DURHAM, N.C. - How most babies are protected from acquiring HIV from their infected mothers has been a matter of scientific controversy. Now researchers at Duke Medicine provide new data identifying an antibody response that had long been discounted as inadequate to confer protection. Mother-to-child transmissions account for about 250,000 HIV infections per year worldwide, despite greatly expanded access to antiretroviral drug regimens that can interrupt transmission into low-resource settings. Ongoing problems with access to the drugs, late initiation of the drug regimens ...

At least two and a half million more workers will be needed to provide long-term care to older people in the United States between now and 2030, according to a study by UC San Francisco researchers published in the June 2015 issue of Health Affairs. The study authors predict that there will be little effect on this demand for new workers even if long-term care use among different racial and ethnic groups changes significantly or if there is a major shift from institutional care to home-based care. 'Even if 20 percent of elderly patients move out of nursing homes into ...

The June issue of Health Affairs, a variety issue, includes articles examining how health care markets function, both in the United States and elsewhere. One of the studies in the issue is by Zachary Wagner of the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthors, titled "PEPFAR Funding Associated With An Increase In Employment Among Males In Ten Sub-Saharan African Countries." It examines the economic impact of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief--or PEPFAR--in sub-Saharan Africa. PEPFAR has provided over 6.7 million people infected with HIV access to antiretroviral ...

Stem cell transplantation is used to treat hematologic malignancies, such as leukemia. Patients that receive donor cells are at risk of developing graft-versus host disease (GVHD). This potentially fatal complication results when naive T cells generated from the graft promote an immune response that attacks the recipient's tissues. Prophylactic treatment with immunosuppressive drugs is currently used to limit GVHD but does not reliably prevent disease. In mouse models, depletion of naive T cells from the stem cell graft prior to transplant reduces the occurrence and severity ...

New research from Brigham and Women's Hospital finds that physician characteristics are the strongest predictor of whether a patient will be referred to hospice care. Individual physicians are widely believed to influence the kind of care their patients receive at the end of life, but to date, there is little scientific evidence to support this belief. New research from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) indicates that the individual physician a patient sees is the strongest known predictor of whether or not he or she will enroll in hospice care, outweighing other known ...

A new study by NYU Wagner Dean and Professor of Public Service Sherry A. Glied and two additional researchers sees little evidence to support the belief that healthcare workers' wage levels are responsible for the rising cost of health care services in the U.S. Effective cost containment will require not wage reductions alone, but broad productivity gains derived from the use of fewer or less-skilled employees to produce any given service, the study concludes. Published today (June 8) in the June edition of the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs, the paper by ...

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin and Mount Sinai in New York have just published new research which for the first time provides strong evidence on the economic benefits of early palliative care intervention for people with an advanced cancer diagnosis. Their findings were published today in the highly esteemed international peer reviewed Journal of Clinical Oncology. Previous research has shown the clinical benefits of early palliative care, but this new study robustly demonstrated how early access to expert palliative care decision making resulted in very significant ...

PHILADELPHIA-- Using a simple blood test to measure the T lymphocyte count in donors for stem cell transplants may help identify the best match for patients in need of an allogeneic stem cell transplant, suggests a new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology from researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC) of the University of Pennsylvania. Typically, matched siblings have been preferred over unrelated donors. This study shows that older patients who received stem cells from younger, unrelated donors with higher numbers of so-called killer T cells (CD8 cells) had ...

New York, NY-- Earlier introduction of palliative care for patients hospitalized with advanced cancer is associated with lower hospital costs, according to a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The findings support a growing body of evidence that suggests that early provision of palliative care not only enhances the quality of medical care received by patients and families with serious illness, but does so at a lower cost than traditional oncologic care. The observational study, funded by the National Cancer Institute and National Institute for Nursing ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Gay and bisexual men living in European countries with strong attitudes and policies against homosexuality are far less likely to use HIV-prevention services, test for HIV, and discuss their sexuality with health providers, according to research led by Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). The study is published online in the journal AIDS. Attitudes about homosexuality vary greatly across Europe, noted YSPH associate professor and lead author John Pachankis and his colleagues. The research team wanted to investigate the impact of homophobia on gay and ...

CHICAGO -- A toxin secreted by Vibrio vulnificus, a water and food-borne bacteria that can cause rapidly lethal infections in persons with liver disease, has potential to prevent the growth of tumors, according to a new study by Northwestern Medicine scientists. Karla Satchell, a professor in microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and her team demonstrated in a paper in Nature Communications, that a multifunctional-autoprocessing repeats-in-toxin (MARTX) protein from Vibrio vulnificus can inhibit tumor cell growth by cutting the ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - Quenched glasses formed by asteroid impacts can encapsulate and preserve biological material for millions of years on Earth, and can also serve as a substrate for microbial life. These impact glasses are thus an important target to search for signs of ancient life on Mars, but until now they have not been definitively detected on the martian surface. In this study, Kevin Cannon and John Mustard used orbital remotely sensed data to investigate spectral signatures of geologic units on Mars that were formed during impacts (impactites). Using spectral ...

PITTSBURGH--It has been well established that people have a "bias blind spot," meaning that they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than others. However, how blind we are to our own actual degree of bias, and how many of us think we are less biased than others have been less clear. Published in Management Science, new research from Carnegie Mellon University, the City University London, Boston University and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has developed a tool to measure the bias blind spot, and reveals that believing that you are less biased than your ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study suggests that those at risk of hoarding disorder may have serious complaints about sleep. Results show that participants at risk of hoarding disorder scored significantly higher on the Sleep Habits Survey (SH) and on three sub-scales of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), including sleep latency; sleep disturbances and daytime disturbances. "Hoarders typically have problems with decision making and executive function; poor sleep is known to compromise cognition generally, so if hoarders have cluttered/unusable bedrooms (and less comfortable, ...

Evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould is famous for describing the evolution of humans and other conscious beings as a chance accident of history. If we could go back millions of years and "run the tape of life again," he mused, evolution would follow a different path. A study by University of Pennsylvania biologists now provides evidence Gould was correct, at the molecular level: Evolution is both unpredictable and irreversible. Using simulations of an evolving protein, they show that the genetic mutations that are accepted by evolution are typically dependent on ...

Planets with volcanic activity are considered better candidates for life than worlds without such heated internal goings-on. Now, graduate students at the University of Washington have found a way to detect volcanic activity in the atmospheres of exoplanets, or those outside our solar system, when they transit, or pass in front of their host stars. Their findings, published in the June issue of the journal Astrobiology, could aid the process of choosing worlds to study for possible life, and even one day help determine not only that a world is habitable, but in fact ...

Researchers in UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi's lab are proving that wireless signals can do more than provide Internet access. They have demonstrated that a WiFi signal can be used to count the number of people in a given space, leading to diverse applications, from energy efficiency to search-and-rescue. 'Our approach can estimate the number of people walking in an area, based on only the received power measurements of a WiFi link,' said Mostofi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. This approach does not require people to carry WiFi-enabled ...

DARIEN, Ill. -- A new study suggests that poor sleep quality is associated with reduced resilience among veterans and returning military personnel. Results show that 63 percent of participants endorsed poor sleep quality, which was negatively associated with resilience. Longer sleep onset, lower sleep efficiency, shorter sleep duration, worse sleep quality, and greater daytime disturbance were each associated with lower resilience. Findings suggest that appraisal of sleep quality may contribute to resilience scores more than self-reported sleep efficiency. 'To our knowledge, ...

In 2009, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution embarked on a NASA-funded mission to the Mid-Cayman Rise in the Caribbean, in search of a type of deep-sea hot-spring or hydrothermal vent that they believed held clues to the search for life on other planets. They were looking for a site with a venting process that produces a lot of hydrogen because of the potential it holds for the chemical, or abiotic, creation of organic molecules like methane - possible precursors to the prebiotic compounds from which life on Earth emerged. For more than a decade, the ...

BOSTON -- Diabetes patients with abnormal blood sugar levels had longer, more costly hospital stays than those with glucose levels in a healthy range, according to studies presented by Scripps Whittier Diabetes Institute researchers at the 75th Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), which ends June 9 in Boston. The findings come as more patients are being admitted into U.S. hospitals with diabetes as an underlying condition. A recent UCLA public health report indicated that one of every three hospital patients admitted in California has a diagnosis ...

BOSTON (June 8, 2015) -- One member of a widely prescribed class of drugs used to lower blood glucose levels in people with diabetes has a neutral effect on heart failure and other cardiovascular problems, according to the first clinical trial to examine cardiovascular safety in a GLP-1 receptor agonist, presented at the American Diabetes Association's 75th Scientific Sessions. The Evaluation of Lixisenatide in Acute Coronary Syndrome (ELIXA) study also found a modest benefit for weight control, and no increase of risk for hypoglycemia or pancreatic injury in those who ...

A team of researchers from UC San Diego, Florida State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories has for the first time visualized the growth of 'nanoscale' chemical complexes in real time, demonstrating that processes in liquids at the scale of one-billionth of a meter can be documented as they happen. The achievement, which will make possible many future advances in nanotechnology, is detailed in a paper published online today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Chemists and material scientists will be able to use this new development in their ...

ALMA's Long Baseline Campaign has produced a spectacularly detailed image of a distant galaxy being gravitationally lensed. The image shows a magnified view of the galaxy's star-forming regions, the likes of which have never been seen before at this level of detail in a galaxy so remote. The new observations are far more detailed than those made using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and reveal star-forming clumps in the galaxy equivalent to giant versions of the Orion Nebula. ALMA's Long Baseline Campaign has produced some amazing observations, and gathered unprecedentedly ...

An international, multidisciplinary team including investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has found that lixisenatide, a member of a class of glucose-lowering drugs frequently prescribed in Europe to patients with diabetes, did not increase risk of cardiovascular events including heart failure. These results - the first to be reported on the cardiovascular safety of a glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist - were presented today at the American Diabetes Association's 75th Scientific Sessions. "There are a large number of patients around the world ...

ORANGE, Calif. -- In a study just published by researchers at Chapman University, findings showed that greater life satisfaction in adults older than 50 years of age is related to a reduced risk of mortality. The researchers also found that variability in life satisfaction across time increases risk of mortality, but only among less satisfied people. The study involved nearly 4,500 participants who were followed for up to nine years. 'Although life satisfaction is typically considered relatively consistent across time, it may change in response to life circumstances ...