MANHASSET, NY – A study from North Shore University Hospital's (NSUH) cardiothoracic surgery department demonstrated a very significant reduction in hospital readmissions after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. This study is featured in the May 2014 issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, the North Shore-LIJ Health System announced today. The CABG patients who did not receive home health care through the Follow Your Heart program were three times more likely to either be readmitted to the hospital or pass away, the study found. The 30-day readmission rate ...

A major new survey of the seafloor has found that even in the deepest ocean depths you can find bottles, plastic bags, fishing nets and other types of human litter. The litter was found throughout the Mediterranean, and all the way from the continental shelf of Europe to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge 2,000 kilometres from land. Litter is a problem in the marine environment as it can be mistaken for food and eaten by some animals or can entangle coral and fish – a process known as "ghost fishing". The international study involving 15 organisations across Europe was led by the ...

SAN DIEGO, CA – April 30, 2014 – Three new mango-related studies were presented this week at the 2014 Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) in San Diego, revealing initial findings on the effects of mango consumption on ulcerative colitis and bone parameters in animal models. "The mango industry's nutrition research program is committed to advancing our understanding of the role mangos can play as part of a healthy diet," said Megan McKenna, Director of Marketing for the National Mango Board. "These studies provide important insights that ...

West Orange, NJ. April 30, 2014. Multiple sclerosis researchers have found that brain reserve and cognitive reserve confer a long-term protective effect against cognitive decline: Sumowski JF, Rocca MA, Leavitt VM, Dackovic J, Mesaros S, Drulovic J, Deluca J, Filippi M. Brain reserve and cognitive reserve protect against cognitive decline over 4.5 years in MS. Neurology. 2014 Apr 18. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000000433 [Epub ahead of print]. James Sumowski, PhD, lead author of the article, and John DeLuca, PhD, are at Kessler Foundation. Co-authors are from the Manhattan ...

Tracing where your DNA was formed over 1,000 years ago is now possible due to a revolutionary technique developed by a team of international scientists led by experts from the University of Sheffield. The ground breaking Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool, created by Dr Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences and Dr Tatiana Tatarinova from the University of Southern California, works similarly to a satellite navigation system as it helps you to find your way home, but not the one you currently live in – but rather ...

Each year, more than 25,000 Americans are diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer that often develops resistance to therapies. However, researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center are reporting promising results from laboratory experiments testing a new combination therapy that could potentially overcome the resistance hurdle. While several drugs are effective against multiple myeloma, including the proteasome inhibitor bortezomib, multiple myeloma cells are often able to survive by increasing the production of a protein known ...

Johns Hopkins biochemists have figured out what is needed to activate and sustain the virus-fighting activity of an enzyme found in CD4+ T cells, the human immune cells infected by HIV. The discovery could launch a more effective strategy for preventing the spread of HIV in the body with drugs targeting this enzyme, they say. A summary of their work was published online on April 21 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Current antiretroviral drugs target HIV's proteins," says James Stivers, Ph.D., a professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- The new Center for Health Innovation & Implementation Science at the Indiana University School of Medicine and Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute is studying how best to prepare the future health care workforce as the country's population ages. It calls upon the tools of implementation science to enable these workers and the health systems that will employ them to provide optimal care in a rapidly changing health care environment. Implementation science, a new discipline, provides tools to clinicians and administrators to deliver better ...

Fairfax, Va., May 1, 2014—Patients with locally advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck treated with hyperfractionated radiation therapy (HFX) experienced improved local-regional control and, with patients censored at five years, improved overall survival with no increase in late toxicity, according to a study published in the May 1, 2014 edition of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology ● Biology ● Physics (Red Journal), the official scientific journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). This study, "Final Results ...

When a woman requires gynecologic surgery, she and her surgeon have several minimally invasive surgical options, including robotic surgery. In recent years, the use of robotic surgery has become more and more common. But questions have arisen about the potential overuse of robotic surgery and its advantages over traditional laparotomy for hysterectomy. A clinical opinion by Charles Rardin, MD, a urogynecologist in the Division of Urogynecology and Reconstructive Surgery and director of the Robotic Surgery Program for Women at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, ...

Traditional first-line checks of such heart disease risk factors as cholesterol, blood pressure and smoking habits aren't nearly good enough to identify cardiovascular disease in otherwise healthy, young firefighters, according to results of a small Johns Hopkins study. Previous studies have found that cardiovascular disease accounts for 45 percent of deaths of on-duty firefighters nationwide, in contrast to 15 percent of deaths among those with conventional occupations, with heart attack being the number one cause of death. The Johns Hopkins researchers designed their ...

By hightailing it to nearby ponds and shallow waterways, frogs and salamanders have – until now – had a way to evade exotic trout introduced to the West's high-mountain lakes for recreational fishing. A warming climate, however, will dry up some of the places where amphibians and their young have found refuge. Researchers in the May 1 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment write about this challenge and a novel combination of tools that could help land managers, biologists, fishing enthusiasts and other citizens weigh where amphibians are in the most need of ...

A newly discovered molecule provides a new drug target for controlling both asthma-induced muscle thickening and cancerous tumor growth. This molecule, called "microRNA-10a," normally helps genes produce proteins or make copies of themselves, also play an important role in the growth or overgrowth of human airway smooth muscle cells and some forms of cancer. This newly discovered role, which was published in the May 2014 issue of The FASEB Journal, suggests that manipulating microRNA-10a could lead to new asthma and cancer drugs. "We hope this study will serve as the ...

A protein believed to be limited to the hematopoietic system, called Kindlin-3, has been identified as a major player in both the formation and spread of breast cancer to other organs. This discovery, published in the May 2014 issue of The FASEB Journal, could open the door to an entirely new class of breast cancer drugs that targets this protein's newly found activity. "Kill Kindlin-3 to cure cancer," said Elzbieta Pluskota, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Molecular Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute in Cleveland, ...

Ottawa (May 1st, 2014) – A new expert panel report, Environmental Impacts of Shale Gas Extraction in Canada, concludes that shale gas development must be supported by well-targeted science and management strategies to understand and mitigate potential impacts. The report, released today by the Council of Canadian Academies, addresses environmental and associated health impacts and offers insights regarding public engagement and trust. Shale gas is leading an energy boom which is having profound economic, environmental, and social impacts across much of North America. ...

New Orleans, LA – Kristopher Kaliebe, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Medicine, offers parents and caregivers three simple family-oriented goals to overcome the complex problem of childhood obesity and related mental disorders. They involve limit setting to address the brain's "get more" drive strengthened through habitual over-consumption of temptations including highly caloric processed food, hyper-reality media and electronics, as well as excessive sitting. His 3 "rules" of living promote physical ...

Activity in areas of the brain related to reward and self-control may offer neural markers that predict whether people are likely to resist or give in to temptations, like food, in daily life, according to research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Most people have difficulty resisting temptation at least occasionally, even if what tempts them differs," say psychological scientists Rich Lopez and Todd Heatherton of Dartmouth College, authors on the study. "The overarching motivation of our work is to understand why some ...

Antimicrobial agents incorporated into edible films applied to foods to seal in flavor, freshness and color can improve the microbiological safety of meats, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. Using films made of pullulan -- an edible, mostly tasteless, transparent polymer produced by the fungus Aureobasidium pulluns -- researchers evaluated the effectiveness of films containing essential oils derived from rosemary, oregano and nanoparticles against foodborne pathogens associated with meat and poultry. The results demonstrate that ...

How hard can it be to make a wheel rotate in a machine? Very hard actually, when the wheel sits in one of those nano-small molecular machines that are predicted to be running our future machines. But before the molecular machines become part of our daily lives, researchers must be able to control them. A Danish/American research team have now solved part of this problem. There are large machines and there are small machines - and then there are molecular machines. They are nano-tiny collections of molecular building blocks that together make up a machine and operate various ...

In the 1950s and 1960s, pregnant women with morning sickness were often prescribed the new drug thalidomide. Shortly after the medicine was released on the market, a reported 10,000 infants were born with an extreme form of the rare congenital phocomelia syndrome, which caused death in 50 percent of cases and severe physical and mental disabilities in others. Although various factors are now known to cause phocomelia, the prominent roots of the disease can be found in the use of the drug thalidomide. Now, half a century later, new research by Dr. Noam Shomron, Prof ...

Boston, MA-- New findings from an in vitro study, led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), show that the combination of statins and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), an omega-3 fatty acid, may potentially reduce cardiovascular risk. This research is being presented May 1 at a peer-reviewed poster session at the National Lipid Association Scientific Sessions in Orlando, Florida. "We know that endothelial cell dysfunction is emerging as an early and important predictor of cardiovascular disease and plays an essential role in plaque development. Treatments that ...

Smokers may avoid treatment to quit smoking if they previously gained weight while trying to quit, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. Weight gain is a predictable occurrence for smokers who have recently quit. Within the first year after quitting, they gain an average of eight to14 pounds, and some smokers report that they keep smoking simply because they do not want to gain weight from quitting. Susan Veldheer, project manager in the Department of Public Health Sciences, predicted that smokers would avoid treatment to quit if they are highly ...

CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine® scientists have newly identified a protein's key role in cell and physiological aging and have developed – in collaboration with Tohoku University in Japan -- an experimental drug that inhibits the protein's effect and prolonged the lifespan in a mouse model of accelerated aging. The rapidly aging mice fed the experimental drug lived more than four times longer than a control group, and their lungs and vascular system were protected from accelerated aging, the new study reports. The experimental drug could potentially be used to treat ...

A team of researchers from SUNY Downstate Medical Center (SUNY Downstate) and Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) has found that deficiencies in hyaluronan, also known as hyaluronic acid or HA, can lead to spontaneous epileptic seizures. HA is a polysaccharide molecule widely distributed throughout connective, epithelial, and neural tissues, including the brain's extracellular space (ECS). Their findings, published on April 30 in The Journal of Neuroscience, equip scientists with key information that may lead to new therapeutic approaches to epilepsy. ...

VIDEO: Land plants detect light with pigments called phytochromes, which are sensitive to red light. But red light is absorbed by water, so aquatic algae have evolved phytochromes with a much... Click here for more information. Aquatic algae can sense an unexpectedly wide range of color, allowing them to sense and adapt to changing light conditions in lakes and oceans. The study by researchers at UC Davis was published earlier this year in the journal Proceedings of the National ...