A third of women who are given information about the chance of 'overdiagnosis' through the NHS breast screening programme may not fully understand the risks involved, according to research published in the British Journal of Cancer (BJC), today (Friday). In a survey of around 2,200 women, Cancer Research UK scientists at University College London (UCL) found that 64 per cent felt they fully understood the information given about overdiagnosis – the chance that screening will pick up cancers that would never have gone on to cause any harm – by the National breast screening ...

Previous research has indicated that salt may alter the autoimmune response, which is implicated in the development of multiple sclerosis (MS), but it is not clear if it has any direct effect on the course of the disease itself. The researchers assessed the blood and urine samples of 70 people with the relapsing-remitting form of MS to check for levels of salt; a marker of inflammatory activity called creatinine; and vitamin D, low levels of which have been linked to the disease. This group were asked to provide urine samples on three separate occasions over a period ...

The findings suggest there is no evidence for these particular arguments against the policy, put forward by the tobacco industry, say the researchers. Australia was the first country in the world to introduce standardised packaging for tobacco products in December 2012. New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK are currently considering similar legislation. The researchers wanted to find out if the policy would deter people from buying their tobacco from small independent retailers, prompt a rise in the availability of cheap products sourced from Asia, and increase the use of ...

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) presents a new model for predicting which patients with type 1 diabetes will go on to develop major complications, through easily and routinely measured risk factors. The research is by Assistant Professor Sabita Soedamah-Muthu, Wageningen University, Netherlands, and colleagues. To create the model, data were analysed from 1,973 participants with type 1 diabetes followed for seven years in the EURODIAB Prospective Complications Study, and strong prognostic factors ...

China's rapid emergence as a global power has coincided with a series of unprecedented challenges to Chinese people's health. The fifth China themed issue of The Lancet provides a picture of the complex health issues facing China, and looks at how better health outcomes for Chinese people can be achieved into the future. In this issue, the journal highlights the dire consequences that urbanisation and increasing affluence are having on China's chronic disease burden. The journal also reports systematic and comprehensive assessments of China's health-care system and revamping ...

Highlights When dialysis patients reported discussions about transplantation with clinicians, they had a nearly 3-fold increased likelihood of being listed for transplantation, but clinician-reported discussions did not increase a patient's likelihood of being listed. In almost one-third of cases, clinicians reported that they had discussed transplantation with a particular dialysis patient, but the patient said that nobody had discussed it with them. Washington, DC (August 28, 2014) — In a study of dialysis patients, those who reported that they had discussed ...

Bottom Line: Children with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) have no worse complications from ventilation tube (VT) insertion in their ears to treat otitis media with effusion (OME, a buildup of fluid in the ear) or acute otitis media (AOM, a common ear infection), two conditions which can result in hearing loss. Author: Ian Smillie, M.R.C.S. Ed., of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow, Scotland, and colleagues. Background: CLP is a common birth defect in children, occurring in 1 of 700 births. Optimizing hearing in children with CLP is important to avoid problems ...

LOS ANGELES - August 28, 2014: This week, a team of researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering will share results from a pilot study on the effects of using humanoid robots to help children with autism practice imitation behavior in order to encourage their autonomy. Findings from the study, entitled "Graded Cueing Feedback in Robot-Mediated Imitation Practice for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders," will be presented at the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Aug. ...

How did the earliest birds take wing? Did they fall from trees and learn to flap their forelimbs to avoid crashing? Or did they run along the ground and pump their "arms" to get aloft? The answer is buried 150 million years in the past, but a new University of California, Berkeley, study provides a new piece of evidence – birds have an innate ability to maneuver in midair, a talent that could have helped their ancestors learn to fly rather than fall from a perch. The study looked at how baby birds, in this case chukar partridges, pheasant-like game birds from Eurasia, ...

A chronic problem in winemaking is "stuck fermentation," when yeast that should be busily converting grape sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide prematurely shuts down, leaving the remaining sugar to instead be consumed by bacteria that can spoil the wine. A team of researchers including UC Davis yeast geneticist Linda Bisson has discovered a biochemical communication system behind this problem. Working through a prion -- an abnormally shaped protein that can reproduce itself -- the system enables bacteria in fermenting wine to switch yeast from sugar to other food sources ...

A space weather storm from the sun engulfed our planet on Jan. 21, 2005. The event got its start on Jan. 20, when a cloud of solar material, a coronal mass ejection or CME, burst off the sun and headed toward Earth. When it arrived at our planet, the ring current and radiation belts surrounding Earth swelled with extra particles, while the aurora persisted for six hours. Both of these are usually signs of a very large storm – indeed, this was one of the largest outpouring of solar protons ever monitored from the sun. But the storm barely affected the magnetic fields around ...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – The protracted and uneven recovery from the Great Recession has led most Americans to conclude that the U.S. economy has undergone a permanent change for the worse, according to a new national study at Rutgers. Seven in 10 now say the recession's impact is permanent, up from half in 2009 when the recession officially ended, according to the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Among key findings in "Unhappy, Worried and Pessimistic: Americans in the Aftermath of the Great Recession," the center's latest Work Trends report, are: Despite ...

LEBANON, NH ­– As the federal government plans its exit strategy from the war, now may be the time for it to rethink its role in providing health care to veterans, says a Perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine. "To simply go on doing more of the same is to fail to recognize the challenge that the Veterans Health Administration's cost and population structure pose in the longer run," said William Weeks, from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, and David Auerbach, from the RAND Corporation, in the August issue of NEJM. The ...

The next time you get really mad, take a look in the mirror. See the lowered brow, the thinned lips and the flared nostrils? That's what social scientists call the "anger face," and it appears to be part of our basic biology as humans. Now, researchers at UC Santa Barbara and at Griffith University in Australia have identified the functional advantages that caused the specific appearance of the anger face to evolve. Their findings appear in the current online edition of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. "The expression is cross-culturally universal, and even ...

RENO, Nev. – Climate change is hurting reproduction of the endangered Devils Hole pupfish, threatening the survival of this rare species that has numbered as few as 35 individuals, new research by the University of Nevada, Reno and Desert Research Institute shows. Scientists report that geothermal water on a small shelf near the surface of an isolated cavern in the Nevada desert where the pupfish live is heating up as a result of climate change and is likely to continue heating to dangerous levels. The hotter water, which now reaches more than 93 degrees, has shortened ...

A herbal preparation prescribed by a Chinese herbal medication practitioner in Melbourne for back pain resulted in life-threatening heart changes, prompting a team of intensive care and emergency physicians to call for appropriate patient education by practitioners who prescribe complementary medications. Writing in Emergency Medicine Australasia, the journal of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, emergency medicine trainees Dr Angelly Martinez and Dr Nicky Dobos from the Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and emergency medicine trainee Dr ...

CORAL GABLES, Fla (Aug. 26, 2014)-- Cigarette smoking kills approximately 440,000 Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Protection. It's the leading cause of preventable death worldwide. In order to overcome this addiction, many people resort to nicotine replacement therapies. A recent literature review study by researchers at the University of Miami (UM) suggest that small dosages of nicotine found in cigarette substitutes could be harmful to human musculoskeletal system, due to overuse. The findings are reported in the Global Journal ...

Rabies (and rabies virus, its causative agent) is usually transmitted through the bite of an infected animal into muscle tissue of the new host. From there, the virus travels all the way to the brain where it multiplies and causes the usually fatal disease. An article published on August 28th in PLOS Pathogens sheds light on how the virus hijacks the transport system in nerve cells to reach the brain with maximal speed and efficiency. Pathogens that travel in the blood can spread throughout the body without much effort, courtesy of the heart's pumping action. Those traveling ...

In response to an ongoing, unprecedented outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa, a team of researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard University, in collaboration with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation and researchers across institutions and continents, has rapidly sequenced and analyzed more than 99 Ebola virus genomes. Their findings could have important implications for rapid field diagnostic tests. The team reports its results online in the journal Science. For the current study, researchers sequenced 99 Ebola virus genomes collected ...

Astronomers have used a worldwide network of radio telescopes to resolve a controversy over the distance to a famous star cluster -- a controversy that posed a potential challenge to scientists' basic understanding of how stars form and evolve. The new work shows that the measurement made by a cosmic-mapping research satellite was wrong. The astronomers studied the Pleiades, the famous "Seven Sisters" star cluster in the constellation Taurus, easily seen in the winter sky. The cluster includes hundreds of young, hot stars formed about 100 million years ago. As a nearby ...

The genetic changes that transformed wild animals into domesticated forms have long been a mystery. An international team of scientists has now made a breakthrough by showing that many genes controlling the development of the brain and the nervous system were particularly important for rabbit domestication. The study is published today in Science and gives answers to many genetic questions. The domestication of animals and plants, a prerequisite for the development of agriculture, is one of the most important technological revolutions during human history. Domestication ...

VIDEO: Stimulating a region in the brain with non-invasive electrical current using magnetic pulses (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) improves memory, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study in Science. The discovery opens... Click here for more information. CHICAGO --- Stimulating a particular region in the brain via non-invasive delivery of electrical current using magnetic pulses, called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, improves memory, reports a new Northwestern Medicine® ...

Brazil could conserve its valuable Atlantic Forest by investing just 0.01 per cent of its annual GDP, according to a new study. The Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlântica) is one of the most important and threatened biodiversity hotspots in the world, containing the only living examples of nearly 10,000 species of plant and more bird species than all of Europe. Situated along the Atlantic coast of Brazil, it once covered an area of nearly 1.5 million square kilometres. Today, the forest is home to more than 130 million people and it covers only 160,000 km2, because of deforestation. ...

A person's home is their castle, and they populate it with their own subjects: millions and millions of bacteria. A study published today in Science provides a detailed analysis of the microbes that live in houses and apartments. The study was conducted by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. The results shed light on the complicated interaction between humans and the microbes that live on and around us. Mounting evidence suggests that these microscopic, teeming communities play a role in human ...

We know people have lived in the New World Arctic for about 5,000 years. Archaeological evidence clearly shows that a variety of cultures survived the harsh climate in Alaska, Canada and Greenland for thousands of years. Despite this, there are several unanswered questions about these people: Where did they come from? Did they come in several waves? When did they arrive? Who are their descendants? And who can call themselves the indigenous peoples of the Arctic? We can now answer some of these questions, thanks to a comprehensive DNA study of current and former inhabitants ...