Scientists have for the first time used DNA sequencing to trace the fatal spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis between patients in the UK. Genetic analysis of the TB bacteria revealed how a 44-year-old man who died of the disease in 2012 caught the drug-resistant infection from a healthcare worker who had worked in South Africa, when both were admitted on the same medical ward four years earlier. TB is spread by inhaling tiny airborne droplets from an infected person. The bacteria can survive in the lungs for long periods without causing symptoms - known as latent ...

A frog in Ecuador's western Andean cloud forest changes skin texture in minutes, appearing to mimic the texture it sits on. Originally discovered by a Case Western Reserve University PhD student and her husband, a projects manager at Cleveland Metroparks' Natural Resources Division, the amphibian is believed to be the first known to have this shape-shifting capability. But the new species, called Pristimantis mutabilis, or mutable rainfrog, has company. Colleagues working with the couple recently found that a known relative of the frog shares the same texture-changing ...

Verbal abuse, aggressive behaviour, criminal damage to objects--such incidents are to be expected within certain professions. Hardly anyone had included doctors in this thinking, however, although they too are exposed to such problems. Florian Vorderwülbecke and colleagues in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112: 159-65) investigate, for the first time, how often acts of violence and aggression against primary care physicians are committed in Germany. They surveyed 1500 doctors, asking which assaults they had been ...

ATHENS, GA -- More efficient irrigation management has become a primary focus in sustainable container plant production as growers look for ways to improve resource use and mitigate negative environmental impacts of fertilizers and pesticides that are often found in nursery runoff. Among the new technologies for increasing irrigation efficiency is the use of soil moisture sensors for automated irrigation. The practice allows nursery personnel to schedule plant irrigation when substrate volumetric water content drops below a certain threshold, thus improving irrigation efficiency ...

Boston, MA - Schools collaborating with a professionally trained chef to improve the taste of healthy meals significantly increased students' fruit and vegetable consumption, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study also found that using "choice architecture" (environmental nudges to promote healthy choices) in school cafeterias improved students' selection of fruits and vegetables, but did not increase consumption over the long-term. The study is the first to examine the long-term impact of choice architecture ...

In a clinical trial that explored the effectiveness of exercise training and vitamin D supplementation for reducing falls in older women, neither intervention affected the overall rate of falls, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Falls are the leading cause of unintentional injuries and fractures in older adults. However, reviews of clinical trials on the role of vitamin D in reducing falls and fractures in community-dwelling older adults and in improving physical functioning have been inconclusive, according to the study background. Kirsti ...

Patients with Parkinson disease who experienced pain before undergoing subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) had that pain improved or eliminated at eight years after surgery, although the majority of patients developed new pain, mostly musculoskeletal, according to an article published online by JAMA Neurology. Pain is a common nonmotor symptom in patients with Parkinson disease and it negatively impacts quality of life. Beom S. Jeon, M.D., Ph.D., of the Seoul National University Hospital, Korea, and coauthors evaluated the long-term effect of STN DBS ...

Fruit and vegetable selections in school meals increased after students had extended exposure to school food made more tasty with the help of a professional chef and after modifications were made to school cafeterias, including signage and more prominent placement of fruits and vegetables, but it was only chef-enhanced meals that also increased consumption, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. More than 30 million students get school meals daily and many of them rely on school foods for up to half of their daily calories. Therefore, school-based ...

ROCHESTER, Minn - A Mayo Clinic study has identified a familial association in spontaneous coronary artery dissection, a type of heart attack that most commonly affects younger women, suggesting a genetic predisposition to the condition, researchers say. The results are published in the March 23 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers used the Mayo Clinic SCAD Registry of 412 enrollees to identify five familial cases of SCAD, comprised of three pairs of first-degree relatives (mother-daughter, identical twin sisters, sisters) and two pairs of second-degree relatives ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 23, 2015) - Discontinuing statin use in patients with late-stage cancer and other terminal illnesses may help improve patients' quality of life without causing other adverse health effects, according to a new study by led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Duke University and funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). The finding, to be published in JAMA Internal Medicine on March 23, indicates that care for patients with advanced illness can be improved by discontinuing some therapies that are ...

DETROIT - Innovative angles of attack in research that focus on how the human brain protects and repairs itself will help develop treatments for one of the most common, costly, deadly and scientifically frustrating medical conditions worldwide: traumatic brain injury. In an extensive opinion piece recently published online on Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs, Henry Ford Hospital researcher Ye Xiong, M.D., Ph.D., makes the case for pioneering work underway in Detroit and elsewhere seeking to understand and repair brain function at the molecular level. "To date, ...

A blood thinning agent is helping researchers at the University of East Anglia understand more about the body's natural barriers to HIV. New research published today reveals how the protein langerin, which is present in genital mucous and acts as a natural HIV barrier during the first stages of contamination, interacts with the drug heparin. The research team has been able to identify two different mechanisms for that interaction - involving different sites or 'faces' at the surface of the langerin protein. Lead researcher Dr Jesus Angulo from UEA's school of Pharmacy ...

Lexington, MA (March 23, 2015) - Research results published in the Journal of Neurotrauma and conducted by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) as part of a collaboration with Concert Pharmaceuticals, Inc. showed that a novel deuterium-containing sigma-1 agonist invented at Concert, called C-10068, demonstrated anti-seizure and anti-inflammatory effects in a preclinical model of traumatic brain injury (TBI). C-10068, a novel metabolically-stabilized morphinan derivative, is based on a compound first identified at WRAIR in the 1990s as possessing anticonvulsant ...

Many smartphone users know that free apps sometimes share private information with third parties, but few, if any, are aware of how frequently this occurs. An experiment at Carnegie Mellon University shows that when people learn exactly how many times these apps share that information they rapidly act to limit further sharing. In one phase of a study that evaluated the benefits of app permission managers - software that gives people control over what sensitive information their apps can access - 23 smartphone users received a daily message, or "privacy nudge," telling ...

March 23, 2015 - Patients with carpal tunnel syndrome are more than twice as likely to have migraine headaches, reports a study in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery--Global Open®, the official open-access medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The association also runs in the other direction, with migraine patients having higher odds of carpal tunnel syndrome, according to research by Dr. Huay-Zong Law and colleagues of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. The findings add a new piece of evidence in the ongoing debate ...

This news release is available in French. Raising the age of eligibility for the Old Age Security pension and the Guaranteed Income Supplement will increase inequalities between older people. "This change will force retired people into greater dependence on their private savings to support them as they get older. Research shows that greater privatisation of the retirement income system results in growing inequalities among the older population. When you raise the pension eligibility age, you are also opening the door to rising disparities" according to demographer Yves ...

Implementing a well-established business approach allowed physicians to shave hours off pediatric patient discharges without affecting readmission rates, according to researchers at Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital. This approach could help hospitals around the country open up existing beds to more patients, and reduce emergency department crowding and lost referrals without investing significant capital. Most hospitals have a fixed number of staffed beds available for patients. When hospitals are at or exceed capacity, admitted patients may be kept in the ED ...

An extensive study of global habitat fragmentation - the division of habitats into smaller and more isolated patches - points to major trouble for a number of the world's ecosystems and the plants and animals living in them. The study shows that 70 percent of existing forest lands are within a half-mile of the forest edge, where encroaching urban, suburban or agricultural influences can cause any number of harmful effects - like the losses of plants and animals. The study also tracks seven major experiments on five continents that examine habitat fragmentation ...

NAIROBI, KENYA (20 March 2015)--African cattle infected with a lethal parasite that kills one million cows per year are less likely to die when co-infected with the parasite's milder cousin, according to a new study published today in Science Advances. The findings suggest that "fighting fire with fire" is a strategy that might work against a range of parasitic diseases. The immediate implications are for the battle in Africa against a tick-borne cattle-killing parasite, Theileria parva, which causes East Coast fever. The disease kills one cow every 30 seconds and claims ...

PHILADELPHIA- Penn Medicine researchers have discovered that hypermethylation - the epigenetic ability to turn down or turn off a bad gene implicated in 10 to 30 percent of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) - serves as a protective barrier inhibiting the development of these diseases. Their work, published this month in Neurology, may suggest a neuroprotective target for drug discovery efforts. "This is the first epigenetic modification of a gene that seems to be protective against neuronal disease," says lead author ...

Philadelphia, PA, March 20, 2015 - A new study provides the first evidence that the mediator complex subunit 15 (MED15) may play a crucial role in the pathophysiology of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). MED15 overexpression was found to be associated with higher mortality rates in HNSCC patients with cancer recurrence, particularly in oral cavity/oropharyngeal tumors, according to the study published in The American Journal of Pathology. MED15 overexpression was also associated with heavy alcohol consumption, which is an HNSCC risk factor. HNSCC is the sixth ...

This news release is available in German. Erectile dysfunction is a taboo subject among men. No one likes to talk about it. But the fact is that as men age, an increasing number will suffer from erectile dysfunction. From the age of 30, the number of men who have unsatisfactory erections or none at all increases. In the over-60 age group, more than half of all men have been affected by erectile dysfunction. The main causes include cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hormonal imbalance, neurological disease and the side-effects of medication. Even spinal paralysis can ...

Philadelphia, PA, March 23, 2015 - Many adults, regardless of their weight, resolve to avoid fatty foods and unhealthy desserts. But despite one's best intentions, when the moment for decision comes, that chocolate lava cake is often too enticing and self-control vanishes. This behavior is normal because hunger increases the intensity of food rewards. Yet, individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN), despite their state of starvation, are able to ignore such food-related rewards. A new study by Dr. Christina Wierenga, Dr. Walter Kaye, and colleagues, published in the current ...

A chance discovery by a team of researchers, including a University of York scientist, has provided experimental evidence that stars may generate sound. The study of fluids in motion - now known as hydrodynamics - goes back to the Egyptians, so it is not often that new discoveries are made. However when examining the interaction of an ultra-intense laser with a plasma target, the team observed something unexpected. Scientists including Dr John Pasley, of the York Plasma Institute in the Department of Physics at York, realised that in the trillionth of a second after the ...

(WASHINGTON - March 23, 2015) - New research reports that when compared to healthy pregnant women, pregnant women with a severe form of sickle cell disease (SCD) are six times more likely to die during or following pregnancy and have an increased risk for stillbirth, high blood pressure, and preterm delivery. Research findings, published online today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), are the first to estimate several health risks facing pregnant women with SCD and identify those who are at highest risk of complications. People with ...