Military veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who live in rural areas successfully engaged in evidence-based psychotherapy through a telemedicine-based collaborative care model thereby improving their clinical outcomes, according to a report published online by JAMA Psychiatry. A disabling disorder, PTSD develops in some people exposed to traumatic events. More than 500,000 military veterans enrolled in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) health care system (about 9.2 percent of the VHA population) were diagnosed with PTSD in 2012. A large portion of ...

Higher proportions of women eligible for breast conservation surgery (BCS) are undergoing mastectomy, breast reconstruction and bilateral mastectomy (surgical removal of both breasts), with the steepest increases seen in women with lymph node-negative and in situ (contained) disease, according to a report published online by JAMA Surgery. BCS has been a standard of excellence in breast cancer care and its use for management of early-stage breast cancer had increased steadily since the 1990s. However there is evidence that that trend may be reversing. Kristy L. Kummerow, ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. - Eighty percent of kidney dialysis patients surveyed were not adequately prepared in the event of an emergency or natural disaster that shut down their dialysis center. But after receiving individualized education from a multidisciplinary team of doctors, nurses, dieticians and social workers, 78 percent of these patients had become adequately prepared, according to a Loyola University Medical Center study. Anuradha Wadhwa, MD, and colleagues, reported findings during the ASN Kidney Week 2014 meeting. Patients with kidney failure rely on dialysis treatments ...

It's known that cholesterol levels typically rise as people age and that high cholesterol levels are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease. What's less known is that cholesterol levels begin to decline the more a person ages. Recently, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Kentucky found that differences in one gene can influence a person's cholesterol levels from midlife to late life. The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, analyzed data from ...

MADISON, Wis. -- Each year, the planet balances its budget. The carbon dioxide absorbed by plants in the spring and summer as they convert solar energy into food is released back to the atmosphere in autumn and winter. Levels of the greenhouse gas fall, only to rise again. But the budget has gotten bigger. Over the last five decades, the magnitude of this rise and fall has grown nearly 50 percent in the Northern Hemisphere, as the amount of the greenhouse gas taken in and released has increased. Now, new research shows that humans and their crops have a lot to do with ...

An international team of researchers analyzing decades of observations from many facilities, including NASA's Swift satellite, has discovered an unusual source of light in a galaxy some 90 million light-years away. The object's curious properties make it a good match for a supermassive black hole ejected from its home galaxy after merging with another giant black hole. But astronomers can't yet rule out an alternative possibility. The source, called SDSS1133, may be the remnant of a massive star that erupted for a record period of time before destroying itself in a supernova ...

On an archaeology field trip in New Mexico as an undergraduate in 2006, Dana Bardolph noticed something that struck her as an odd gender imbalance: The professor leading the dig was a men, while the graduate assistant and all but two of the 14 undergrads were women. "And it just got me thinking," Bardolph recalled. "Is this reflective of the profession as a whole, or is it an anomaly?" The question stayed with her, and four years ago she decided to search for an answer. Her findings -- generated after digging through more than 4,500 peer-reviewed papers in 11 archaeology ...

TORONTO, November 19, 2014 - Today an international team of researchers announced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family, which makes them cousins of the familiar proton and neutron. The LHCb collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, used CERN's Large Hadron Collider to make these discoveries. The masses of these particles, named Xi_b'- and Xi_b*- had been predicted in a paper published in 2009 by York University Professor Randy Lewis and Richard Woloshyn, scientist at the TRIUMF Lab in Vancouver, using a supercomputer approach ...

Far more breast cancer patients are choosing to undergo mastectomy, including removal of both breasts, instead of choosing breast conservation surgery even when they have early stage disease that is confined to one breast, a Vanderbilt study shows. In the past decade, there have also been marked trends toward higher proportions of women opting for breast reconstruction. The rates of increase were steepest among women with lymph node-negative and in situ (contained) disease. This is a reversal of trends seen since the 1990s when breast conservation surgery (BCS) was ...

Delivering stem cell factor directly into damaged heart muscle after a heart attack may help repair and regenerate injured tissue, according to a study led by researchers from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai presented November 18 at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2014 in Chicago, IL. "Our discoveries offer insight into the power of stem cells to regenerate damaged muscle after a heart attack," says lead study author Kenneth Fish, PhD, Director of the Cardiology Laboratory for Translational Research, Cardiovascular Research Center, Mount Sinai ...

Tropical Storm Adjali started curving to the southwest on its trek through the Southern Indian Ocean when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead on Nov. 19. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Tropical Storm Adjali on Nov. 19 at 9:05 UTC (4:05 a.m. EST). The MODIS image showed that the storm began curving to the southwest, and despite slight weakening, thunderstorms circled around the low-level center. Adjali was curving to the southwest as it continued to move along ...

Minimum legal drinking age legislation in Canada can have a major impact on young drivers, according to a new study from the Northern Medical Program at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC). Drivers just older than the legal age had a significant increase in motor vehicle crashes compared to those immediately under the restriction. In the study, published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Russ Callaghan and his research team looked at Quebec motor vehicle collision statistics between 2000 and 2012 which involved young drivers. ...

A physicist in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences is the lead contributor to the discovery of two never-before-seen baryonic particles. The finding, which is the subject of a forthcoming article in Physical Review Letters (American Physical Society, 2014), is expected to have a major impact on the study of quark dynamics. Steven Blusk, associate professor of physics, has identified particles known as Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-. Although the particles had been predicted to exist, nobody has seen them until now. The discovery is part of his ongoing work at the Large ...

The first issue of a new publication series from The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) called From Policy to Practice explores pain as a public health problem and takes a look at how various policies impact the care provided to patients in a range of practice settings. It also provides readers with an overview of provisions of the Affordable Care Act that address pain research, education, training, and clinical care -- as well as steps taken to implement those provisions. "An Interdisciplinary Look at the Potential of Policy to Improve the Health of an Aging America: ...

Physician-researchers from the Cardiac Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) presented new findings on pediatric cardiovascular disease at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014 in Chicago. Among many other topics, they investigated using automated external defibrillators in infants, long-term cardiac risk in surgical survivors of the Fontan operations for congenital heart disease, and whether centers that perform more cardiac catheterizations tend to have better outcomes. Pediatric cardiologist Yoav Dori, M.D., Ph.D., delivered ...

Alexandria, Va., USA - Today, the International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) published a special themed issue of the Journal of Dental Research (JDR) centered on novel dental biomaterials and technologies. Although the Associations have published clinical supplements to the JDR, this is the first special themed issue the Associations have published. This special themed issue of the JDR contains a collection of timely articles designed to provide the reader with a review of some of the important new material developments, as well as examples ...

Peruvian coastal waters may provide suitable habitat that may help the recovery of endangered South Pacific green turtles, according to a study published November 19, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Ximena Velez-Zuazo from University of Puerto Rico and colleagues. Green turtles inhabit tropical and subtropical coastal waters around the world. The authors of this study worked to identify suitable habitat for the endangered species by measuring two populations off the Peruvian coast from 2010 to 2013 in potentially important feeding grounds. The researchers ...

Florida harvester ants move and construct a similar subterranean nest about once a year, according to a study published November 19, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Walter Tschinkel from Florida State University. The Florida harvester ant excavates up to 2 meter deep nests in the sandy soils of the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains. Scientists tracked and mapped nest relocations of over 400 colonies in a north Florida coastal plains pine forest from 2010 to 2013 and monitored the progress of entire relocations of 20 of these nests. The researchers found that ...

A new study in mice, conducted by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet together with colleagues in Singapore and the United States, shows that our natural gut-residing microbes can influence the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, which protects the brain from harmful substances in the blood. According to the authors, the findings provide experimental evidence that our indigenous microbes contribute to the mechanism that closes the blood-brain barrier before birth. The results also support previous observations that gut microbiota can impact brain development ...

LA JOLLA--Scientists at the Salk Institute have discovered a powerful one-two punch for countering a common genetic mutation that often leads to drug-resistant cancers. The dual-drug therapy--with analogs already in use for other diseases--doubled the survival rate of mice with lung cancer and halted cancer in pancreatic cells. Lung cancer, which affects nonsmokers as well as smokers, is the most common cancer worldwide, causing 1.6 million deaths a year, far more than pancreatic, breast and colon cancer combined. About 30 percent of the most common type of lung cancer ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - An antidepressant commonly prescribed for women with postpartum depression may restore connections between cells in brain regions that are negatively affected by chronic stress during pregnancy, new research suggests. Ohio State University scientists found that rats that had been chronically stressed during pregnancy showed depressive-like behaviors after giving birth, and structures in certain areas of their brains were less complex than in unstressed rats. After receiving the drug for three weeks, these rats had no depressive symptoms and neurons ...

New York City residents' movement around the city was perturbed, but resumed less than 24-hours after Hurricane Sandy, according to a study published November 19, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Qi Wang and John Taylor from Virginia Tech. Tropical cyclones, including hurricanes and typhoons, are severe natural disasters that can cause tremendous loss of human life and suffering. Our knowledge of peoples' movements during natural disasters is so far limited due to a lack of data. The authors of this article studied human mobility using movement data from individuals ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Engineers have created a new way to use lidar technology to identify and classify landslides on a landscape scale, which may revolutionize the understanding of landslides in the U.S. and reveal them to be far more common and hazardous than often understood. The new, non-subjective technology, created by researchers at Oregon State University and George Mason University, can analyze and classify the landslide risk in an area of 50 or more square miles in about 30 minutes - a task that previously might have taken an expert several weeks to months. It can ...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A new study by a Florida State University biologist shows that bleaching events brought on by rising sea temperatures are having a detrimental long-term impact on coral. Professor Don Levitan, chair of the Department of Biological Science, writes in the latest issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series that bleaching -- a process where high water temperatures or UV light stresses the coral to the point where it loses its symbiotic algal partner that provides the coral with color -- is also affecting the long-term fertility of the coral. "Even corals ...

New research has found that one of the world's most prolific bacteria manages to afflict humans, animals and even plants by way of a mechanism not before seen in any infectious microorganism -- a sense of touch. This unique ability helps make the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa ubiquitous, but it also might leave these antibiotic-resistant organisms vulnerable to a new form of treatment. Pseudomonas is the first pathogen found to initiate infection after merely attaching to the surface of a host, Princeton University and Dartmouth College researchers report in the journal ...