ATS 2015, DENVER--Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), being female, and certain scores on the St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) were associated with exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in subjects using long-acting controller medication, according to a study presented at the 2015 American Thoracic Society International Conference. "Knowing these factors can help clinicians identify subjects at risk for acute exacerbations of their COPD," said Robert Busch, MD, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Although inhaled medications ...

The overall suicide rate among children ages 5 to 11 was stable during the 20 years from 1993 to 2012 but that obscures racial differences that show an increase in suicide among black children and a decrease among white children, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Youth suicide is a major public health concern. However not much is known about childhood suicide because prior studies have typically excluded children younger than 10 years old and only investigated trends among older children, according to the study background. Jeffrey A. Bridge, ...

Patients with chest pain who are admitted to the hospital after an emergency department evaluation with negative findings and nonconcerning vital signs rarely had adverse cardiac events, suggesting that routine inpatient admission may not be a beneficial strategy for this group of patients, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Patients with potentially ischemic (restricted blood flow) chest pain are commonly admitted to the hospital or observed after a negative evaluation in the emergency department because of concern about adverse events. ...

A preliminary study of retired National Football League (NFL) players suggests that history of concussion with loss of consciousness may be a risk factor for increased brain atrophy in the area involved with memory storage and impaired memory performance later in life, according to an article published online by JAMA Neurology. While most individuals recover completely from concussion within days or weeks, the potential association of concussion and the subsequent development of memory dysfunction with brain atrophy later in life remains poorly understood, according to ...

A team of New York University neuroscientists has identified a part of the brain exclusively devoted to processing speech. Its findings point to the superior temporal sulcus (STS), located in the temporal lobe, and help settle a long-standing debate about role-specific neurological functions. "We now know there is at least one part of the brain that specializes in the processing of speech and doesn't have a role in handling other sounds," explains David Poeppel, the paper's senior author, a professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science. The ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Chest pain is a scary symptom that sends more than 7 million Americans to the emergency department each year. About half of them are admitted to the hospital for further observation, testing or treatment. Now, emergency medicine physicians at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Mount Carmel Health System believe that number can be significantly reduced. Their study, published in today's JAMA Internal Medicine, finds a very low short-term risk for life-threatening cardiac events among patients with chest pain who have normal cardiac blood ...

Researchers have developed a microfluidic chip that can capture rare clusters of circulating tumor cells, which could yield important new insights into how cancer spreads. The work was funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cells that break away from a tumor and move through a cancer patient's bloodstream. Single CTCs are extremely rare, typically fewer than 1 in 1 billion cells. These cells can take up residence in distant organs, and researchers ...

TEMPE, Arizona -- Electricity generation and distribution infrastructure in the Western United States must be "climate-proofed" to diminish the risk of future power shortages, according to research by two Arizona State University engineers. Expected increases in extreme heat and drought events will bring changes in precipitation, air and water temperatures, air density and humidity, write Matthew Bartos and Mikhail Chester in the current issue of the research journal Nature Climate Change. The authors say the changing conditions could significantly constrain the energy ...

Suicide is a leading cause of death among children younger than 12 years. Suicide rates in this age group have remained steady overall for the past 20 years, but a study published today in JAMA Pediatrics from The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital is the first national study to observe higher suicide rates among black children compared to white children. "Little is known about the epidemiology of suicide in this age group," said Jeff Bridge, PhD, lead researcher of the study and principal investigator at the Center for Innovation in Pediatric Practice ...

A team led by UCSF researchers has discovered how a commonly administered vaccine protects against acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common type of childhood cancer. The Haemophilus influenzae Type b (Hib) vaccine not only prevents ear infections and meningitis caused by the Hib bacterium, but also protects against ALL, which accounts for approximately 25 percent of cancer diagnoses among children younger than 15 years, according to the National Cancer Society. The Hib vaccine is part of the standard vaccination schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - May 18, 2015 - New proof-of-concept research at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine suggests the potential for engineering replacement intestine tissue in the lab, a treatment that could be applied to infants born with a short bowel and adults having large pieces of gut removed due to cancer or inflammatory bowel disease. Lead researcher Khalil N Bitar, Ph.D., a professor at the institute, which is part of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, reported the results this week at Digestive Diseases Week in Washington, D.C. He also updated ...

The MET-proto-oncogene is involved in the pathogenesis of several tumors and therefore represents an interesting target for future therapies currently tested in dozens of clinical trials. Veronica Finisguerra, Andrea Casazza, Max Mazzone and colleagues from VIB, KU Leuven and UZ Leuven now reveal that MET is needed for the recruitment of anti-tumoral neutrophils and puts a mechanism into action that promotes the killing of cancer cells. This means that the efficacy of a cancer therapy targeting MET in cancer cells will partly be countered by the pro-tumoral effect arising ...

Moonshiners and home-brewers have long used yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. New research shows that those methods could also be adapted for something with more significant ramifications: the production of drugs including opiates, antibiotics, and anti-cancer therapeutics. According to new studies by researchers from Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Berkeley, yeast can be engineered to convert sugar to alkaloids -- plant-derived compounds such as codeine and morphine, naturally produced in the opium poppy. Collaborating on synthesis ...

Long range weather forecasts and climate change projections could be significantly boosted by advances in our understanding of the relationship between layers of the Earth's atmosphere -- the stratosphere and troposphere. A team of UK scientists have studied how a circulation changes in the stratosphere (above 10 km) can influence both weather and climate conditions on the surface of the Earth. The experts, who include Professor Mark Baldwin from the University of Exeter, argue that the predictability and persistence of stratospheric events could help scientists enhance ...

In what they are calling a surprising finding in a large study of men who completed questionnaires and allowed scientists to review their medical records, Johns Hopkins researchers report that men with a history of asthma were less likely than those without it to develop lethal prostate cancer. In their analysis of data collected from 47,880 men and described online Feb. 27 in the International Journal of Cancer, the scientists found that men with a history of asthma were 29 percent less likely to have been diagnosed with prostate cancer that spread or to have died of ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Biomedical devices that can be implanted in the body for drug delivery, tissue engineering, or sensing can help improve treatment for many diseases. However, such devices are often susceptible to attack by the immune system, which can render them useless. A team of MIT researchers has come up with a way to reduce that immune-system rejection. In a study appearing in the May 18 issue of Nature Materials, they found that the geometry of implantable devices has a significant impact on how well the body will tolerate them. Although the researchers expected ...

DETROIT, Mich., Monday, May 18, 2015 -- Although body-cooling has long been a standard of care in treating adults after heart attacks, a recently published multi-center study has concluded that the same procedure -- known as "therapeutic hypothermia" -- does not confer any survival-with-quality-of-life benefit for children who are resuscitated after suffering out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The study noted hypothermia is no more effective than maintaining normal body temperature by preventing fever in the children being treated. These surprising results, published April ...

When citizens stop complying with laws, the legitimacy of government comes into question, especially in nondemocratic states -- or so goes a prominent strand of political thinking. But what if citizens are doing something subtler, such as disobeying in order to enact smaller, more incremental changes? That's the implication of a new study of political attitudes among people in rural China, an area where political scientists would not normally expect to see give-and-take between residents and the government. The study, conducted by Lily Tsai, an associate professor of ...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Climate change may be the driving force behind fewer, yet more powerful hurricanes and tropical storms, says a Florida State geography professor. In a paper published today by Nature Climate Change, Professor Jim Elsner and his former graduate student Namyoung Kang found that rising ocean temperatures are having an effect on how many tropical storms and hurricanes develop each year. "We're seeing fewer hurricanes, but the ones we do see are more intense," Elsner said. "When one comes, all hell can break loose." Prior to this research, there had ...

A University of Oklahoma structural geologist and collaborators are studying earthquake instability and the mechanisms associated with fault weakening during slip. The mechanism of this weakening is central to understanding earthquake sliding. Ze'ev Reches, professor in the OU School of Geology and Geophysics, is using electron microscopy to examine velocity and temperature in two key observations: (1) a high-speed friction experiment on carbonate at conditions of shallow earthquakes, and (2) a high-pressure/high-temperature faulting experiment at conditions of very ...

TORONTO, ON (May 18, 2015) - Cancer research leaders at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Oregon Health & Science University, Sage Bionetworks, the distributed DREAM (Dialog for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods) community and The University of California Santa Cruz published the first findings of the ICGC-TCGA-DREAM Somatic Mutation Calling (SMC) Challenge (The Challenge: https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn312572) today in the journal Nature Methods. These results provide an important new benchmark for researchers, helping to define the most accurate ...

Irvine, Calif., May 18, 2015 -- They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. The same can be said of the adult brain. Its connections are hard to change, while in children, novel experiences rapidly mold new connections during critical periods of brain development. UC Irvine neurobiologist Sunil Gandhi and colleagues wanted to know whether the flexibility of the juvenile brain could be restored to the adult brain. Apparently, it can: They've successfully re-created a critical juvenile period in the brains of adult mice. In other words, the researchers have reactivated ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 18, 2015 -- Struggling to understand someone else talking can be a taxing mental activity. A wide range of studies have already documented that individuals with hearing loss or who are listening to degraded speech -- for example, over a bad phone line or in a loud room -- have greater difficulty remembering and processing the spoken information than individuals who heard more clearly. Now researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are investigating the relatively unexplored question of whether listening to accented speech similarly affects ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. and CAMBRIDGE, England -- Screening to identify Type 2 diabetes followed by early treatment could result in substantial health benefits, according to new research published today in Diabetes Care that combined large scale clinical observations and innovative computer modelling. The study, led by researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School and the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, used data from the ADDITION-Europe study of diabetes screening and treatment, which it combined with a computer simulation model of diabetes progression. ...

This news release is available in German. Ion channels are essential structures of life. Ion channels are specialized pores in the cell membrane and move charged atoms known as ions in and out of cells, thereby controlling a wide variety of biological processes including brain function and heartbeat. Ion channels are generally selective for certain ions, allowing specific types of ions to flow through at very high rates, while hindering the flow of others. On the basis of this selective permeability, ion channels are classified as potassium channels, sodium channels, ...