PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — To maximize HIV prevention efforts in South Africa and perhaps the broader region, public health officials should consider testing for other sexually transmitted infections when they test for HIV, according to a new paper in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. STIs can make HIV easier to transmit even after antiretroviral therapy has begun, so rooting out STI co-infections in patients should improve HIV prevention. The new study led by Brown University public health researchers emphasizes that sooner is indeed better than ...

AUSTIN, Texas — Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions have discovered that the more diverse the diet of a fish, the less diverse are the microbes living in its gut. If the effect is confirmed in humans, it could mean that the combinations of foods people eat can influence the diversity of their gut microbes. The research could have implications for how probiotics and diet are used to treat diseases associated with the bacteria in human digestive systems. A large body of research has shown that the human microbiome, the collection ...

For the first time in roughly 2 million years, melting Arctic sea ice is connecting the north Pacific and north Atlantic oceans. The newly opened passages leave both coasts and Arctic waters vulnerable to a large wave of invasive species, biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center assert in a commentary published May 28 in Nature Climate Change. Two new shipping routes have opened in the Arctic: the Northwest Passage through Canada, and the Northern Sea Route, a 3000-mile stretch along the coasts of Russia and Norway connecting the Barents and Bering ...

The open-access, open-data journal GigaScience (published by BGI and Biomed Central), announces today the publication of an article on the genome sequencing of 3000 rice strains along with the release of this entire dataset in a citable format in journal's affiliated open-access database, GigaDB. The publication and release of this enormous data set (which quadruples the current amount of publicly available rice sequence data) coincides with World Hunger Day to highlight one of the primary goals of this project— to develop resources that will aid in improving global food ...

WASHINGTON, DC, May 27, 2014 — A new study suggests that high-status female college students employ "slut discourse" — defining their styles of femininity and approaches to sexuality as classy rather than trashy or slutty — to assert class advantage and put themselves in a position where they can enjoy sexual exploration with few social consequences. "Viewing women only as victims of men's sexual dominance fails to hold women accountable for the roles they play in reproducing social inequalities," said lead author Elizabeth A. Armstrong, an associate professor of sociology ...

Birds come in astounding variety—from hummingbirds to emus—and behave in myriad ways: they soar the skies, swim the waters, and forage the forests. But this wasn't always the case, according to research by scientists at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. The researchers found a striking lack of diversity in the earliest known fossil bird fauna (a set of species that lived at about the same time and in the same habitat). "There were no swans, no swallows, no herons, nothing like that. They were pretty much all between a sparrow and a crow," said Jonathan ...

London's international fish trade can be traced back 800 years to the medieval period, according to new research published today in the journal Antiquity. The research, led by archaeologists from UCL, Cambridge and UCLan, provides new insight into the medieval fish trade and the globalisation of London's food supply. Archaeologists analysed data from nearly 3,000 cod bones found in 95 different excavations in and around London. They identified a sudden change in the origin of the fish during the early 13th century, indicating the onset of a large-scale import trade. Lead ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study of the colorful "eyespots" on the wings of some butterfly species is helping to address fundamental questions about evolution that are conceptually similar to the quandary Aristotle wrestled with about 330 B.C. – "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" After consideration, Aristotle decided that both the egg and the chicken had always existed. That was not the right answer. The new Oregon State University research is providing a little more detail. The study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, actually attempts to ...

In a personal view published on bmj.com today, a professor of public health at a leading university thinks there should be health warning labels on sugary drinks. Professor Simon Capewell, professor at the University of Liverpool, highlights that the State of California is considering a new health bill. One which will see sugary drinks labelled with health warnings, vending machines to bear warning labels, and fines of between $50 and $500 per failed inspection". Professor Capewell thinks this is a good idea, and one that the UK public would support. He says that ...

A policy of higher NHS spending in deprived areas compared with affluent areas is associated with a reduction in absolute health inequalities from causes amenable to healthcare in England, suggests a study published on bmj.com today. In 1999, the government introduced a new 'health inequalities' objective for the allocation of NHS resources in England, which resulted in greater NHS spending in deprived areas with the worst health outcomes. But it is not known whether this policy was successful in contributing to a reduction in health inequalities. So researchers based ...

A school-based scheme to encourage children to eat healthily and be active has had little effect, conclude researchers in a study published on bmj.com today. The findings have relevance for researchers, policy makers, public health practitioners, and doctors, and they suggest that more intense interventions may be required. Low levels of physical activity and of fruit and vegetable consumption in childhood are associated with adverse health outcomes. School based interventions have the potential to reach the vast majority of children, and evidence reviews have suggested ...

Concerns about guardianship and privacy can discourage clinics from testing children for HIV, according to new research from Zimbabwe published this week in PLOS Medicine. The results of the study, by Rashida A. Ferrand of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and colleagues, provide much-needed information on how to improve care of this vulnerable population. More than three million children globally are living with HIV (90% in sub-Saharan Africa) and in 2011 an estimated 1000 infant infections occurred every day. HIV acquired through mother-to-child transmission ...

In a PLOS Medicine guest editorial, Paul Glasziou, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Bond University in Australia, explores how open access publications could help moderate and reduce the vast waste of global medical research. Continuing on from his previous work, which highlighted how most of the world's expenditure on medical research was thrown away, Glasziou outlines how bad the situation is and suggests how it might be improved. Subscription-based academic journals make money by through copyrights assigned by authors to publishers who lock the articles behind ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – We all deal with stress differently. For many of us, stress is a great motivator, spurring a renewed sense of vigor to solve life's problems. But for others, stress triggers depression. We become overwhelmed, paralyzed by hopelessness and defeat. Up to 20% of us will struggle with depression at some point in life, and researchers are actively working to understand how and why this debilitating mental disease develops. Today, a team of researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) led by Associate Professor Bo Li reveals a major insight ...

The cognitive differences between humans and our closest living cousins, the chimpanzees, are staggeringly obvious. Although we share strong superficial physical similarities, we have been able to use our incredible mental abilities to construct civilisations and manipulate our environment to our will, allowing us to take over our planet and walk on the moon while the chimps grub around in a few remaining African forests. But a new study suggests that human muscle may be just as unique. Scientists from Shanghai's CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, together ...

Disturbed patterns of blood flow induce lasting epigenetic changes to genes in the cells that line blood vessels, and those changes contribute to atherosclerosis, researchers have found. The findings suggest why the protective effects of good blood flow patterns, which aerobic exercise promotes, can persist over time. An epigenetic change to DNA is a chemical modification that alters whether nearby genes are likely to be turned on or off, but not the letter-by-letter sequence itself. The results are scheduled for publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Atherosclerosis ...

Older people who undertake at least 25 minutes of moderate or vigorous exercise everyday need fewer prescriptions and are less likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency, new research has revealed. The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reinforce the need for exercise programmes to help older people stay active. It could also reduce reliance on NHS services and potentially lead to cost savings. In the first study of its kind looking at this age group, researchers from the University of Bristol looked at data from 213 people whose average age was 78. Those ...

In certain patients with abdominal pain after gallbladder removal (cholecystectomy), undergoing an endoscopic procedure involving the bile and pancreatic ducts did not result in fewer days with disability due to pain, compared to a placebo treatment, according to a study in the May 28 issue of JAMA. Post-cholecystectomy pain is a common clinical problem. More than 700,000 patients undergo cholecystectomy each year in the United States, and at least 10 percent are reported to have pain afterwards. Most of these patients have no significant abnormalities on imaging or ...

An analysis of more than 600 class I (procedure/treatment should be performed/administered) American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guideline recommendations published or revised since 1998 finds that about 80 percent were retained at the time of the next guideline revision, and that recommendations not supported by multiple randomized studies were more likely to be downgraded, reversed, or omitted, according to a study in the May 28 issue of JAMA. As adherence to recommended clinical practice guidelines increasingly is used to measure performance, ...

PHILADELPHIA –Clinical practice guideline recommendations related to screening and treatment can change markedly over time as new evidence about best practices and clinical outcomes of various treatments emerges. In a first-of-its-kind study, Penn Medicine researchers examined high-level recommendations published by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) between 1998 and 2007 and found that recommendations which were supported by multiple randomized controlled trials were the most "durable" and least likely to change over time. ...

Science crowdsourcing was used to disprove a widely held theory that "supertasters" owe their special sensitivity to bitter tastes to an usually high density of taste buds on their tongue, according to a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. Supertasters are people who can detect and are extremely sensitive to phenylthiocarbamide and propylthiouracil, two compounds related to the bitter molecules in certain foods such as broccoli and kale. Supertasting has been used to explain why some people don't like spicy foods or "hoppy" ...

Oncologists now have a new understanding of the toxicity levels of specific chemotherapy regimens used for women with early stage breast cancer, according to research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The retrospective study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, used large population-based data to compare the risk of hospitalization for six common chemotherapy regimens. Reasons for hospitalization included infection, fever, anemia, dehydration, neutropenia (low white blood cell count), thrombocytopenia (low blood platelets) and delirium. ...

A genetic variant linked to sudden cardiac death leads to protein overproduction in heart cells, Johns Hopkins scientists report. Unlike many known disease-linked variants, this one lies not in a gene but in so-called noncoding DNA, a growing focus of disease research. The discovery, reported in the June 5 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, also adds to scientific understanding of the causes of sudden cardiac death and of possible ways to prevent it, the researchers say. "Traditionally, geneticists have studied gene variants that cause disease by producing ...

The agency charged to protect patients from dangerous drug side effects needs to be far more vigilant when it comes to medications that affect blood pressure. Robert P. Blankfield, MD, MS, a clinical professor of family medicine, issues this call to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in an editorial published recently in an online edition of the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics; the print version of the article is expected to appear this autumn. The editorial notes that several medications survived FDA scrutiny, only to be pulled from ...

Disturbed blood flow induces epigenetic alterations to promote atherosclerosis Arterial hardening, also known as atherosclerosis, is the result of plaque buildup in the walls of arteries and over time can lead to cardiovascular complications, including heart attack, stroke, and peripheral vascular disease. Atherosclerotic plaques typically develop in arterial regions with disrupted blood flow. While blood flow disturbances are known to alter endothelial gene expression and function, it is not clear how altered blood flow induces these changes in endothelial cells. In ...