EVANSTON, Ill. --- Birth weight makes a difference to a child's future academic performance, according to new Northwestern University research that found heavier newborns do better in elementary and middle school than infants with lower birth weights. Led by a multidisciplinary team of Northwestern researchers, the study raises an intriguing question: Does a fetus benefit from a longer stay in the mother's womb? "A child who is born healthy doesn't necessarily have a fully formed brain," said David Figlio, one of the study's authors and director of Northwestern's Institute ...

Gorlin syndrome causes an increased risk of developing cancers of the skin and, rarely, in the brain. Around 1 in 30,000 people has the condition. Most people with Gorlin syndrome have a change in a gene called PTCH1, but the new research has revealed that changes in a gene called SUFU also cause Gorlin syndrome and it is children with a change in SUFU that are 20 times more likely to develop a brain tumour. Dr Miriam Smith, a lecturer in cancer genomics from the University's Institute of Human Development led the research, which was also carried out with The Christie ...

Whereas most adults are members of the Clean Plate Club, they eat an average of about 90% of the food they serve themselves, this is not true for children. New Cornell research aggregated six different studies of 326 elementary school-aged children. It showed that, if their parents are not around, the average child only eats about 60% of what they serve themselves. More than a third goes right in the trash. Unlike adults, kids are still learning about what foods they like and how much it will take to fill them up. "It's natural, for them to make some ...

Vitamin D supplements can reduce COPD lung disease flare-ups by over 40% in patients with a vitamin D deficiency - according to new research from Queen Mary University of London. COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) includes conditions such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and is thought to affect more than 3 million people in the UK. The NIHR-funded randomised trial, published in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine, included 240 patients with COPD in and around London. Half of the patients (122) received vitamin D supplements (6 x 2-monthly oral doses ...

Muslim communities may not be as victimised by violent crime, or as dissatisfied with the police as is widely suggested and believed, according to new research by a Cambridge academic. An examination of statistics taken from the Crime Survey of England and Wales between 2006 and 2010 reveals a surprising counter-narrative to commonly-held perceptions of British Muslim communities and their relationships to crime victimization and the criminal justice system. Analysis of crime data generated by nearly 5,000 Muslims reveals few differences between Muslims and non-Muslims ...

People diagnosed with diabetes in midlife are more likely to experience significant memory and cognitive problems during the next 20 years than those with healthy blood sugar levels, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests. The researchers found that diabetes appears to age the mind roughly five years faster beyond the normal effects of aging. For example, on average, a 60-year-old with diabetes experiences cognitive decline on par with a healthy 65-year-old aging normally. Decline in memory, word recall and executive function is strongly ...

1. Better glucose control in midlife may protect against cognitive decline later in life Having diabetes or prediabetes in midlife is associated with a greater risk for cognitive decline later in life, according to a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population has type 2 diabetes, putting them at risk for several adverse health outcomes, including dementia. Cognitive decline is a precursor to dementia. Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) level is a measure of the average circulating glucose level in the blood over the preceding 2 ...

While policymakers and health care professionals have identified health information exchanges -- organizations that facilitate the sharing of patient medical information electronically between different organizations -- as a promising solution to fragmented health care delivery in the United States, a RAND Corporation review found that few of the more than 100 such organizations have been evaluated. The relatively few exchanges that have been examined show some evidence of reducing emergency department costs and usage, but other outcomes are unknown, according to the ...

Over 75 million adults in the US are obese. These individuals are predisposed to health complications, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Gastric bypass surgery results in dramatic weight loss and can improve diabetes symptoms in obese patients. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation reveals that exercise following bypass surgery provides additional benefit for obese patients. Bret Goodpaster and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh conducted a study on individuals that had recently undergone gastric bypass surgery. One group followed a moderate ...

Premature ovarian failure (POF) is estimated to affect 1-4% of the female population. Women with POF can present with a variety of symptoms and many genes have been linked to this condition. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation identifies a specific mutation in a family that results in POF. Aleksandar Rajkovic and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh studied 3 sisters with POF-associated symptoms and identified and mutation in MCM8, a gene involved in chromosome maintenance. Siblings without the MCM8 mutation did not have any signs of POF. Cells from ...

ORLANDO, Fla., December 1, 2014 - A new study by researchers at the Florida Hospital - Sanford-Burnham Translational Research Institute for Metabolism and Diabetes (TRI-MD) shows that patients who moderately exercise after bariatric surgery (weight-loss surgery) gain additional health improvements in glucose metabolism and cardiorespiratory fitness compared to patients who lead a sedentary lifestyle after surgery. The findings confirm the physiological and potential clinical benefits of adding an exercise regime following weight-loss surgery. "This is the first randomized, ...

(NEW YORK - December 1, 2014) Kidneys donated by people born with a small variation in the code of a key gene may be more likely, once in the transplant recipient, to accumulate scar tissue that contributes to kidney failure, according to a study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. If further studies prove the variation to cause fibrosis (scarring) in the kidneys of transplant recipients, researchers may be able to use it to better screen potential donors and improve transplant ...

Treatment with the anticholesterol medicine rosuvastatin calcium did not reduce the risk of fracture among men and women who had elevated levels of an inflammatory biomarker, according to a report published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Fractures resulting from the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis are a burden facing an aging population. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) and osteoporosis may share common biological pathways with inflammation key to the development of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and possibly the development of osteoporosis. Several studies ...

Parents of children who fell at home were more likely not to use safety gates and not to have taught their children rules about climbing on things in the kitchen, according to a study published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Falls send more than 1 million children in the United States and more than 200,000 children in the United Kingdom to emergency departments (EDs) each year. Costs for falls in the U.S. were estimated at $439 million for hospitalized children and $643 million for ED visits in 2005. Most of the falls involve beds, chairs, baby walkers, bouncers, changing ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- If decades of effort to bring more underrepresented minority students into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields were considered a grand chemistry experiment, then the modest results would suggest that while the formula may not be wrong, it may well be incomplete, according to a new article in the journal CBE-Life Sciences Education. "I don't necessarily want to say that we've been doing it wrong all along, it's just that there are other ideas we can bring in," said lead author Andrew G.Campbell, a Brown ...

Turn on any local TV weather forecast and you can get a map of where skies are blue or cloudy. But for scientists trying to figure out how clouds affect the Earth's environment, what's happening inside that shifting cloud cover is critical and hard to see. To investigate the layers and composition of clouds and tiny airborne particles like dust, smoke and other atmospheric aerosols, , scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland have developed an instrument called the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System, or CATS. The instrument, which launches to ...

NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel, or HS3, mission investigated four tropical cyclones in the 2014 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season: Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard and Gonzalo. The storms affected land areas in the Atlantic Ocean Basin and were at different stages during the investigations. The HS3 mission pilots flew a remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft over Cristobal, Dolly, and Edouard and flew a manned WB-57 aircraft over Gonzalo. During the flights, Cristobal transitioned from a hurricane into an extra-tropical storm. Edouard strengthened from a tropical storm ...

December 1, 2014 --Years after the end of the Great Recession, child poverty remains widespread in America's largest cities. A paper just released by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), a research center based at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, reports that nearly three children in five living in Detroit are poor, according to the most recent Census figures. This rate has grown by 10 percentage points since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. Most children in Cleveland and Buffalo also live in poverty, as do nearly half ...

West Orange, NJ. December 1, 2014. Kessler Foundation researchers have authored a new article that provides insight into the variable impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on long-term memory. The article, "Working memory capacity links cognitive reserve with long-term memory in moderate to severe TBI: a translational approach," was epublished ahead of print on October 7 in the Journal of Neurology (10.1007/s00415-014-7523-4). The authors are Joshua Sandry, PhD, John DeLuca, PhD, and Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD, of Kessler Foundation. This study was supported by grants ...

WASHINGTON (Dec. 1 2014) -- For patients in cardiac arrest, administering epinephrine helps to restart the heart but may increase the overall likelihood of death or debilitating brain damage, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The study offers new data in an ongoing debate over the risks and benefits of using epinephrine to treat cardiac arrest, an often-fatal condition in which the heart stops beating. Epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, is a hormone that stimulates the heart and promotes the flow of blood. ...

Give therapists and psychiatrists information about the biology of a mental disorder, and they have less -- not more -- empathy for the patient, a new Yale study shows. The findings released Dec. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge the notion that biological explanations for mental illness boost compassion for the tens of millions of Americans who suffer from mental-health problems. Conventional wisdom suggests that biological explanations for psychiatric symptoms should reduce the blame patients receive for their behavior by making ...

Existing age estimates of American mastodon fossils indicate that these extinct relatives of elephants lived in the Arctic and Subarctic when the area was covered by ice caps--a chronology that is at odds with what scientists know about the massive animals' preferred habitat: forests and wetlands abundant with leafy food. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers is revising fossil age estimates based on new radiocarbon dates and suggesting that the Arctic and Subarctic were only temporary ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disease of the brain and spinal cord, affects about 2.3 million people worldwide (400,000 in the United States). Affecting more women than men, it can be seen at any age, although it is most commonly diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 40. An unpredictable disease that disrupts the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and the body, MS is triggered when the immune system attacks the myelin sheath, the protective covering around the axons of nerve fibers. The "demyelination" that follows ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The house mouse, stickleback fish and honey bee appear to have little in common, but at the genetic level these creatures respond in strikingly similar ways to danger, researchers report. When any of these animals confronts an intruder, the researchers found, many of the same genes and brain gene networks gear up or down in response. This discovery, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that distantly related organisms share some key genetic mechanisms that help them respond to threats, said University of Illinois ...

The rapid evolution of HIV, which has allowed the virus to develop resistance to patients' natural immunity, is at the same time slowing the virus's ability to cause AIDS, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust. The study also indicates that people infected by HIV are likely to progress to AIDS more slowly - in other words the virus becomes less 'virulent' - because of widespread access to antiretroviral therapy (ART). Both processes make an important contribution to the overall goal of the control and eradication of the HIV epidemic. In 2013, there ...