CHICAGO - An important new study of men who have undergone testosterone replacement therapy has found that taking supplemental testosterone does not increase their risk of experiencing a major adverse cardiac event, such as a heart attack or stroke. Researchers at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Murray, Utah, which is the flagship facility for the Intermountain Healthcare system, studied 5,695 men between the ages of 53 and 71. The men, all patients at Intermountain Healthcare hospitals, had initial low testosterone levels. Researchers found that ...

WASHINGTON, DC - November 18, 2014 - Certain subtypes of avian influenza viruses have the potential to cause more severe disease in humans than other avian influenza subtypes and should be monitored carefully to prevent spread of disease, according to a study published this week in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The work, directed by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., found that flu viruses expressing the low pathogenicity avian H1, H6, H7, H10 or H15 hemagglutinins ...

(WASHINGTON, November 18, 2014) - New evidence suggests that therapeutic plasma exchange and appropriate blood testing could help patients who are in urgent need of heart surgery, but have a history of an adverse reaction to the blood thinner heparin, according to a study, published online today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). Many patients who take blood thinners will eventually require some form of heart surgery, which requires the administration of large quantities of heparin to prevent clots. Some patients who have taken heparin ...

Mycoplasma gallisepticum causes chronic respiratory disease in birds. The illness particularly affects domestic chicken and turkey flocks. The bacteria are especially life-threatening for the animals when they occur in combination with other infections. In order to control the spread of the disease, poultry farms in the EU must be proven free from Mycoplasma gallisepticum or face being closed. Mycoplasma gallisepticum is related to the human pathogen Mycoplasma pneumoniae, the causative agent of human bronchitis and pneumonia. Mycoplasmas are among the world's smallest ...

New research by a team of European physicists could explain why the universe did not collapse immediately after the Big Bang. Studies of the Higgs particle - discovered at CERN in 2012 and responsible for giving mass to all particles - have suggested that the production of Higgs particles during the accelerating expansion of the very early universe (inflation) should have led to instability and collapse. Scientists have been trying to find out why this didn't happen, leading to theories that there must be some new physics that will help explain the origins of the universe ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Nov. 18, 2014 - Although every person's DNA remains the same throughout their lives, scientists know that it functions differently at different ages. As people age, drastic changes occur in their DNA methylation patterns, which are thought to act as a "second code" on top of the DNA that can lock genes in the on or off position. However, what the consequences of these changes are remains a mystery. To begin deciphering this process, scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center studied methylation patterns in the blood cells of 1,264 persons ...

This news release is available in German. Are the fundamental constants really constant? Recent investigations carried out at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have shown that one essential fundamental constant - namely the mass ratio of protons to electrons - can have changed only by a maximum of one part in a million over the age of our solar system (i.e. extrapolated over approx. 5 billion years). Previously, scientists deemed the possible changes to be twice as high. To obtain this result, physicists from PTB compared caesium and ytterbium atomic ...

Spices and herbs are rich in antioxidants, which may help improve triglyceride concentrations and other blood lipids, according to Penn State nutritionists. Triglyceride levels rise after eating a high-fat meal -- which can lead to an increased risk of heart disease. If a high-antioxidant spice blend is incorporated into the meal, triglyceride levels may be reduced by as much as 30 percent when compared to eating an identical meal without the spice blend. The spiced meal included garlic powder, rosemary, oregano, cinnamon, cloves, paprika, turmeric, ginger and black pepper. Sheila ...

Scientists have discovered how a gene mutation can lead to diseases that occur when the immune system attacks the body by mistake. Understanding how these mechanisms work could help scientists to develop new treatments for autoimmune diseases such as Lupus and neurodegenerative conditions including Motor Neurone Disease. Researchers found that a mutation in the gene - called ADAR1 - causes a defect in an alarm system in our cells that normally protects the body from viruses and other infections. This means that the alarm system is tripped by the cell's own molecules, ...

A new method for examining the Ebola virus genome could make surveillance quicker and cheaper for West African nations, and help detect new forms of the virus. The detailed procedure is being shared with the research community along with the study paper, which is freely available in the open access journal Genome Biology. With over 13,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths in eight affected countries, the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest to date, the first to spread to densely populated urban areas, and represents the first time the virus has been diagnosed ...

Celiac disease patients suffer from gluten intolerance and must adjust to a life without gluten from food sources like wheat, rye and barley. There is no treatment of the disease except lifelong gluten-free diet, but now a Danish/Norwegian research team publishes new research, that may lead to the development of a drug against the disease. Gluten intolerance is often caused by celiac disease, which makes the human organism sensitive to gluten proteins from certain cereals. No known drug can cure the disease or make the patient able to eat gluten again, and therefore the ...

A new study has shown for the first time how people can be trained to "see" letters of the alphabet as colours in a way that simulates how those with synaesthesia experience their world. The University of Sussex research, published today (18 November 2014) in Scientific Reports, also found that the training might potentially boost IQ. Synaesthesia is a fascinating though little-understood neurological condition in which some people (estimated at around 1 in 23) experience an overlap in their senses. They "see" letters as specific colours, or can "taste" words, or ...

Researchers at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and doctors at University Hospital of Bellvitge, together with a team of researchers from the University of California, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, California Pacific Medical Center, University of Pittsburgh, University Emory and Stanford University (USA) and the Children's Hospital of Mexico Federico Gomez, have developed a genetic test that identifies patients at high risk of kidney transplant rejection. From a peripheral blood sample and test development easier, you can tell noninvasively and before ...

For years physicists have been looking for the universe's elusive dark matter, but so far no one has seen any trace of it. Maybe we are looking in the wrong place? Now physicists from University of Southern Denmark propose a new technique to detect dark matter. The universe consists of atoms and particles - and a whole lot more that still needs to be detected. We can only speculate about the existence of this unknown matter and energy. "We know that app. 5 pct. of the universe consists of the known matter we are all made of. The rest is unknown. This unknown matter ...

In 1966, it was Roger Penrose who won the prestigious Adams Prize for his essay "An analysis of the structure of space-time." The Adams Prize - named after the British mathematician John Couch Adams - is awarded each year by the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge to a young, UK-based mathematician. At the same time, Steven Hawking won an auxiliary to the Adams Prize for an essay entitled Singularities and the Geometry of Spacetime, shortly after completing his PhD. A copy of the original Hawking submission has now been reproduced in EPJ H. That year, ...

"When the discovery was published back in September, we were certain that we had found a Viking ring fortress, but since then there have been intense discussions online and amongst archaeologists about whether we were right. Now we know without doubt that we have found a fortress from the 10th century," says archaeologist Nanna Holm, curator of the Danish Castle Centre. Two carbon-14 dating results have removed all doubt regarding the authenticity of the Viking fortress. The carbon-14 dating was performed by the AMS 14C Dating Centre at the Department of Physics and Astronomy ...

HANOVER, N.H. - Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues have created an artificial intelligence software that uses photos to locate documents on the Internet with far greater accuracy than ever before. The new system, which was tested on photos and is now being applied to videos, shows for the first time that a machine learning algorithm for image recognition and retrieval is accurate and efficient enough to improve large-scale document searches online. The system uses pixel data in images and potentially video - rather than just text -- to locate documents. It learns ...

The climate 150 million years ago of a large swath of the western United States was more complex than previously known, according to new research from Southern Methodist University, Dallas. It's been thought that the climate during the Jurassic was fairly dry in New Mexico, then gradually transitioned to a wetter climate northward to Montana. But based on new evidence, the theory of a gradual transition from a dry climate to a wetter one during the Jurassic doesn't tell the whole story, says SMU paleontologist Timothy S. Myers, lead author on the study. Geochemical ...

You can't catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Yet the diagnosis and treatment of this behavioral condition is spreading like a contagion -- surging as much as tenfold in some countries. Call it an economic and cultural plague, but not necessarily a medical one, says Brandeis professor Peter Conrad. In a recent paper in the journal Social Science and Medicine, Conrad and coauthor Meredith Bergey examined the growth of ADHD in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Brazil. Until recently, North America tallied by far the most ADHD diagnoses, ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Overhunting has been disastrous for elephants, but their forest habitats have also been caught in the crossfire. A first-of-its-kind study led by researchers at the University of Florida shows that the dramatic loss of elephants, which disperse seeds after eating vegetation, is leading to the local extinction of a dominant tree species, with likely cascading effects for other forest life. Their work shows that loss of animal seed dispersers increases the probability of tree extinction by more than tenfold over a 100-year period. "The entire ...

LOS ANGELES (NOV. 17, 2014) - Researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute have found that injections of cardiac stem cells might help reverse heart damage caused by Duchenne muscular dystrophy, potentially resulting in a longer life expectancy for patients with the chronic muscle-wasting disease. The study results were presented today at a Breaking Basic Science presentation during the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago. After laboratory mice with Duchenne muscular dystrophy were infused with cardiac stem cells, the mice showed steady, marked ...

Results of a new study challenge the current consensus in cardiology that peak myocardial edema, or heart muscle swelling, only occurs just after a myocardial infarction, or heart attack. In the study, presented as a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2014 and published simultaneously in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), scientists discovered a second wave of swelling and inflammation occurs within a week of a heart attack. The researchers from the Mount Sinai Heart at Icahn School of Medicine ...

The findings of this international collaboration have been published today in Nature Genetics. Progressive myoclonus epilepsies (PME) are rare, inherited, and usually childhood-onset neurodegenerative diseases whose core symptoms are epileptic seizures and debilitating involuntary muscle twitching (myoclonus). Professor Berkovic said this finding of a new gene underlying progressive myoclonus epilepsy is one of the most devastating forms of epilepsy. "For the study, we used modern DNA sequencing technologies, which have revolutionised genetic research of rare, severe ...

Anyone who has struggled with a foggy brain while adjusting to daylight saving time knows first-hand how an out-of-sync circadian clock can impair brain function. Now, by manipulating the circadian clocks of Siberian hamsters, Stanford scientists may have identified a brain structure that disrupts memory when circadian rhythms fall apart, as they often do in patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. "What we've been able to show is that the part of the brain that we absolutely know contains the circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), ...

Adding just one gram of turmeric to breakfast could help improve the memory of people who are in the very early stages of diabetes and at risk of cognitive impairment. The finding has particular significance given that the world's ageing population means a rising incidence of conditions that predispose people to diabetes, which in turn is connected to dementia. Early intervention could help to reduce the burden, whether by halting the disease or reducing its impact, said Emeritus Professor Mark Wahlqvist, from the Monash Asia Institute at Monash University. Professor ...