Munich, 1 July 2014: The rapid freezing technique of vitrification is set to revolutionise egg donation as a fertility treatment by enabling freeze-storage egg-banking. The cryopreservation of eggs was one of IVF's continuing challenges until the widespread introduction of vitrification; the older slow freezing methods induced the formation of ice crystals, which could cause damage to several structures of the egg. Thus, as demand for egg donation increases as a treatment for age-related infertility, egg banking with vitrification can theoretically provide a large pool ...

Munich, 1 July 2014: A project in Denmark whose aim is to assess the reliability of preconceptional lifestyle and biological factors as predictors of fertility has found a pronounced effect of the contraceptive pill on markers used to assess "ovarian reserve", a predictor of future reproductive lifespan. Available evidence of whether the Pill has an effect on fertility has so far been reassuring - and usual advice to those stopping the Pill is that cycles will soon revert to normal, with pregnancy likely within six months or so.(1) However, one continuing concern ...

Munich, 1 July 2014: With an ever-ageing female patient population, egg donation is an increasingly common treatment in infertility. ESHRE's own annual reports on fertility treatments in Europe show a rise in egg donation cycles from 15,028 in 2007 to 24,517 in 2010 (to 4.05% of all treatments). This proportion is still some way behind the USA, where egg donation now accounts for around 12% of all treatments. As women age their store of viable eggs reduces such that their "ovarian reserve" (and likelihood of pregnancy) declines. Once the eggs have gone, they cannot be ...

Munich, 1 July 2014: While the majority of younger women are aware of egg freezing as a technique of fertility preservation and consider it an acceptable means of reproductive planning, only one in five would consider it appropriate for them, according to the results of an internet survey performed in the UK and Denmark. The questionnaire, which was accessible online, was completed anonymously by 973 women with a median age of 31 years between September 2012 and September 2013. Results are reported today at the ESHRE Annual Meeting in Munich by Dr Camille Lallemant of ...

Researchers at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore (Duke-NUS) have found evidence that the less older adults sleep, the faster their brains age. These findings, relevant in the context of Singapore's rapidly ageing society, pave the way for future work on sleep loss and its contribution to cognitive decline, including dementia. Past research has examined the impact of sleep duration on cognitive functions in older adults. Though faster brain ventricle enlargement is a marker for cognitive decline and the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, ...

PHILADELPHIA —A new approach demonstrated that the recognition of unique cancer mutations appeared to be responsible for complete cancer regressions in two metastatic melanoma patients treated with a type of immunotherapy called adoptive T-cell therapy. This new approach may help develop more effective cancer immunotherapies, according to a study published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "This study provides the technical solution to identify mutated tumor targets that can stimulate immune responses, which is one ...

In a new study of the causes underlying respiratory symptoms in military personnel returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, a large percentage of veterans had non-specific symptoms that did not lead to a specific clinical diagnosis. Most patients who did receive a diagnosis had evidence of asthma or nonspecific airway hyperreactivity, which may have been due in some cases to aggravation of pre-existing disease by deployment exposures. "Earlier studies of military personnel deployed in Southwest Asia have shown increases in non-specific respiratory symptoms related ...

Contrary to popular belief, the foodborne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni is not a harmless commensal in chickens but can cause disease in some breeds of poultry according to research published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. "The main implication is that Campylobacter is not always harmless to chickens. This rather changes our view of the biology of this nasty little bug," says Paul Wigley of Institute for Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool, an author on the study. Campylobacter jejuni is the ...

Researchers from IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) have identified a new protein, galectin-1, as a possible therapeutic target for pancreatic cancer. For the first time they have demonstrated the effects of the inhibition of this protein in mice suffering this type of cancer and the results showed an increase in survival of 20%. The work further suggests that it could be a therapeutic target with no adverse effects. Until now, the strategies for treating this tumour were aimed at attacking the tumour cells and had little success. The latest studies indicate ...

Scientists have sketched out one of the greatest baby booms in North American history, a centuries-long "growth blip" among southwestern Native Americans between 500 and 1300 A.D. It was a time when the early features of civilization--including farming and food storage--had matured to a level where birth rates likely "exceeded the highest in the world today," the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Then a crash followed, says Tim Kohler, an anthropologist at Washington State University (WSU), offering ...

Emotional and behavioral problems show up even with low exposure to lead, and as blood lead levels increase in children, so do the problems, according to research funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health. The results were published online June 30 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. "This research focused on lower blood lead levels than most other studies and adds more evidence that there is no safe lead level," explained NIEHS Health Scientist Administrator Kimberly Gray, Ph.D. "It is important to ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Malaria parasites alter the chemical odor signal of their hosts to attract mosquitos and better spread their offspring, according to researchers, who believe this scent change could be used as a diagnostic tool. "Malaria-infected mice are more attractive to mosquitos than uninfected mice," said Mark Mescher, associate professor of entomology, Penn State. "They are the most attractive to these mosquito vectors when the disease is most transmissible." Malaria in humans and animals is caused by parasites and can be spread only by an insect vector, ...

CHICAGO --- The heart is more forgiving than you may think -- especially to adults who try to take charge of their health, a new Northwestern Medicine® study has found. When adults in their 30s and 40s decide to drop unhealthy habits that are harmful to their heart and embrace healthy lifestyle changes, they can control and potentially even reverse the natural progression of coronary artery disease, scientists found. The study was published June 30 in the journal Circulation. "It's not too late," said Bonnie Spring lead investigator of the study and a professor of ...

Patients with Alzheimer's disease run a high risk of seizures. While the amyloid-beta protein involved in the development and progression of Alzheimer's seems the most likely cause for this neuronal hyperactivity, how and why this elevated activity takes place hasn't yet been explained – until now. A new study by Tel Aviv University researchers, published in Cell Reports, pinpoints the precise molecular mechanism that may trigger an enhancement of neuronal activity in Alzheimer's patients, which subsequently damages memory and learning functions. The research team, led ...

A Binghamton University physicist and his colleagues say they have unlocked one key mystery surrounding high-temperature superconductivity. Their research, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found a remarkable phenomenon in copper-oxide (cuprate) high-temperature superconductors. Michael Lawler, assistant professor of physics at Binghamton, is part of an international team of physicists with an ongoing interest in the mysterious pseudogap phase, the phase situated between insulating and superconducting phases in the cuprate phase ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- While inadequate funding has hampered international efforts to conserve biodiversity in tropical forests, a new Duke University-led study finds that people in a growing number of tropical countries may be willing to shoulder more of the costs on their own. "In wealthier developing countries, there has been a significant increase in public demand for conservation, which has not yet been matched by an equivalent increase in protective actions by the governments of those countries," said Jeffrey R. Vincent, a Duke environmental economist who led the study, ...

About seven days after conception, something remarkable occurs in the clump of cells that will eventually become a new human being. They start to specialize. They take on characteristics that begin to hint at their ultimate fate as part of the skin, brain, muscle or any of the roughly 200 cell types that exist in people, and they start to form distinct layers. Although scientists have studied this process in animals, and have tried to coax human embryonic stem cells into taking shape by flooding them with chemical signals, until now the process has not been successfully ...

Stem cell scientists had what first appeared to be an easy win for regenerative medicine when they discovered mesenchymal stem cells several decades ago. These cells, found in the bone marrow, can give rise to bone, fat, and muscle tissue, and have been used in hundreds of clinical trials for tissue repair. Unfortunately, the results of these trials have been underwhelming. One problem is that these stem cells don't stick around in the body long enough to benefit the patient. But Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists at Boston Children's Hospital aren't ready ...

If you've gone grocery shopping lately, you've probably bought palm oil. Found in thousands of products, from peanut butter and packaged bread to shampoo and shaving cream, palm oil is a booming multibillion-dollar industry. While it isn't always clearly labeled in supermarket staples, the unintended consequences of producing this ubiquitous ingredient have been widely publicized. The clearing of tropical forests to plant oil palm trees releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas fueling climate change. Converting diverse forest ecosystems to these ...

Sharks were a tolerant bunch some 50 million years ago, cruising an Arctic Ocean that contained about the same percentage of freshwater as Louisiana's Lake Ponchatrain does today, says a new study involving the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Chicago. The study indicates the Eocene Arctic sand tiger shark, a member of the lamniform group of sharks that includes today's great white, thresher and mako sharks, was thriving in the brackish water of the western Arctic Ocean back then. In contrast, modern sand tiger sharks living today in the Atlantic Ocean ...

UC San Francisco researchers have completed the first Internet-based clinical trial for children with autism, establishing it as a viable and cost effective method of conducting high-quality and rapid clinical trials in this population. In their study, published in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the researchers looked at whether an Internet-based trial was a feasible way to evaluate whether omega-3 fatty acids helped reduce hyperactivity in children with autism. The authors found that not only was it a valuable ...

Researchers at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) are discovering that the current protective eyewear used by our U.S. armed forces might not be adequate to protect soldiers exposed to explosive blasts. According to a recent study, ocular injuries now account for 13 percent of all battlefield injuries and are the fourth most common military deployment-related injury. With the support of the U.S. Department of Defense, UTSA biomedical engineering assistant professor Matthew Reilly and distinguished senior lecture in geological sciences Walter Gray have been ...

COLLEGE STATION, TX – Earth-Kind® roses are favorites with gardeners and landscapers. Chosen for their superior tolerance to heat, drought, and pests, as well as their outstanding performance in landscapes, Earth-Kind® roses can thrive in most environments, even with limited care. A new study focused on determining the best Earth-Kind® varieties for withstanding the challenges of salt stress. As alternative water sources such as reclaimed water are becoming more commonly used as irrigation for urban landscapes and agricultural crops, plants are being subjected to higher ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 30, 2014—Zebrafish, a model organism that plays an important role in biological research and the discovery and development of new drugs and cell-based therapies, can form embryonic stem cells (ESCs). For the first time, researchers report the ability to maintain zebrafish-derived ESCs for more than 2 years without the need to grow them on a feeder cell layer, in a study published in Zebrafish, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Zebrafish website. Ho Sing Yee and coauthors from the ...

Although scenes of people fleeing from dramatic displays of Mother Nature's power dominate the news, gradual increases in an area's overall temperature — and to a lesser extent precipitation — actually lead more often to permanent population shifts, according to Princeton University research. The researchers examined 15 years of migration data for more than 7,000 families in Indonesia and found that increases in temperature and, to a lesser extent, rainfall influenced a family's decision to permanently migrate to another of the country's provinces. They report in the ...