Philadelphia, PA, November 18, 2014 - Care gaps are emerging due to disharmony between healthcare reimbursement policies and evidence-based clinical guideline recommendations, cautions a group of Canadian physicians. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, they use the example of stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation (AF) to make a case for engaging with policy-makers to address the growing barriers to patients' access to optimal care. Stroke is a costly disease, imposing a significant human, societal, and economic burden. AF affects about one in eight people ...

Computerized cognitive training (CCT) has been widely promoted for older adults, but its effectiveness for cognitively health older adults has been unclear in systematic reviews to date. In a new systematic review and meta-analysis published in this week's issue of PLOS Medicine, Michael Valenzuela (Brain and Mind Research Institute, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) and colleagues evaluated 52 datasets in 51 studies and found a small overall effect of CCT (g = 0.22; 95% CI 0.15 to 0.29, where g END ...

Computer based 'brain training' can boost memory and thinking skills in older adults, but many programs promoted by the $1 billion brain training industry are ineffective, reveals new research by the University of Sydney. Published today in PLOS Medicine, the study shows that engaging older adults computer-based cognitive training (also known as brain training) can lead to improvements in memory, speed, and visuospatial skills. However, it has no impact on attention or executive functions such as impulse control, planning and problem solving. Brain degeneration ...

HOUSTON, Nov. 18, 2014 - The quest of University of Houston professor Richard Meisel to understand how and why males and females differ may one day lead to a more effective means of pest control - namely, the pesky house fly. Meisel, an assistant professor in the UH Department of Biology and Biochemistry, collaborated with several scientists on sequencing the house fly genome. The results were recently published in the open-access journal Genome Biology. "The house fly genome will be a useful resource for understanding how pest species are able to exist in their environment ...

WASHINGTON, DC-- Small volcanic eruptions might eject more of an atmosphere-cooling gas into Earth's upper atmosphere than previously thought, potentially contributing to the recent slowdown in global warming, according to a new study. Scientists have long known that volcanoes can cool the atmosphere, mainly by means of sulfur dioxide gas that eruptions expel. Droplets of sulfuric acid that form when the gas combines with oxygen in the upper atmosphere can remain for many months, reflecting sunlight away from Earth and lowering temperatures. However, previous research ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Nov. 18, 2014 -- Leave it to long-dead short-tailed shrew and flying squirrels to outfox climate-modelers trying to predict future habitats. Evidence from the fossil record shows that gluttonous insect-eating shrew didn't live where a species distribution technique drawn by biologists put it 20,000 years ago to survive the reach of glaciers, says University of Oregon geologist Edward B. Davis. The shrew is not alone. According to a new study by Davis and colleagues, fossil records of five ancient mammalian species that survived North America's last glacial ...

Hamilton, ON (Nov. 18, 2014) - McMaster University researchers have found new evidence that suggests patients with a history of adverse reaction to the blood thinner heparin may be ready for urgent heart surgery sooner with a combination of appropriate blood screenings and therapeutic plasma exchange. The study was published online today in Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology. The lead author is Dr. Theodore Warkentin, a professor in the Department of Medicine's Division of Hematology and Thromboembolism and the Department of Pathology and Molecular ...

The consumption of a diet high in fructose throughout adolescence can worsen depressive- and anxiety-like behavior and alter how the brain responds to stress, according to new animal research scheduled for presentation at Neuroscience 2014, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health. "Our results offer new insights into the ways in which diet can alter brain health and may lead to important implications for adolescent nutrition and development," said lead author Constance Harrell of ...

Washington, D.C. - November 18, 2014 - Lumosity is presenting new research today at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience conference on how altering cognitive task parameters affects learning rates. The study, titled "Optimizing Cognitive Task Designs to Improve Learning Rates in a Large Online Population," analyzed game play performance from 99,022 participants, and found that participants operating closer to their performance threshold earlier in their experience with a cognitive task tend to have faster learning rates - especially at higher levels of difficulty. "By looking ...

Ticagrelor halves risks of stents blocking with blood clots Study of 18,000 patients shows cost-effective drug could prevent premature deaths Reduces the risk of patients needing repeat operations Treating heart attack patients with ticagrelor reduces the risk of stents blocking with blood clots according to a ground breaking new study conducted by researchers from the University of Sheffield. The new findings confirm that treating heart attack patients with the pioneering drug ticagrelor, instead of the previous standard treatment clopidogrel, could halve the risks ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - In the 1970s, ecologists published results from one of the first whole-forest ecosystem studies ever conducted in Hubbard Brook, New Hampshire. In the paper, scientists reported that salamanders represent one of the largest sources of biomass, or food, of all vertebrates in the forest landscape. Now, using new sampling and statistical techniques not available during the past study, researchers at the University of Missouri have estimated that the population of salamanders in forested regions of the Missouri Ozarks are 2-4 times higher than originally thought, ...

NEW YORK (November 18, 2014) - The addition of mitral valve (MV) repair (a valve of the heart) to coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), a type of open-heart surgery, did not result in significant benefit to the patient and was associated with increased risk of neurological events. Therefore, the routine addition of MV repair to CABG in patients with moderate IMR did not demonstrate a clinically meaningful advantage. The Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network (CTSN) is reporting results for the first time from a clinical trial of patients who have a complication of ...

Over the last decade, neuroscientists have largely come to believe that physical pain and social pain are processed by the brain in the same way. But a new study led by the University of Colorado shows that the two kinds of pain actually use distinct neural circuits, a finding that could lead to more targeted treatments and a better understanding of how the two kinds of pain interact. For the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers used a technique recently borrowed from the computer science field by neuroscientists--multivariate pattern ...

WASHINGTON D.C., November 18, 2014 - On a quest to design an alternative to the two complex approaches currently used to produce electrons within microwave electron guns, a team of researchers from Euclid TechLabs and Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Nanoscale Materials have demonstrated a plug-and-play solution capable of operating in this high-electric-field environment with a high-quality electron beam. Unfamiliar with microwave electron guns? Perhaps best known within the realm of X-ray sources, microwave electron guns provide a higher current and much higher ...

Medications, such as chemotherapy, are often limited by their tendency to be detrimental to healthy cells as an unintended side effect. Now research in the November 18th issue of Cell Press's Biophysical Journal offers a new computational model that can help investigators design ways to direct drugs to their specific targets. A major problem with many cancer drugs is the harmful effects they can have on normal cells. Similarly, treatments for a variety of other diseases can have side effects by acting on cells that are not meant to be targeted. Researchers have tried ...

A mother's "TLC" not only can help soothe pain in infants, but it may also impact early brain development by altering gene activity in a part of the brain involved in emotions, according to new study from NYU Langone Medical Center. By carefully analyzing what genes were active in infant rat brains when the mother was present or not present, the NYU researchers found that several hundred genes were more, or less, active in rat infants experiencing pain than in those that were not. With their mothers present, however, fewer than 100 genes were similarly expressed. According ...

(BOSTON) - A major challenge faced by the pharmaceutical industry has been how to rationally design and select protein molecules to create effective biologic drug therapies while reducing unintended side effects - a challenge that has largely been addressed through costly guess-and-check experiments. Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University offer a new approach, in a study published today in Biophysical Journal. "I believe that biology is the technology of this century," said the study's senior author and Wyss Institute ...

STANFORD, CA Today, scientists at the Natural Capital Project share new science and open source software that can calculate risk to coastal and marine ecosystems. These novel tools, described in the journal Environmental Research Letters, were used to design the first integrated coastal zone management plan for the Caribbean country of Belize. Conducted with the Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute in Belize and the World Wildlife Fund, the study offers a comprehensive explanation of the process used to calculate risk of habitat degradation in marine spatial ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT chemists have developed new nanoparticles that can simultaneously perform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and fluorescent imaging in living animals. Such particles could help scientists to track specific molecules produced in the body, monitor a tumor's environment, or determine whether drugs have successfully reached their targets. In a paper appearing this week in Nature Communications, the researchers demonstrate the use of the particles, which carry distinct sensors for fluorescence and MRI, to track vitamin C in mice. Wherever there is a high ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The bacteria that helped cause the near-ruin of two large oyster hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest have been mistakenly identified for years, researchers say in a recent report. In addition, the study shows that the bacteria now believed to have participated in that problem are even more widespread and deadly than the previous suspect. Although the hatchery industry has largely recovered, primarily by better control of ocean water acidity that was also part of the problem, the bacterial pathogens remain a significant concern for wild oysters along ...

Findings play important role in understanding impact of oral health on heart 35 extra cases of serious heart infection every month in the UK Prescription of antibiotic prophylaxis has fallen by 89 per cent Scientists at the University of Sheffield have identified a significant rise in the number of people diagnosed with a serious heart infection alongside a large fall in the prescribing of antibiotic prophylaxis to dental patients. The pioneering study is the largest and most comprehensive to be conducted with regards to the National Institute for Health and Care ...

NEW YORK, NY - November 17, 2014 - A new study has identified an FDA approved cancer drug, crizotinib, as a possible new coating for drug-eluting stents. Researchers found that crizotinib in mice helped prevent the narrowing of blood vessels after stenting without affecting the blood vessel lining. Results of this study were published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. To find a more effective drug to use on stents, researchers used a computational biology or "big data" approach to better understand the genetic pathways of re-narrowing that occurs in stented ...

November 18, 2014 -- A study just released by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found that children who were exposed to antibiotics in the second or third trimester of pregnancy had a higher risk of childhood obesity at age 7. The research also showed that for mothers who delivered their babies by a Caesarean section, whether elective or non-elective, there was a higher risk for obesity in their offspring. Study findings are published online in the International Journal of Obesity. Although previous studies have shown that antibiotics administered early ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - With a population of 11 million and located about 100 km from Beijing (22 million people) and Tangshan (7 million people), Tianjin lies on top of the Tangshan-Hejian-Cixian fault that has been the site of 15 devastating earthquakes in the past 1,000 years. An example of the disastrous events is the 1976 magnitude 7.6 Tangshan Earthquake, which killed a quarter million people. To assess future seismic hazards along the fault, scientists from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Chinese Earthquake Administration (CEA) have reconstructed, ...

In an extensive, multi-institution study led by SUNY Downstate Medical Center, researchers have identified new evidence supporting the growing belief that Neanderthals were a distinct species separate from modern humans (Homo sapiens), and not a subspecies of modern humans. The study looked at the entire nasal complex of Neanderthals and involved researchers with diverse academic backgrounds. Supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the research also indicates that the Neanderthal nasal complex was not adaptively ...