New Rochelle, NY, August 13, 2014—About 1 in 5 Medicare patients is discharged from hospice care alive, whether due to patients' informed choice, a change in their condition, or inappropriate actions by the hospice to save on hospitalization costs related to terminal illness. How live discharge rates differ between hospice programs and geographic regions, and when those rates should raise red flags are among the issues explored in the article "A National Study of Live Discharges from Hospice" , published in Journal of Palliative Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary ...

The metaphor of a ticking clock is often used to refer to a woman's growing urge – from puberty onwards to menopause – to conceive before her childbearing years are over. New research in Springer's journal Human Nature shows that there's more truth to this phrase than you might think. The subtle sound of a ticking clock can quite literally speed up a woman's reproductive timing. That is, the sound of a ticking clock can lead women to want to start a family at an earlier age, especially if she was raised in a lower socio-economic community. This is according to Justin Moss ...

Numerous wildfires have dotted the Russian landscape this past summer fire season. Although not quite as the adage says, although still true, where there's fire there's smoke. The smoke in this image has drifted from the Eastern Russian wildfires to the Arctic Sea. Other images that have been collected over the summer show both the fires that have broken out and the accompanying smoke. The blaze of a fire is dangerous enough but smoke is an insidious by-product of fires as well. Winds carry the smoke out of the immediate area to other parts of the world not affected ...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed – and misdiagnosed – behavioral disorder in children in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unfortunately, there are currently no reliable physiological markers to diagnose ADHD. Doctors generally diagnose the disorder by recording a medical and social history of the patient and the family, discussing possible symptoms and observing the patient's behavior. But an incorrect evaluation can lead to overmedication with Ritalin (methylphenidate), which has parents ...

n parts of British Columbia, Canada, the Canadian Wildfire Information System's (CWIS) interactive map shows extreme wildfire danger. The area targeted on the map is the area where these wildfires are showing up on this Aqua satellite image from August 12, 2014. The priority fires this week are all within British Columbia and have affected over 142,000 hectares (almost 351,000 acres). According to the CWIS's report for this week: "There have been 637 new fires in the past week. The difference in the area burned in the past week is difficult to gauge, as the Northwest ...

Healthy men participating in the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial who actively participate in all steps of the clinical trial are most likely to undergo a biopsy, according to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention – a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. The Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial which tested the efficacy of finasteride, a drug used for prostate cancer prevention. This study was conducted by SWOG – a cancer research cooperative group that designs and ...

August 13, 2014 – As effective treatments for HIV become more widely available in low- and middle-income countries, there's an urgent need to assess and manage health risks in the growing number of people living with HIV. An update on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among HIV-positive populations in LMICs appears as a supplement to in JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. In an introductory article, Dr K.M. Venkat Narayan of Rollins School of Public Health, ...

CHICAGO (August 13, 2014) – Bacteria that cause life-threatening bloodstream infections in critically ill patients may be growing increasingly resistant to a common hospital antiseptic, according to a recent study led by investigators at Johns Hopkins. The study was published in the September issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. Chlorhexidine gluconate (CHG) has been increasingly used in hospitals in light of recent evidence that daily antiseptic baths for patients in intensive care units ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Twenty-first-century patients typically don't stay in the hospital until they are completely well or totally healed. As hospitalization durations decrease, a significant number of older patients -- about one in five -- are discharged to skilled nursing facilities for continuation or closure of their care. Deciding on the right post-discharge rehabilitation destination is important to future health and quality of life. However, it is a decision for which many patients and families are unprepared and unsupported, according to scientists from the Indiana ...

CHICAGO (August 13, 2014) – Colonization of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) allows people in the community to unknowingly harbor and spread this life-threatening bacteria. The inside of the front of the nose is where this bacteria is most predominant, but new research shows nearly all colonized individuals have this bacteria living in other body sites. The study was published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. "While people colonized with MRSA may not be sick, the bacteria ...

VIDEO: Henry Ford Hospital cardiologist William O'Neill, M.D., Medical Director for the Henry Ford Center for Structural Heart Disease discusses the non-surgical procedure -- the first in the United States --... Click here for more information. DETROIT – For the first time in the United States, doctors at Henry Ford Hospital used a minimally invasive procedure to replace a failing, hard-to-reach heart valve with a new one – and placed it just outside the heart. Due to prior ...

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons in the preoptic area may undergo morphological changes during the pubertal period when their activities are upregulated. To clarify the regulatory mechanism of puberty onset, Dr. Quan Liu and co-workers from the First Hospital of Jilin University, China investigated the morphological changes of GnRH neurons in the preoptic area of GnRH-enhanced green fuorescent protein transgenic rats. Under confocal laser microscopy, pubertal GnRH neurons exhibited an inverted Y distribution pattern. Prepubertal GnRH neurons were generally ...

Previous studies have shown that Yizhijiannao granule can enhance cognitive performance in Alzheimer's disease patients and Alzheimer's disease-model mice. Further studies revealed that Yizhijiannao granule may exert its therapeutic effect by inhibiting neural cell apoptosis, reducing tau phos-phorylation and relieving neuroinflammation. Dr. Hong Zhu and colleagues who come from Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, China treated senescence-accelerated mouse prone 8 mice with Yizhijiannao granule, aiming to identify target-proteins of Yizhijiannao granule ...

Mammalian adult central nerve system (CNS) injuries are devastating because of the intrinsic difficulties for effective neuronal regeneration. The greatest problem to be overcome for CNS recovery is the poor regeneration of neurons and myelin-forming cells, oligodendrocytes. Endogenous neural progenitors and transplanted exogenous neuronal stem cells can be the source for neuronal regeneration. However, because of the harsh local microenvironment, they usually have very low efficacy for functional neural regeneration which cannot compensate for the loss of neurons and oligodendrocytes. ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A team of materials chemists, polymer scientists, device physicists and others at the University of Massachusetts Amherst today report a breakthrough technique for controlling molecular assembly of nanoparticles over multiple length scales that should allow faster, cheaper, more ecologically friendly manufacture of organic photovoltaics and other electronic devices. Details are in the current issue of Nano Letters. Lead investigator, chemist Dhandapani Venkataraman, points out that the new techniques successfully address two major goals for device manufacture: ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Physicians tend to marry later and their marriages last longer even as they face the challenges, like others with demanding professions, of giving time and attention to their partners and families. The University of Michigan Medical School interviewed physicians and spouses to learn how "medical marriages" succeed and the resulting report is rich with data and anecdotes about live-in in-laws, role definition, financial security and the advantage of avoiding the emergency room because Mom or Dad knows how to stitch a bad cut. Published by the Association ...

In the most comprehensive assesment of its type, UNSW Australia-led research has found that in just four years, the HPV vaccine has resulted in a dramatic drop in genital warts in young Australians from a range of backgrounds, a result that could herald further good news for cervical cancer rates in future. The research, which was done in collaboration with the University of Sydney, is based on national hospital admission rates and shows a similar result in the female Indigenous population, which has historically had significantly higher rates of cervical cancer. Genital ...

Declines in ocean productivity, increases in ocean acidification, and the cumulative effects of multiple stressors on ocean health are among the most pressing issues facing coastal and maritime countries, according to a survey of scientists by a University of York researcher. All three issues were ranked in the top five ocean research priorities by oceanographers and marine ecologists from around the globe, in a survey led by Dr Murray Rudd, from York's Environment Department, and reported in Frontiers in Marine Science. The survey asked 2,197 scientists from 94 countries ...

(Boston)—Regular exercise, including brisk walking, is associated with a decrease in the incidence of breast cancer in African American women. In a recently published study in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers from Boston University's Slone Epidemiology Center found strong evidence linking physical exercise to a lower rate of breast cancer in African American women, a group in which previous evidence has been lacking. In a large prospective study of the health of black women, the Black Women's Health Study (BWHS), researchers collected information ...

Materials scientists have long sought to form glass from pure, monoatomic metals. Scott X. Mao and colleagues did it. Their paper, "Formation of Monoatomic Metallic Glasses Through Ultrafast Liquid Quenching," was recently published online in Nature, a leading science journal. Mao, William, Kepler Whiteford Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh, says, "This is a fundamental issue explored by people in this field for a long time, but nobody could solve the problem. People believed that it could be done, and now we're ...

From research stations drifting on ice floes to high-tech aircraft radar, scientists have been tracking the depth of snow that accumulates on Arctic sea ice for almost a century. Now that people are more concerned than ever about what is happening at the poles, research led by the University of Washington and NASA confirms that snow has thinned significantly in the Arctic, particularly on sea ice in western waters near Alaska. A new study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, combines ...

A recent study illustrated that the mode conversion of the ultrasonic guided waves can quantitatively reflect the fracture degree of long cortical bone, which may provide new method for long bone fracture evaluation and healing monitoring. This scientific paper (Quantitative evaluation of long bone fractures by ultrasonic guided waves) is published on SCIENCE CHINA Physica, Mechanica & Astronomica (in Chinese), 2014, 44(7). Professor TA De-an from school of information science and technology, Fudan university leads this study. The impacts of fracture width and depth on ...

Porphyrin molecules are essential to many biological processes, such as photosynthesis and respiration. Dr. Wilhelm Auwärter's group is investigating these all-round talents at TU München. Normally, hydrogen attaches to the outer edges of the porphyrin core – named porphine, but other chemical entities can take the place of hydrogen, thereby changing the properties of the molecules. Alissa Wiengarten, PhD student at the TUM Department of Physics, heats a porphine powder in a vacuum chamber. In the process, individual porphine molecules leave the collective and adhere ...

An innovative physical activities guide developed at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) is helping North Carolina fight childhood obesity. New research shows that when teachers direct these physical activities, young children become more active and less sedentary. "In the past twenty years, childhood obesity rates have skyrocketed," said FPG investigator Allison De Marco. "And for the first time in over a century, children's life expectancies are declining because of increased numbers of overweight kids." De Marco said these statistics are especially ...

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health say they have discovered a new clue to understanding how the most important medication for tuberculosis (TB) works to attack dormant TB bacteria in order to shorten treatment. The antibiotic Pyrazinamide (PZA) has been used to treat TB since the 1950s, but its mechanisms are the least understood of all TB drugs. The PZA findings may help researchers identify new and more effective drugs not only for TB – which can require six months or more of treatment – but other persistent bacterial infections. A report ...