Rome, Italy, 10 June 2015: The results of a study presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2015) Press Conference showed that patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) taking conventional DMARD therapy who have moderate disease activity have a similar risk of joint failure that requires surgery as those with high disease activity. In some countries, additional treatment with a biological DMARD is based on a disease activity cut-off that excludes RA patients with moderate disease activity. These findings suggest it is not just ...

Men benefit from one-time screening for abdominal aortic aneurysms via ultrasound. Studies provide proof that their risk of dying is reduced, the abdominal aorta ruptures less often, and emergency surgery can be avoided more often. Far fewer data are available for women and they show no relevant differences between the groups investigated. This is the result of the final report published on 28 May 2015 by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG). Rupture is often fatal, even if emergency surgery is performed An abdominal aortic aneurysm ...

Petrel fledglings leave the nest after dark, but these marine birds' maiden flights towards the sea are hampered by city lights. Many collide or fall to the ground where they are in danger of being run over and vulnerable to predators. Now, a study has evaluated the impact of light pollution on three species of petrels on the Balearic Islands, including the Balearic shearwater, the most threatened sea bird in Europe, and concludes that between 30 and 47% of colonies are exposed to high levels of light pollution. This is not a new phenomenon. The dangers that fledglings ...

"Let's synchronize our watches." It's the classic line before a group goes out on a mission. We are all familiar with the concept of synchronized clocks - less known, but equally important, is that wireless devices need to be synchronized too. However, instead of requiring a precision of minutes, wireless devices have to make their clocks match within very small fractions of a second. This so-called "clock synchronization" is needed for a large range of purposes - from increasing cellphone coverage, to increasing data speed rates, to enabling precision localization in ...

Britain, Queensland, Israel, Poland - 2015 has been a year of electoral polling failure and it could have major implications on election outcomes, say QUT economics researchers. The recent definitive Conservative win in the recent British elections, when polling had produced the near universal prediction of a 'hung parliament', mirrors Labor's surprise win in Queensland where the election outcome was unrelated to the poll prediction, says Professor Lionel Page from QUT's Queensland Behavioural Economics Group (QuBE). "The magnitude of the failure to predict these elections' ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) is an infectious disease that affects the immune system of cattle, causing immunodeficiency and in some cases triggering the development of leukemia or solid tumors in the form of lymphomas. This illness causes significant losses in productivity and even premature death of animals mostly in dairy farms. It also raises sanitary barriers for commerce of livestock and derived goods. As such, it has become a very prevalent veterinary issue, notably in Uruguay, which needs urgent solving. BLV is a virus ...

Coral colonies are more genetically diverse than it has been assumed to date. This is the conclusion drawn by biologists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, who have conducted comprehensive studies into the genetic variability in individual colonies of different reef-forming coral species. "However, this doesn't mean we should expect that this variability can compensate for corals dying worldwide due to climate change," says Maximilian Schweinsberg from the Department of Animal Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity, headed by Prof Dr Ralph Tollrian. In collaboration with colleagues, ...

A systematic review publishing today in the journal Human Reproduction Update has found that women who suffer from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) could manage some of the symptoms by combining a change in lifestyle with taking the drug metformin. PCOS is associated with a range of features including irregular cycles, infertility, obesity, diabetes, and depression. Researchers at Monash University in Australia compared the effects of change in lifestyle alone or with placebo, to lifestyle plus metformin. They found that lifestyle changes combined with taking metformin ...

A previously unknown link between the immune system and the death of motor neurons in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, has been discovered by scientists at the CHUM Research Centre and the University of Montreal. The finding paves the way to a whole new approach for finding a drug that can cure or at least slow the progression of such neurodegenerative diseases as ALS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. The study, published today in Nature Communications, shows that the immune system in the animal model C. elegans, ...

New York, June 10 -- A new paper in the British Medical Journal by Jan Blustein, M.D., Ph.D., of New York University's Wagner School and a professor of Medicine and Population Health at NYU School of Medicine and Jianmeng Liu, M.D., Ph.D., of Peking University examines the evidence as to whether newborns delivered by Cesarean section are more likely to develop chronic diseases later in life. While the jury is still out and research is ongoing, recent studies underscore the need for health care providers to discuss with expectant parents the risk of babies born through cesarean ...

Companies are spending increasing amounts on cybersecurity tools, but aren't convinced their data is truly secure and many chief information security officers believe that attackers are gaining on their defenses, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Charting the future of cybersecurity is difficult because so much is shrouded in secrecy, no one is entirely certain of all the methods malicious hackers use to infiltrate systems and businesses do not want to disclose their safety measures, according to the report. While worldwide spending on cybersecurity is close ...

CLEVELAND, June 10 -- The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is increasing for the treatment of menopausal symptoms but often without the guidance of a clinician. That's according to a new study reported online today in Menopause, the journal of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS). As a result, the authors suggest that healthcare providers -- in particular family medicine practitioners -- need to be more aware of the various CAM therapies and take a more active role in guiding patients through their options to more safely and effectively coordinate ...

Almost one in every 150 babies born in the UK is stillborn or dies soon after birth. A research team led from the University of Leicester has identified large differences across the UK in the numbers and rates of babies who die, even after taking account of known factors that influence the rate of death such as poverty, mother's age and ethnicity. A new report by MBRRACE-UK*, a team of academics, clinicians and charity representatives (commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership** as part of the Maternal, Newborn and Infant Clinical Outcome Review Programme), ...

Brood parasites are reproductive cheats that evolve ways of duping other birds into raising their young. Examples such as mimicry of host eggs, chicks and fledglings by brood parasitic eggs, chicks and fledglings are amongst the most iconic examples of animal deception in nature. New research shows that adult brood parasitic female cuckoo finches have evolved plumage colours and patterns to mimic a harmless and abundant species, such as southern red bishops, to deceive possible host birds and reduce the risk of being attacked when approaching host nests to lay their eggs. ...

A young woman has become the first in the world to give birth to a healthy child after doctors restored her fertility by transplanting ovarian tissue that had been removed and frozen while she was a child. A report of the case is published today in Human Reproduction [1], one of the world's leading reproductive medicine journals. While there have been reports of successful pregnancies after ovarian transplantation using tissue that had been removed from patients when they were adults, there have been none using tissue taken from girls before puberty and the ability of ...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that the most complete giant sauropod dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus, discovered by palaeontologists in South America in 2014, was not as large as previously thought. Found in Patagonia, the huge fossil had almost all of the major bones intact, allowing scientists to confidently estimate its overall size - measuring in at 26 metres long. Preserved in rock, it is thought that the animal was close to maturity but not fully grown when it died, and may have grown to be even larger. The long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur was ...

Having a hierarchical social structure with just a few well-connected leaders enables pigeon flocks to navigate more accurately on the wing, new research shows. Hierarchical organisation also enables flocks to cope better with navigation errors made by individual birds. Researchers from Oxford University and the Zoological Society of London created 'virtual flocks' of homing pigeons to test how different social networks affect the navigation performance of these groups. The team's simulations looked at everything from no networks (all connections between individuals ...

A single dose of the bivalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine (Cervarix®, GlaxoSmithKline group of companies) may offer a similar level of protection against HPV-16/18 infections, which cause about 70% of cervical cancers, as the current two- and three-dose schedules, according to new research combining data from two large phase 3 trials published in The Lancet Oncology. "Our findings question the number of HPV vaccine doses truly needed to protect the majority of women against cervical cancer, and suggest that a one-dose schedule should be further evaluated. ...

NEW YORK, June 9 -- The World Health Organization released its 2015 updated essential medicines list and for the first time included the progesterone contraceptive vaginal ring (CVR), a contraceptive safe and effective for lactating women in the postpartum period. The progesterone CVR, developed by the Population Council, is an intravaginal ring that provides women who breastfeed at least four times a day with a contraceptive option as early as four weeks after giving birth. It can be used for up to a year for improved birth spacing. 'More than 220 million women in ...

UC Davis researchers have identified the molecular interactions that allow capsaicin to activate the body's primary receptor for sensing heat and pain, paving the way for the design of more selective and effective drugs to relieve pain. Their study appeared online June 8 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Capsaicin is the ingredient that makes chili peppers spicy and hot. The same pathway in the body that responds to spicy food is also activated after injury or when the immune system mounts an inflammatory response to bacteria, viruses, or in the case of autoimmune ...

Our sun is a volatile star: explosions of light, energy and solar materials regularly dot its surface. Sometimes an eruption is so large it hurls magnetized material into space, sending out clouds that can pass by Earth's own magnetic fields, where the interactions can affect electronics on satellites, GPS communications or even utility grids on the ground. The clouds can be large or small. They can be relatively slow or as fast as 3,000 miles per second, but only one component has a strong effect on how much a CME will arrange the magnetic fields in near-Earth space. ...

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found a three to five percent reduction in the probability of criminal recidivism among a sample of juveniles arrested for felony drug offenses, some of whom were processed as adults due to their age at the time of their arrests. In a study published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Charles Loeffler, an assistant professor of criminology in the School of Arts & Sciences and Ben Grunwald, a doctoral candidate in the criminology department, analyzed the effect of processing juveniles as adults using ...

For engine designers in the digital age, time is money. And that time is measured in computer cycles. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory are partnering with Convergent Science, Inc. (CSI), to speed up a key piece of modeling and simulation software to ensure those cycles are used as effectively as possible, reducing product development time and resulting in better engines and savings for consumers. The scale of the speed gains were recently demonstrated when researchers ran the largest engine simulation to date on more than 4,000 ...

Irvine, Calif., June 9 -- Brain inflammation caused by chronic nerve pain alters activity in regions that regulate mood and motivation, suggesting for the first time that a direct biophysical link exists between long-term pain and the depression, anxiety and substance abuse seen in more than half of these patients, UC Irvine and UCLA researchers report. This breakthrough finding also points to new approaches for treating chronic pain, which is second only to bipolar disorder among illness-related causes of suicide. About a quarter of Americans suffer from chronic pain, ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- Brain lesions in children can be especially challenging to diagnose, according to a report in the journal Frontiers in Neurology by a multidisciplinary team of Loyola University Medical Center physicians. Lesions include tumors, abnormal blood vessel formations and abscesses and inflammation due to infections. In the pediatric population, such lesions 'can have a large variety of underlying etiologies (causes), which can be challenging to differentiate on neuroimaging,' lead author Marisa McGinley, M.D., and colleagues report. The Loyola physicians ...