A physical test for measuring age shows wide differences between the rates of aging among different population groups, according to new research by demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. A strong handshake can say a lot about a person—it can indicate power, confidence, health, or aggression. Now scientists say that the strength of a person's grasp may also be one of the most useful ways to measure people's true age. In a new study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, IIASA researchers Serguei Scherbov and Warren Sanderson (also at ...

The largest investigation to date has found a significant increase in the number of acute pancreatitis (AP) cases in hospitalized children in the United States. The new study, in the "PLOS ONE" journal found a 51 percent increase in the primary diagnosis of AP from 2000 to 2009. The number increased from 6,350 in 2000 to 9,561 in 2009. The study looked at hospitalization records of patients 20 years old and younger using a federal children's inpatient database. From 2000 to 2009, they identified 55,012 cases of AP in hospitalized children ages 1 – 20. According ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Different manifestations of preeclampsia, such as early vs. late timing or typical vs. high severity, appear to have distinct genetic underpinnings, suggesting that they may need to be studied and treated differently. That and several other insights are described in a newly published comprehensive review of genetic studies of the condition, which produces life-threatening complications such as high-blood pressure in as many as 8 percent of pregnancies in the United States. "There are probably very different phenotypes of preeclampsia ...

Philadelphia - A group of health care and policy experts from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is urging health care institutions to look more to their own in-house personnel, including physicians and nurses, as a source of new ideas for improving how care is delivered. The practice – referred to as insourcing – relies on an organization's existing staff to drive needed transformations. The team also suggests a four-stage design process which, when adopted internally, may help organizations implement more efficient health care delivery solutions. ...

A deep-water creature once thought to be one of the world's largest sea anemones, with tentacles reaching more than 6.5 feet long, actually belongs to a new order of animals. The finding is part of a new DNA-based study led by the American Museum of Natural History that presents the first tree of life for sea anemones, a group that includes more than 1,200 species. The report, which is published today in the journal PLOS ONE, reshapes scientists' understanding of the relationships among these poorly understood animals. "The discovery of this new order of Cnidaria—a phylum ...

WHAT:In an invited perspective article on the Ebola outbreak under way in West Africa, Heinz Feldmann, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) emphasizes the need for scientists to make their data available to colleagues in real-time to improve the public health response to outbreaks. He cites past responses to influenza and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreaks as successful examples of global information sharing. Rapid diagnoses are key to controlling outbreaks of deadly viruses such as Ebola, for which no therapies are available. The immediate ...

WHAT: Although malaria kills some 600,000 African children each year, most cases of the mosquito-borne parasitic disease in children are mild. Repeated infection does generate some immunity, and episodes of severe malaria are unusual once a child reaches age 5. However, the relative contributions of such factors as the level of malaria-causing parasites in a person's blood—parasite density—to disease severity and to development of protective immunity are not well understood. To clarify these issues, researchers from the United States and Tanzania regularly examined 882 ...

For years, scientists have had an itch they couldn't scratch. Even with the best microscopes and spectrometers, it's been difficult to study and identify molecules at the so-called mesoscale, a region of matter that ranges from 10 to 1000 nanometers in size. Now, with the help of broadband infrared light from the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), researchers have developed a broadband imaging technique that looks inside this realm with unprecedented sensitivity and range. By ...

MINNEAPOLIS – A drug typically prescribed for erectile dysfunction or increased pressure in the arteries may help improve blood flow in the muscles of boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, according to a study published in the May 7, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive and fatal muscle disease affecting boys and young men that causes loss of muscle function. There is no specific treatment for the disease, which is genetic. Corticosteroids can slow muscle degeneration ...

A multidimensional frailty score may help predict postoperative outcomes in older adults. More than half of all operations are performed on patients 65 years and older in the United States. Frail elderly patients who undergo surgery are more likely to have postoperative complications. But tools to estimate operative risk have their limitations because they often focus on a single organ system or solitary event. In geriatric medicine, the comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) is widely used to detect disabilities and conditions associated with frailty. The authors sought ...

OAKLAND, Calif. May 7, 2014 — Radiation treatment can help reduce the recurrence of Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare and aggressive skin cancer, while chemotherapy does not appear to have any impact on recurrence or survival, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published online in the current issue of JAMA Dermatology. The study presents one of the largest single-institution datasets on Merkel cell carcinoma, which occurs in about 1,500 people in the United States annually. Most such cancers occur on the sun-exposed skin of white males and are first diagnosed at age 75, ...

WASHINGTON, May 7, 2014 — Yesterday's release of the third National Climate Assessment (NCA) should serve as a claxon call for policymakers and the general public to take action to address and mitigate the observable and documented adverse climate disruption impacts being observed in every region and key economic sector of the United States. These impacts, which have been observed and measured, are wreaking havoc with our society. This is a not a theoretical assessment; this report cites changes we are all observing and with which we are living. The future climate ...

When you get sick, your physician may take a sample of your blood, send it to the lab and wait for results. In the near future, however, doctors may be able to run those tests almost instantly on a piece of plastic about the size of credit card. These labs-on-a-chip would not only be quick—results are available in minutes—but also inexpensive and portable. They could be used miles from the nearest medical clinic to test for anything from HIV to diabetes. But as powerful as they may be, they could be far better, says Shiyan Hu, an associate professor of electrical and ...

(NEW YORK – May 7) Adults suffering from diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma, and other blood-related disorders may benefit from life-saving treatment commonly used in pediatric patients. Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified a new technique that causes cord blood (CB) stems cells to generate in greater numbers making them more useful in adult transplantation. The study, published in the May issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, looked at ways to expand the number of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) in the laboratory required ...

VIDEO: Watch the movie to see the wealth of colorful NASA observations of an X-class flare on March 29 -- the most comprehensively observed flare, ever. BROADCAST QUALITY: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011500/a011522/.... Click here for more information. On March 29, 2014, an X-class flare erupted from the right side of the sun... and vaulted into history as the best-observed flare of all time. The flare was witnessed by four different NASA spacecraft and one ground-based ...

Leesburg, VA, May 5, 2014—Glutamate imaging reveals ischemic lesions in the first 3 hours after stroke that are not distinguishable in T1-weighted and T2-weighted imaging. Researchers using chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST), an emerging MRI technology, have found that using glutamate with CEST shows high spatial resolution in vivo. The finding has the potential to speed diagnosis—and, therefore, treatment—in the critical first hours after a stroke. "I have been interested in glutamate imaging since its inception," said researcher Zhuozhi Dai of Second Affiliated ...

Premature menopause is associated with long-term negative effects on cognitive function, suggests a new study published today (7 May) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG). The average age of menopause is around 50 years in the Western World. Premature menopause refers to menopause at or before 40 years of age, this could be due to a bilateral ovariectomy, (surgically induced menopause)or non-surgical loss of ovarian function (sometimes referred to as 'natural' menopause). The study, based on a sample of 4868 women, used cognitive tests ...

Leesburg, VA, May 7, 2014— Patients undergoing peritoneal dialysis catheter placement via fluoroscopy and ultrasound-guidance experienced significantly fewer complications at 1 year post-insertion than did patients whose catheters were placed laparoscopically. The first of two study groups received catheters using fluoroscopy and ultrasound guidance under conscious sedation by interventional radiologists. In the second group, the catheters were inserted using laparoscopy under general anesthesia by surgeons. "Our results showed that the overall complications at 1 ...

Leesburg, VA, May 7, 2014—A study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School found that estimated radiation doses are substantially lower for pediatric CT exams of the brain that used an adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction technique (ASIR) compared to those that did not use ASIR. The researchers found that the brain and salivary gland doses were much lower for ASIR-enabled exams compared to those without ASIR technique. However, no differences in the estimated organ doses were found for the thyroid gland, skeleton, and eye lenses across ...

Leesburg, VA, May 6, 2014—Screening 40- to 49-year-old women for breast cancer has additional benefits beyond the proven decrease in mortality rate. Patients screened with mammography are statistically less likely to undergo chemotherapy, avoiding the associated toxic morbidities. Screening mammography also helps identify a subset of patients at increased risk of breast cancer by diagnosing high-risk lesions. The majority of high-risk lesions identified in a retrospective chart review were found in screened patients. Identifying patients at high risk may allow for the ...

Leesburg, VA, May 5, 2014—Misinformation and misunderstanding about the risks associated with ionizing radiation create heightened public concern and fear, and may result in avoidance of screening mammography that can detect early cancers. In a study to determine the baseline understanding of the radiation associated with mammography among patients presenting for initial or follow-up imaging, women were asked to rate the amount of radiation received in a single mammogram as being significantly less, slightly less, about the same, slightly more, or significantly more compared ...

Alexandria, Va. – Since hydraulic fracturing operations began in the Marcellus Shale region, debate has raged over whether drilling operations are causing high levels of methane in drinking-water wells. But few systematic scientific studies have been published to date, so it's unknown if high methane levels are natural or the result of contamination from nearby gas wells. Now, a new study is adding some much-needed baseline data for methane levels in groundwater in New York. The results suggest that at least in some cases methane occurs at naturally high levels in groundwater. Read ...

There's a tropical low pressure area in the Eastern Pacific Ocean today, about 8 days before the official Eastern Pacific hurricane season begins. NOAA's National Hurricane Center is giving it a 50 percent chance of becoming a tropical depression in the next two days, and NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead to gather infrared data on it. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over developing tropical low pressure system 90E on May 8 at 08:41 UTC (4:41 a.m. EDT) and infrared data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard, showed that some of the thunderstorms ...

Leesburg, VA, May 5, 2014—Dose-tracking software provides effective and easy monitoring of radiation dose exposure in a busy academic practice, according to research conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital. For commonly ordered abdominal CT exams, iterative reconstruction techniques enabled approximately 50 percent radiation dose reduction compared to the national averages reported in the Dose Index Registry*. "A busy practice with diverse CT technology and remote scanner locations encounters challenges in assessing institutional performance in lowering radiation ...

Leesburg, VA, May 5, 2014—Breast tomosynthesis in the diagnostic workup for one- or two-view focal asymmetry detected at screening mammography resulted in less use of ultrasound, fewer biopsies, and higher positive predictive value for cancer than when diagnostic exams involved only 2D mammography, according to a study conducted at the University of Virginia. "Tomosynthesis has been evaluated in screening populations and been shown to decrease recall rates," said researcher Brandi Nicholson, "but studies in the diagnostic setting are lacking." Five hundred thirty ...