BOSTON —A new method for measuring delirium severity in older adults has been developed by researchers from Harvard, Brown, and UMASS. The new scoring system, CAM-S, is based on the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM) and standardizes the measurement of delirium severity for both clinical and research uses. Details of this study are published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Delirium is defined as the sudden onset of confusion or change in mental status that is often brought about by physical illness, surgery, or hospitalization. Delirium is a common and often costly ...

The US Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act encourages patients to act as their own advocates for reducing unnecessary prescriptions that increase the risk of harm. The American Board of Internal Medicine Choosing Wisely® campaign echoes this message by asking older adults to refrain from using sleeping pills. According to the American Geriatrics Society, these medicines have been linked to memory problems, falls, fractures and motor vehicle accidents. "Many people believe that involving patients in the decision to curtail medical treatments is expecting too ...

STANFORD, Calif. — As many as 10 percent of women with a personal or family history of breast or ovarian cancer have at least one genetic mutation that, if known, would prompt their doctors to recommend changes in their care, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The women in the study did not have mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 (mutations in these genes are strongly associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer), but they did have mutations in other cancer-associated genes. The study was conducted using what's known ...

Bottom Line: A telephone-based collaborative care model helped manage depression and anxiety, and improved health-related quality of life in patients with heart disease. Author: Jeff C. Huffman, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and colleagues. Background: Depression following acute cardiac conditions is common and generalized anxiety and panic disorders occur at higher rates in patients with heart conditions. Depression and anxiety are determinants of health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Collaborative care (CC) models use nonphysician care managers ...

Significant advances have been made in chemotherapy over the past decade, but targeting drugs to cancer cells while avoiding healthy tissues continues to be a major challenge. Nanotechnology has unlocked new pathways for targeted drug delivery, including the use of nanocarriers, or capsules, that can transport cargoes of small-molecule therapeutics to specific locations in the body. The catch? These carriers are tiny, and it matters just how tiny they are. Change the size from 10 nanometers to 100 nanometers, and the drugs can end up in the wrong cells or organs and ...

It's a hard pill to swallow, but if you're over 24 years of age you've already reached your peak in terms of your cognitive motor performance, according to a new Simon Fraser University study. SFU's Joe Thompson, a psychology doctoral student, associate professor Mark Blair, Thompson's thesis supervisor, and Andrew Henrey, a statistics and actuarial science doctoral student, deliver the news in a just-published PLOS ONE Journal paper. In one of the first social science experiments to rest on big data, the trio investigates when we start to experience an age-related ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Lower levels of blood sugar may make married people angrier at their spouses and even more likely to lash out aggressively, new research reveals. In a 21-day study, researchers found that levels of blood glucose in married people, measured each night, predicted how angry they would be with their spouse that evening. At the end of the 21 days, people who had generally lower levels of glucose were willing to blast their spouses with unpleasant noises at a higher volume and for a longer time than those who had higher glucose levels. The study shows how ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- During the age of the dinosaurs, the arrival of flowering plants as competitors could have spelled doom for the ancient fern lineage. Instead, ferns diversified and flourished under the new canopy -- using a mysterious gene that helped them adapt to low-light environments. A team led by Duke University scientists has pinpointed the curious origins of this gene and determined that it was transferred to ferns from a group of unassuming moss-like plants called hornworts. The findings were announced today, April 14, in the Proceedings of the National Academy ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Since the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, scientists, policymakers, and the public have wondered whether we might someday see a similarly extreme depletion of ozone over the Arctic. But a new MIT study finds some cause for optimism: Ozone levels in the Arctic haven't yet sunk to the extreme lows seen in Antarctica, in part because international efforts to limit ozone-depleting chemicals have been successful. "While there is certainly some depletion of Arctic ozone, the extremes of Antarctica so far are very different from what we find in the ...

Falmouth, Mass. – Future simulations of climate in the Amazon suggest a longer dry season leading to more drought and fires. Woods Hole Research Center scientists Michael Coe, Paulo Brando, Marcia Macedo and colleagues have published a new study on the impacts of fire and drought on Amazon tree mortality. Their paper entitled “Abrupt increases in Amazonian tree mortality due to drought-fire interactions,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that prolonged droughts caused more intense and widespread wildfires, which consumed more forests ...

Like humans, many animals depend on beneficial microbes for survival. Although such symbioses can persist for millions of years, the factors maintaining their long-term stability remain, in most cases, unknown. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and the University of Regensburg, in collaboration with researchers in the USA, now discovered that certain wasps tightly control mother-to-offspring transmission of their bacterial symbionts. This stabilizes the symbiotic alliance and contributed to its persistence over the past 68-110 million years. ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - High levels of the greenhouse gas methane were found above shale gas wells at a production point not thought to be an important emissions source, according to a study jointly led by Purdue and Cornell universities. The findings could have implications for the evaluation of the environmental impacts from natural gas production. The study, which is one of only a few to use a so-called "top down" approach that measures methane gas levels in the air above wells, identified seven individual well pads with high emission levels and established their stage ...

Penicillin, one of the scientific marvels of the 20th century, is currently losing a lot of battles it once won against bacterial infections. But scientists at the University of South Carolina have just reported a new approach to restoring its combat effectiveness, even against so-called "superbugs." Bacteria have been chipping away at the power of the penicillin family of drugs since their first wide-scale use as antibiotics in the 1940s. For example, the staph infection, brought about by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, was once readily treated with penicillin and ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study shows that moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea is independently associated with an increased risk of stroke, cancer and death. Results of the 20-year follow-up study show that people with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea were four times more likely to die (hazard ratio = 4.2), nearly four times more likely to have a stroke (HR = 3.7), three times more likely to die from cancer (HR = 3.4), and 2.5 times more likely to develop cancer. Results were adjusted for potential confounding factors such as body mass index, smoking status, ...

PHILADELPHIA—Playing an active role in their radiation treatment decisions leaves cancer patients feeling more satisfied with their care, and may even relieve psychological distress around the experience, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania report in the journal Cancer. In a study of 305 patients undergoing radiation treatment, Neha Vapiwala, MD, an associate professor in the department in Radiation Oncology at Penn Medicine, and colleagues at link "Penn's...Center: Penn's Abramson Cancer Center found an association between ...

Northwestern Medicine scientists are continuing to unravel the molecular changes that underlie one of the world's deadliest and most infamous respiratory infections. When the bacterium Yersinia pestis enters the lungs, it causes pneumonic plague, a disease that is 100 percent fatal if untreated. The way in which Y. pestis evades the immune system and kills people in a matter of days has largely confounded scientists, until now. Following a 2007 study demonstrating that the presence of a protein called the plasminogen activator protease (Pla) is required for Y. pestis ...

Changes in the Puerto Rican climate over the past three decades have caused small but significant changes to the coqui frog, the territory's national animal. UCLA biologists have found that not only have male coquis become smaller, but their mating call has also become shorter and higher pitched. Authored by Peter Narins, UCLA distinguished professor of integrative biology and physiology and of ecology and evolutionary biology, and Sebastiaan Meenderink, a UCLA physics researcher, the study examined 170 male coqui frogs (Eleutherodactylus coqui) in 1983 and then 116 ...

RICHLAND, Wash. – Think of the pressure change you feel when an elevator zips you up multiple floors in a tall building. Imagine how you'd feel if that elevator carried you all the way up to the top of Mt. Everest – in the blink of an eye. That's similar to what many fish experience when they travel through the turbulent waters near a dam. For some, the change in pressure is simply too big, too fast, and they die or are seriously injured. In an article in the March issue of the journal Fisheries, ecologists from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National ...

Somewhere in the cosmos an ordinary galaxy spins, seemingly at slumber. Then all of a sudden, WHAM! A flash of light explodes from the galaxy's center. A star orbiting too close to the event horizon of the galaxy's central supermassive black hole is torn apart by the force of gravity, heating up its gas and sending out a beacon to the far reaches of the universe. In a universe with tens of billions of galaxies, how would we see it? What would such a beacon look like? How would we distinguish it from other bright, monumental intergalactic events, like supernovas? "Black ...

Research on children orphaned by HIV/AIDS in South Africa may provide insight on how to identify and help children with emotional behavior issues in other areas of the world, which may have limited access to healthcare and further research that could lead to successful interventions. A report on the global AIDS epidemic published by the United Nations mentions that due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has left 12 million children orphaned in Sub-Saharan African, children are at an increased risk for mental health problems. "There has been a big push to understand what ...

DETROIT – Doctors at Henry Ford Hospital reached a medical milestone April 3, performing the 25th successful transcatheter valve replacement using a novel way to access the heart. Henry Ford is the only hospital in the United States performing the unique procedure called transcaval valve replacement, which accesses the heart by temporarily connecting major blood vessels. Northern Michigan resident Viola Waller, 80, underwent Henry Ford's first transcaval procedure on July 3, 2013 when traditional valve replacement was not medically viable. "Nobody could help me here," ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. –Many families face the decision of whether to get a dog. For families of children with autism, the decision can be even more challenging. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has studied dog ownership decisions in families of children with autism and found, regardless of whether they owned dogs, the parents reported the benefits of dog ownership included companionship, stress relief and opportunities for their children to learn responsibility. "Children with autism spectrum disorders often struggle with interacting with others, which can make it difficult ...

Alexandria, Va., USA – The International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) have published a paper titled "Rare Bone Diseases and Their Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Manifestations." The complete review by researchers Sunday O. Akintoye, Andrea B. Burke, Alison M. Boyce, Michael Collins, Brian L. Foster, Rachel I. Gafni, Janice S. Lee, Mary Scott Ramnitz, Martha J. Somerman and J. Timothy Wright is published in the OnlineFirst portion of the IADR/AADR Journal of Dental Research (JDR). Hereditary diseases affecting the skeleton are heterogeneous ...

MOSS LANDING, CA — Killer sponges sound like creatures from a B-grade horror movie. In fact, they thrive in the lightless depths of the deep sea. Scientists first discovered that some sponges are carnivorous about 20 years ago. Since then only seven carnivorous species have been found in all of the northeastern Pacific. A new paper authored by MBARI marine biologist Lonny Lundsten and two Canadian researchers describes four new species of carnivorous sponges living on the deep seafloor, from the Pacific Northwest to Baja California. A far cry from your basic kitchen sponge, ...

A couple of years ago a University of Washington researcher who studies how children develop social behaviors like kindness and generosity noticed something odd. The 15-month-old infants in her experiments seemed to be playing favorites among the researchers on her team, being more inclined to share toys or play with some researchers than others. "It's not like one experimenter was nicer or friendlier to the babies – we control for factors like that," said Jessica Sommerville, a UW associate professor of psychology. She took a closer look at the data and realized that ...