With age, postmenopausal women with osteoporosis are at greater risk of losing their teeth. But what treatment for tooth loss provides women with the highest degree of satisfaction in their work and social lives? A new study by Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine researchers suggests dental implants may be the best route to take, according to Leena Palomo, associate professor of periodontics and corresponding author of "Dental Implant Supported Restorations Improve the Quality of Life in Osteoporotic Women." Their findings were reported in the ...

URBANA, Ill. - Threonine is an indispensable amino acid, which is often provided in supplement form in swine diets. With U.S. production of crystalline amino acids increasing, more co-products from amino acid production are becoming available, and these co-products can also be fed to pigs. Researchers at the University of Illinois are investigating a co-product of synthetic threonine as a lower-cost alternative protein source to fish meal. "To create synthetic threonine, you ferment a carbohydrate substrate using selected strains of bacteria, then extract the crystalline ...

Having had community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) greatly increases the risk of long-term morbidity and mortality compared to the general population who have never had CAP, according to a new study from researchers in Canada, the longest and largest outcomes study of patients with CAP reported to date. "Although the short-term adverse health consequences of CAP are well known, the long-term effects of the disease are less clear," said Dean T. Eurich, PhD, MSc, BSP, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. "In our large population-based study of more than ...

A "look back" study of Medicare fee-for-service claims for more than 1.2 million patients over age 65 has directly affirmed and quantified a long-suspected link between lower rates of coordinated health care services and higher rates of unnecessary medical tests and procedures. In a report on the study published online May 18 in JAMA Internal Medicine, a trio of Johns Hopkins researchers say they analyzed 5 percent of Medicare claims using a previously validated set of 19 over-used procedures and a measure of so-called continuity of care. Their results showed that 14.7 ...

An analysis of extended follow-up data from the Women's Health Initiative clinical trials suggests that postmenopausal women who were overweight and obese had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer compared to women of normal weight, according to an article published online by JAMA Oncology. Obesity is a major public health problem in the United States and obesity has been associated with breast cancer risk in observational studies, systematic reviews and meta-analyses. However, questions remain. Marian L. Neuhouser, Ph.D., R.D., of the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study suggests that students who initiate and/or continue drinking and engage in binge drinking in college have more delayed sleep timing and more variable sleep schedules. Results show that heavier drinkers had later bedtimes and rise times, and more day-to-day variability in sleep length, bedtime and rise time. "These data indicate that students who initiate drinking and engage in binge drinking in college have more delayed sleep timing and a greater mismatch between circadian phase and sleep timing," said lead author Eliza Van Reen, assistant professor, ...

The third tropical depression of the active Eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season formed and NASA's RapidScat saw its winds coming together as it formed. NASA's Terra satellite provided an image of the storm's cloud extent showing bands of thunderstorms wrapping into its center. RapidScat is a scatterometer instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station and can measure surface winds over the ocean. On June 10 from 07:28 to 09:01 UTC (3:28 to 5:01 a.m. EDT) RapidScat collected wind data on the strengthening tropical low pressure area known as System 94E. ...

Researchers have identified two critical mutations allowing the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus to transmit from bats to humans. The findings were published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Virology. Leading the research was Fang Li, Ph.D., associate professor of Pharmacology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Graduate students Yang Yang and Chang Liu from Professor Fang Li's lab participated in the research. The study was conducted in collaboration with Shibo Jiang, M.D. , Ph.D., and Lanying Du, Ph.D., from the New York Blood ...

Comparing the genomes of different species -- or different members of the same species -- is the basis of a great deal of modern biology. DNA sequences that are conserved across species are likely to be functionally important, while variations between members of the same species can indicate different susceptibilities to disease. The basic algorithm for determining how much two sequences of symbols have in common -- the "edit distance" between them -- is now more than 40 years old. And for more than 40 years, computer science researchers have been trying to improve upon ...

PHILADELPHIA -- More than one-third of counties in the Unites States are located more than 50 miles from the nearest gynecologic oncologist, making access to specialty care for ovarian and other gynecologic cancers difficult for nearly 15 million women. While most of these "low access" counties are located in the Mountain-West and Midwest regions, the findings of a recent study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania also reveal that 47 states have at least one county located more than 50 miles from the nearest gynecologic oncologist. ...

PHILADELPHIA - According to a new study, women experiencing difficulty with time management, attention, organization, memory, and problem solving - often referred to as executive functions - related to menopause may find improvement with a drug already being used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is the first to show that lisdexamfetamine (LDX) improved subjective and objective measures of cognitive decline commonly experienced in menopausal women. Results ...

Researchers from Boston Children's Hospital and Merck have built the beginnings of "digital phenotype" of insomnia and other sleep disorders based on data from Twitter. This study, published today in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is one of the first to look at relationships between social media use and sleep issues, and--based on assessments the sentiments expressed in users' tweets--gives preliminary hints that patients with sleep disorders may be a greater risk of psychosocial issues. The study--led by Jared Hawkins, PhD; David McIver, PhD; and John Brownstein, ...

Philadelphia, PA - "The impact of human mobility on disease dynamics has been the focus of mathematical epidemiology for many years, especially since the 2002-03 SARS outbreak, which showed that an infectious agent can spread across the globe very rapidly via transportation networks," says mathematician Gergely Röst. Röst is co-author of a paper to be published this week in the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems that presents a mathematical model to study the effects of individual movement on infectious disease spread. "More recently, the risk of polio ...

Washington D.C., June 11, 2015 - A study published in the June 2015 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry demonstrates that the atypical trajectory of cortical/brain development in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) extends well beyond young childhood and into late adolescence and young adulthood. A considerable amount of work has focused on early structural brain development in ASD utilizing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This body of work has revealed evidence for brain overgrowth during the early postnatal years that appears ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--An MIT team has developed a way of making soft materials, using a 3-D printer, with surface textures that can then be modified at will to be perfectly smooth, or ridged or bumpy, or even to have complex patterns that could be used to guide fluids. The process, developed using detailed computer simulations, involves a material that is composed of two different polymers with different degrees of stiffness: More rigid particles are embedded within a matrix of a more flexible polymer. When squeezed, the material's surface changes from smooth to a pattern ...

June 11, 2015 - The well-known "fight or flight" response is part of the inborn series of defense/fear responses activated in reaction to threats. Understanding the steps of the defense cascade can help in forming effective treatments for patients dealing with persistent aftereffects of trauma, according to a review in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. Child and adolescent psychiatrist Kasia Kozlowska of The Children's Hospital at Westmead, Australia, and colleagues explain the five steps of the defense cascade, in a framework ...

In a study that seems to defy conventional dietary wisdom, University of Iowa scientists have found that adding high salt to a high-fat diet actually prevents weight gain in mice. As exciting as this may sound to fast food lovers, the researchers caution that very high levels of dietary salt are associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease in humans. Rather than suggest that a high salt diet is suddenly a good thing, the researchers say these findings really point to the profound effect non-caloric dietary nutrients can have on energy balance and weight gain. "People ...

This news release is available in German. Small heat shock proteins ensure that other proteins do not clot, allowing the cell to survive stress. Defects in these "small helpers" are associated with medical conditions like cataracts and cancer. Now, scientists at the Technische Universität München (TUM) have characterized a small heat shock protein responsible for embryonic development in the Caenorhabditis elegans nematode. Presumably, a similar protein exists also in humans. Like humans, cells often face catastrophic situations. Even though cells are ...

PETALUMA, California--A recent study published in the journal Conservation Biology makes a strong case for a new approach to conservation planning that uses much more robust data sets in order to better protect birds, plants, and animals. The concept is fairly simple, but won't work unless scientists can agree to share data across studies. "Right now, we primarily only use presence and absence data for species when conservation planning for large landscapes. Much of this is due to the cost and time of collecting more comprehensive data," said the study's lead author, ...

Cuckoo finches in Africa have adopted a unique disguise to help them lay their eggs in other birds' nests, biologists have found. The cuckoo finch in Zambia has evolved to be almost indistinguishable from common and harmless female weaver birds, such as the southern red bishop, said Dr William Feeney, from The Australian National University (ANU). "The cuckoo finch is so similar to the innocent bishops, that the target of the trickery, the tawny-flanked prinia, cannot tell them apart," said Dr Feeney, who did his PhD at the ANU Research School of Biology before taking ...

Stem cells are especially sensitive to oxygen radicals and antioxidants shows new research from the group of Anu Wartiovaara in the Molecular Neurology Research Program of University of Helsinki. The research led by researcher Riikka Martikainen was published in Cell Reports -journal May 28th 2015. Mitochondria are cellular power plants that use oxygen to produce energy. As a by-product they produce reactive oxygen. Excessive oxygen radicals may cause damage to cells but they are needed in small quantities as important cellular signaling molecules. One of their main ...

A team of Swedish researchers finds that early cardiopulmonary resuscitation more than doubles the chance of survival for patients suffering out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The percentage of patients who receive life-saving resuscitation has also increased substantially thanks to so-called SMS Lifesavers. These results are published simultaneously in two studies in the highly reputed New England Journal of Medicine. The two studies were conducted by researchers at the Center for Resuscitation Science at Karolinska Institutet and Södersjukhuset (Stockholm South General ...

A paper published today in the International Journal of Epidemiology confirms a link between peanut and nut intake and lower mortality rates, but finds no protective effect for peanut butter. Men and women who eat at least 10 grams of nuts or peanuts per day have a lower risk of dying from several major causes of death than people who don't consume nuts or peanuts. The reduction in mortality was strongest for respiratory disease, neurodegenerative disease, and diabetes, followed by cancer and cardiovascular diseases. The effects are equal in men and women. Peanuts show ...

Rome, Italy, 11 June 2015: The results of a large population study presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2015) showed an increased risk of developing Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) among psoriasis patients exposed to physical trauma, particularly when the trauma involved bone and/or joints. "This is the first sizable population-based cohort study to determine the risk of PsA following trauma in psoriasis patients," said Dr Thorvardur Love, senior author from Landspitali University Hospital, Iceland. "Our findings highlight the importance ...

Rome, June 11 -- The results of a study presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2015) show that diclofenac, naproxen and etoricoxib significantly inhibit ovulation in women with mild musculoskeletal pain. Of the women receiving NSAIDs, only 6.3 percent (diclofenac), 25 percent (naproxen) and 27.3 percent (etoricoxib) ovulated, compared with 100 percent of the control group. These findings suggest that readily available non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) could have a harmful effect on fertility, and should be used ...