Bethesda, MD (June 1, 2015) -- The antiviral drug telbivudine prevents perinatal transmission of hepatitis B virus (HBV), according to a study1 in the June issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. "If we are to decrease the global burden of hepatitis B, we need to start by addressing mother-to-infant transmission, which is the primary pathway of HBV infection," said study author Yuming Wang from Institute for Infectious Diseases, Southwest Hospital, Chongqing, China. "We ...

The following research will be presented at the American Physical Society's 2015 Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting that will take place June 8-12, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Columbus and the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. FINDING VENUS AND SEARCHING FOR EXOPLANETS Thursday, June 11, 8:48 AM, Room: Franklin CD Telescopes aren't the only way to detect the presence of Venus passing by. It's also now possible to measure the relative motion of the Earth and Sun so precisely that physicists can use the measurement to ...

Policy makers need to budget more than 288 million pounds over the next 40 years to adequately provide health care to all British soldiers who suffered amputations because of the Afghan war. This is the prediction of Major DS Edwards of the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in the UK, in a new article appearing in the journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, published by Springer. He led a study into the scale and long-term economic cost of military amputees following Britain's involvement in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014. The authors describe the traumatic ...

HOUSTON - (June 1, 2015) - The remains of tiny creatures found deep inside a mountaintop glacier in Peru are clues to the local landscape more than a millennium ago, according to a new study by Rice University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Ohio State University. The unexpected discovery of diatoms, a type of algae, in ice cores pulled from the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier demonstrate that freshwater lakes or wetlands that currently exist at high elevations on or near the mountain were also there in earlier times. The abundant organisms would likely have been ...

Researchers from the University of Liverpool have found that approximately half of patients who have an eye removed because of a form of eye cancer experience `phantom eye syndrome.' Patients with the condition experience "seeing" and pain in the eye that is no longer there. Researchers assessed 179 patients whose eye had been removed as a result of a cancer, called intraocular melanoma. They found that more than a third of the patients experienced phantom eye symptoms every day. In most patients, the symptoms ceased spontaneously, but some patients reported that they ...

Understanding the volcanic activity on Earth is not only important in order to limit the impact of natural disasters, volcanic eruptions also have a large impact on the climate and evolution of life on our planet. However, many details in the history of volcanic activity are still unknown. Scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, together with colleagues from the USA, Taiwan, Australia and Switzerland, now have been able to track the development of the Galapagos volcanoes in the time frame between eight and 16 million years ago. In the process ...

Insulin degludec (trade name: Tresiba) has been approved since January 2015 for adolescents and children from the age of one year with type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus. In an early benefit assessment pursuant to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has now examined whether this new drug, alone or in combination with other blood-glucose lowering drugs, offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy. No added benefit of insulin degludec for adolescents ...

The effort to identify new ways of fighting infections has taken a step forward now that scientists have identified a key protein involved in the host's response to strep infections. This protein, called "NFAT," appears to play a key role in the body's inflammatory response to an infection, which when uncontrolled, can be as bad, if not worse, than the infection itself. Furthermore, this discovery was made using streptococcal bacteria, which are responsible for a wide range of human illnesses, ranging from sore throat and pink eye to meningitis and bacterial pneumonia. ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--Most of the world's electricity-producing power plants -- whether powered by coal, natural gas, or nuclear fission -- make electricity by generating steam that turns a turbine. That steam then is condensed back to water, and the cycle begins again. But the condensers that collect the steam are quite inefficient, and improving them could make a big difference in overall power plant efficiency. Now, a team of researchers at MIT has developed a way of coating these condenser surfaces with a layer of graphene, just one atom thick, and found that this can ...

Chicago, IL, USA (30 May 2015) -- The benefits of adding liver-directed SIR-Spheres Y-90 resin microspheres to a current systemic chemotherapy for the first-line treatment of unresectable metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) reported in the SIRFLOX study, were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago. The results of the 530-patient SIRFLOX randomized controlled study, which open new possibilities for combining radiation targeted at liver metastases with first-line systemic treatment of mCRC, were presented by Associate Professor ...

Chicago and Madrid, June 1st 2015: PharmaMar today announced data from a Phase 1b study of the transcriptional inhibitor PM1183 in combination with doxorubicin in second line therapy in patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC) showing that the treatment induced objective responses in 67% of the patients, including 10% of them where all signs of cancer disappeared (complete responses). Every patient with SCLC denominated primary chemotherapy-sensitive (their chemotherapy-free interval (CTFI) is more than 90 days) responded to treatment, including 18% of complete responses. ...

Chicago and Madrid, June 1st 2015: PharmaMar today announced data from a Phase 2 study in patients with sarcomatoid/biphasic malignant pleural mesothelioma showing that 41.2% (95% CI: 18.4-67.1) of patients treated with the anticancer drug trabectedin in second line were alive and free of progression at 12 weeks. The median progression-free survival (PFS) in these 17 evaluated patients was 8.3 weeks. There were 5 patients who continue receiving trabectedin beyond 12 weeks. "Mesothelioma patients usually do not respond to second-line treatments so the preliminary data ...

PORTLAND, Ore., June 01, 2015 -- Women who took vitamin D and calcium supplements had the same number of menopausal symptoms as women who did not take the supplements, according to a study published today in Maturitas, the official journal of the European Menopause and Andropause Society. The study, which involved 34,157 women ages 50-79, is part of the Women's Health Initiative, one of the largest clinical trials ever undertaken to address the most common causes of death, disability and impaired quality of life in menopausal women. "Our study suggests that women ...

Aging is associated with significant decline in cognitive functions. But does this translate into poorer decision making? Psychologists from the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development report that in simple decision situations, older adults perform just as well as younger adults. However, according to their study published in the academic journal Cognition, aging may affect decision performance in more complex decision situations. Important decisions in politics and economics are often made by older people: According to Forbes magazine, ...

The NHS could achieve up to twice as much with the resources that the Government plans to spend introducing a full seven day service in the NHS in England, according to new research from The University of Manchester. Health economists, working with colleagues at the University of York, have used official data to suggest an extra 5,353 deaths each year occur when people are admitted to hospital at the weekend rather than mid-week, but that the £1.43 billion cost of removing this risk would be better spent on other priorities. Despite a seven day health service ...

Researchers have developed a new augmented reality display that allows the audience to explore 3D augmentations of digital musical performances in order to improve their understanding of electronic musicians' engagement. The diversity of digital musical instruments keeps increasing, especially with the emergence of software and hardware that musicians can modify. While this diversity creates novel artistic possibilities, it also makes it more difficult for the audience to appreciate what the musicians are doing during performances. Contrary to acoustic instruments, digital ...

London, UK (1st June, 2015) - Factors influencing food intake have, and continue to be, a hotly contested subject. A new paper published today in the SAGE journal, Journal of Health Psychology (JHP), suggests that disrupted sleep could be one factor contributing to excessive food intake and thus leading to long term chronic health damage in both adults and children. In a special issue on Food, Diets, and Dieting, the paper explores how a bad night's sleep - something that affects millions of people worldwide - can affect eating habits and behaviors. Though it is well-known ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Can a routine hospital stay upset the balance of microbes in our bodies so much that it sets some older people up for a life-threatening health crisis called sepsis? A new University of Michigan and VA study suggests this may be the case. It shows that older adults are three times more likely to develop sepsis -- a body-wide catastrophic response to infection -- in the first three months after leaving a hospital than at any other time. What's more, the risk of sepsis in that short post-hospital time is 30 percent higher for people whose original hospital ...

There are some bad memories -- whether of a crime or a painful life event -- that we'd rather not recall. New research shows that people can successfully inhibit some incriminating memories, reducing the memories' impact on automatic behaviors and resulting in brain activity similar to that seen in "innocent" participants. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "In real life, many individuals who take memory detection tests want to distort their results. Using a lab-based crime simulation, we examined ...

This news release is available in French. The Drosophila, the so-called fruit fly, attends all day long to its activities. It flutters, has naps, lays its eggs or emerges from the pupa, the stage of metamorphosis preceding maturity. At the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, the team of the researcher in biology Emi Nagoshi is closely interested in this insect, used as a model organism for the study of circadian rhythms in the animal kingdom. The researcher's group discovered that the main clock of the Drosophila, formed by neurons clustered in various regions ...

Viewed from above, our solar system's planetary orbits around the sun resemble rings around a bulls-eye. Each planet, including Earth, keeps to a roughly circular path, always maintaining the same distance from the sun. For decades, astronomers have wondered whether the solar system's circular orbits might be a rarity in our universe. Now a new analysis suggests that such orbital regularity is instead the norm, at least for systems with planets as small as Earth. In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers from MIT and Aarhus University in Denmark ...

Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction. In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out "C-A-T" sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word "cat." And, the study found, these teaching-induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word. The ...

(PHILADELPHIA) -- Despite advances in managing and curing some forms of breast cancer, women whose disease becomes metastatic have fewer effective options. A new phase 3 study in some of the most difficult-to-treat patients, women with endocrine-resistant disease, showed that the newly approved drug, palbociclib, more than doubled the time to cancer recurrence for women with hormone-receptor (HR+) positive metastatic breast cancer. The results will be presented at the 2015 annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO, abstract LBA-502) and published in the New England ...

Anastrozole provides a significant benefit compared with tamoxifen in preventing recurrence after a lumpectomy and radiation therapy in postmenopausal women ages 60 years or younger who had DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ), a common diagnosis of non-invasive breast cancer. In women over age 60, it works as well as tamoxifen. These findings were presented today at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago. The benefit reported in this trial appeared later in follow up of the women in the study. "This study provides a new option for postmenopausal women undergoing treatment ...

DURHAM, N.C. - A modified poliovirus therapy that is showing promising results for patients with glioblastoma brain tumors works best at a low dosage, according to the research team at Duke's Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center where the investigational therapy is being pioneered. The dosage findings for the first 20 patients in the phase 1 trial will be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago at the end of the month (abstract #2068). "The purpose of a phase 1 trial is to identify the optimal dose to minimize toxicity," said ...