially eager to reach for snacks if the packaging has an appealing design. 'The food industry has a lot of experience in using marketing effects to increase product ...

Positive customer feedback, to say nothing of positive sales, is always a good sign of a new product's potential success, right? Not necessarily, says a new study in the Journal of Marketing Research. According to the study, there is a small set of consumers who, time and again, purchase and rave about new products that consistently flop. Positive feedback from those customers, whom the study authors name "harbingers of failure," actually means that a product is likely to bomb. "Certain customers systematically purchase new products that prove unsuccessful," write authors ...

This news release is available in German. Patients with type 2 diabetes have a dysfunctional sugar metabolism because the essential hormone insulin does not work effectively. Once the disease reaches an advanced stage, the body stops producing insulin altogether, which means that it has to be administered externally. Type 2 diabetes most commonly occurs in late adulthood, and it has long been known that it can affect the patient's mental health: Patients have a greater risk of developing dementia than non-diabetics. However, how does antidiabetic medication influence ...

Obesity and excess weight, and their negative impact on health, have become a significant focus for physicians and other health-care experts in recent years. But new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that an escalation in the number of those considered obese or overweight in the United States continues, signaling an ongoing upward swing in chronic health conditions as well. The study is available online June 22 in JAMA Internal Medicine. Compared with a similar study published in 1999 that estimated 63 percent of men and 55 percent ...

A global taskforce of 174 scientists from leading research centres across 28 countries studied the link between mixtures of commonly encountered chemicals and the development of cancer. The study selected 85 chemicals not considered carcinogenic to humans and found 50 supported key cancer-related mechanisms at exposures found in the environment today. Longstanding concerns about the combined and additive effects of everyday chemicals prompted the organisation Getting To Know Cancer led by Leroy Lowe from Halifax Nova Scotia, to put the team together - pitching what ...

WASHINGTON -- Using a simple structure comprising a mirror and an absorbing layer to take advantage of the wave properties of light, researchers at Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, have developed a display technology that harnesses natural ambient light to produce an unprecedented range of colors and superior viewing experience. An article describing their innovative approach appears today in The Optical Society's new high-impact journal Optica. This display technology, which could greatly reduce the amount of power used in multiple ...

The test has produced encouraging results in a clinical study, and will now be tested in a larger trial involving three hospitals in London. Researchers analysed breath samples of 210 patients using the test. They found that the test can discriminate between malignant and benign oesophageal cancer in patients for the first time. The test is 90 per cent accurate and provides results in minutes, which can take up to four to six hours to process using other methods. The test can also be applied to detect gastric (stomach) cancer tumours. According to the researchers, ...