Washington, D.C. - June 23, 2015 - Researchers have identified a new class of antifungals to treat the more than 300 million people worldwide who develop serious fungal infections. The research is described in the current issue of mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. "Fungal infections are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide and current antifungal drugs have drawbacks. These new drugs may pave the way for the development of a new class of antifungals," said principal investigator Maurizio Del Poeta, MD, a ...

Every time you've seen a plane take off or land at a hub airport, you've seen the world growing more connected, according to a new model developed by researchers at MIT. In a study published in the journal Transportation Research Part E, the MIT team outlines a model that determines the degree to which regions around the world are connected via air transportation. The researchers, at MIT's Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment (LAE), analyzed flight schedules between 1990 and 2012 from more than 1,100 airlines connecting over 4,600 airports around the world. ...

The early diagnosis of certain types of cancer, as well as nervous system diseases such as multiple sclerosis and neuromyelitis optica, may soon be facilitated by the use of a nanometric sensor capable of identifying biomarkers of these pathological conditions. The nanobiosensor was developed at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Sorocaba, in partnership with the São Paulo Federal Institute of Education, Science & Technology (IFSP), Itapetininga, São Paulo State, Brazil. It was originally designed to detect herbicides, heavy metals and other ...

Irvine, Calif., June 23 -- By identifying in spinal fluid how the characteristic mutant proteins of Huntington's disease spread from cell to cell, UC Irvine scientists and colleagues have created a new method to quickly and accurately track the presence and proliferation of these neuron-damaging compounds -- a discovery that may accelerate the development of new drugs to treat this incurable disease. The researchers added that the cell-to-cell "seeding" property of these mutant proteins seems to be a critical part of the disease's progression. Their findings also advance ...

A rigorous analysis of more than 20,000 medical records concludes that erectile dysfunction drugs, such as Viagra, are not a cause of melanoma, an often deadly form of skin cancer, despite the higher risk for the disease among users of these drugs. A detailed report on the research findings is to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association online June 23. The analysis, led by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center, of medical records for some 20,235 mostly white men suggests instead that the likely ...

DURHAM, N.C. - Heart attack patients age 65 and older who have reduced heart function might still benefit from implanted defibrillators, according to a Duke Medicine study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But fewer than 1 in 10 eligible patients actually get a defibrillator within a year of their heart attacks, the study found. Advanced age, transitions in care between the hospital and an outpatient clinic, and a mandatory waiting period to get a defibrillator after a heart attack were the most likely factors for low rates of use, according ...

Among Medicare patients who experienced a heart attack from 2007 to 2010, fewer than 1 in 10 eligible patients with low ejection fraction (a measure of how well the left ventricle of the heart pumps blood with each beat) received an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) within 1 year after the heart attack, even though ICD implantation was associated with a lower risk of death at 2 years after implantation, according to a study in the June 23/30 issue of JAMA. More than 350,000 people experience sudden cardiac death in the United States annually. Clinical trials ...

Among men in Sweden, use of erectile dysfunctions drugs with phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors was associated with a modest but significant increased risk of malignant melanoma, although the pattern of association raises questions about whether this association is causal, according to a study in the June 23/30 issue of JAMA. Phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5; an enzyme), the target of oral erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs, is part of a pathway that has been implicated in the development of malignant melanoma. This has raised questions whether PDE5 inhibitors used to treat ...

Among extremely preterm infants, early screening for the vascular disorder patent ductus arteriosus before day 3 of life was associated with a lower risk of in-hospital death and pulmonary hemorrhage, but not with differences in other severe complications, according to a study in the June 23/30 issue of JAMA. The ductus arteriosus is a blood vessel in a fetus that bypasses pulmonary circulation by connecting the pulmonary artery directly to the ascending aorta. It usually closes within 72 hours of birth in most normal-term infants. However, failure to close is common ...

In an analysis of the findings of nearly 80 randomized trials that included about 6,500 participants, there was moderate-quality evidence to support the use of cannabinoids (chemical compounds that are the active principles in cannabis or marijuana) for the treatment of chronic pain and lower-quality evidence suggesting that cannabinoids were associated with improvements in nausea and vomiting due to chemotherapy, sleep disorders, and Tourette syndrome, according to a study in the June 23/30 issue of JAMA. Medical cannabis refers to the use of cannabis or cannabinoids ...

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) ...