The Hilton Garden Inn Hotel in Columbia SC (Northeast) offers convenient accommodations for guests participating in the 5th Annual Palmetto Half Marathon on April 12, 2014. The event also includes a 5K race and a fun run. A youth half marathon will be run on April 11. Registration for all races closes on April 10. The half marathon begins and ends at the Village at Sandhill in northeast Columbia. The course includes flat terrain and rolling hills. Proceeds will benefit Jubilee Academy, a local nonprofit serving inner city youth and their families. "We are pleased ...

The threat of foreclosure is a very real and very frightening one. The Nashville bankruptcy lawyers at Clark & Washington understand that no one ever wants to lose their home, and they encourage you to take steps to avoid foreclosure if possible. There are only two ways to stop a foreclosure in Tennessee: the mortgage lender can voluntarily stop the foreclosure from occurring or you can file for personal bankruptcy under Chapter 13. Unfortunately, mortgage lenders do not often choose to stop foreclosure proceedings on their own, so your best option for keeping your ...

HEC Montreal Business School is launching its new Business French Summer School, a unique program in North America that will run from August 4 to 22. This training, offered for the first time by a business school, addresses the particular needs of all non-francophone students and is also geared towards anyone who wants to hone their French-language skills used in the workplace. "One admittedly thinks of English as the language of business," says Eric Buisson, the program manager. "Yet, for students interested in an international career, mastering a second ...

If two is company and three is a crowd, what is four - especially when you are living and working in close quarters and under stress for several days? That is what NASA's Flight Analogs Project, funded by NASA's Human Research Program, set to find out when it sent four crew members on a simulated mission to the Geographos asteroid on February 27, 2014. This initiated the first of many missions that will take place inside the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) located at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "Flight analogs like HERA provide researchers with environments ...

Amidst TV Connect in London and just weeks away from NAB in Las Vegas, FreeCast's Rabbit TV makes a historical announcement - it will now begin enabling content producers to tap into its millions of viewers through a newly branded 'Rabbit TV Content Partnership Program.' In an unprecedented move, the company will be taking an 'all-inclusive' approach to content sourcing, pulling in producers on all levels and allowing them to incorporate their content into the new web-based platform on all devices, regardless of their current video on-demand or live delivery methods. ...

Poisons are silent, effective and cheap, making the especially dangerous in Africa where they are used for both pest control and illegal poaching. However, as a new study in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences reveals, they also kill un-intended wildlife. Africa has a long history of using poison, both for early tribal warfare and for hunting. Synthetic poisons however were introduced, like so many things, by European colonialists in the 19th century. In southern Africa colonial administrators sanctioned the poisoning of predators and scavengers, a practice which ...

New research from Queen Mary University of London has found youth, wealth, and being in full-time education to be risk factors associated with violent radicalisation. Contrary to popular views – religious practice, health and social inequalities, discrimination, and political engagement showed no links. The pioneering research assessed population prevalence of sympathies for terrorist acts – a key marker of vulnerability to violent radicalisation – and their relationship with commonly assumed causes of radicalisation. The community study surveyed over 600 men and women ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Small protein fragments, also called peptides, are promising as drugs because they can be designed for very specific functions inside living cells. Insulin and the HIV drug Fuzeon are some of the earliest successful examples, and peptide drugs are expected to become a $25 billion market by 2018. However, a major bottleneck has prevented peptide drugs from reaching their full potential: Manufacturing the peptides takes several weeks, making it difficult to obtain large quantities, and to rapidly test their effectiveness. That bottleneck may soon disappear: ...

The first humans to pluck a Caribbean fighting conch from the shallow lagoons of Panama's Bocas del Toro were in for a good meal. Smithsonian scientists found that 7,000 years ago, this common marine shellfish contained 66 percent more meat than its descendants do today. Because of persistent harvesting of the largest conchs, it became advantageous for the animal to mature at a smaller size, resulting in evolutionary change. Human-driven evolution of wild animals, sometimes referred to as "unnatural selection," has only previously been documented under scenarios of high-intensity ...

Statins may provide doctors with an unlikely new weapon with which to slow the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS). No treatments can currently abate the advanced stage of the disease, known as secondary progressive MS, which gradually causes patients to become more disabled. In a two-year clinical trial involving 140 patients with secondary progressive MS, the drug simvastatin slowed brain shrinkage, which is thought to contribute to patients' impairments. Supporting this finding, patients on simvastatin achieved better scores on movement tests and questionnaires ...

The results show that eating fried food more than four times a week had twice as big an effect on body mass index (BMI) for those with the highest genetic risk scores compared with lower scores. In other words, genetic makeup can inflate the effects of bad diet, says an accompanying editorial. It is well known that both fried food consumption and genetic variants are associated with adiposity (fatness). However, the interaction between these two risk factors in relation to BMI and obesity has not been examined. So a team of US researchers, led by Lu Qi, Assistant Professor ...

Michael Clarke, Consultant Ophthalmologist at Newcastle Eye Centre, says that apart from trauma and orthopaedics, ophthalmology receives more NHS outpatient referrals than any other speciality. He says that opticians are constrained by legislation to refer patients to a medical practitioner if abnormalities are found at an NHS sight test. However, the testing done at NHS sight tests has become more complex and many patients are now referred with clinically insignificant abnormalities, leading to wastage of appointments in Hospital Eye Services. So called 'Eye Health ...

Boston, MA —People with a genetic predisposition to obesity are at a higher risk of obesity and related chronic diseases from eating fried foods than those with a lower genetic risk, according to a new study from researchers from Harvard School of Public Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. It is the first study to show that the adverse effects of fried foods may vary depending on the genetic makeup of the individual. "Our study shows that a higher genetic risk of obesity may amplify the adverse effects of fried food consumption on body weight, ...

Results of a phase 2 study published in The Lancet suggest that simvastatin, a cheap cholesterol lowering drug, might be a potential treatment option for the secondary progressive, or chronic, stage of multiple sclerosis (MS), which is currently untreatable. Findings from the MS-STAT trial showed that a high, daily dose of simvastatin was safe, well tolerated, and slowed brain atrophy (shrinkage) by 43% over two years compared with placebo. Longitudinal studies suggest that atrophy progression is linked with disability. In its early stages, MS is characterised by intermittent ...

Adults hospitalised with H1N1 influenza during the 2009-2010 pandemic were 25% less likely to die from the disease if they were given antiviral drugs called neuraminidase inhibitors (NAIs) such as Tamiflu®, according to a large meta-analysis involving more than 29 000 patients from 38 countries, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal. The findings also indicate that treatment within 2 days of flu symptoms developing halved the risk of death compared with later treatment or no treatment. "Many governments have stockpiles of Tamiflu that are close to expiry. ...

Increased adiposity is likely to cause reduced physical activity in children, according to research published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The results of the study, conducted by Rebecca Richmond and colleagues from the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol, UK, suggest that promoting weight loss in overweight and obese children might also increase childhood activity levels. Previous studies have shown an association between low physical activity and higher body mass index (BMI) in children but were not able to determine whether childhood adiposity ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Growing drug resistance, a high prevalence of S. aureus bacteria and ineffective antibiotics prescribed to one in three patients are among the challenges facing community hospitals in treating patients with serious bloodstream infections, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. The findings, published March 18, 2014, in the journal PLOS ONE, provide the most comprehensive look at bloodstream infections in community hospitals to date. While the majority of people in need of medical care go to community hospitals, much of the existing research on bloodstream ...

PHILADELPHIA - Most people appreciate that not getting enough sleep impairs cognitive performance. For the chronically sleep-deprived such as shift workers, students, or truckers, a common strategy is simply to catch up on missed slumber on the weekends. According to common wisdom, catch up sleep repays one's "sleep debt," with no lasting effects. But a new Penn Medicine study shows disturbing evidence that chronic sleep loss may be more serious than previously thought and may even lead to irreversible physical damage to and loss of brain cells. The research is published ...

PITTSBURGH, March 18, 2014 – Stem cells derived from human muscle tissue were able to repair nerve damage and restore function in an animal model of sciatic nerve injury, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The findings, published online today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, suggest that cell therapy of certain nerve diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, might one day be feasible. To date, treatments for damage to peripheral nerves, which are the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord, have not been very successful, ...

A new study, published today in the journal in PLOS ONE, shows which plant food supplements are most popular across Europe, with consumers using them to complement their diets or to maintain health. The team of researchers from the Fundación para la Investigación Nutricional and the University of Surrey found that these products are taken in many different forms, including in tea, juice or by tablet. They analysed data from six European countries, collecting information from 2359 adult consumers of plant food supplements in Finland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain and ...

Critically ill patients receiving mechanical ventilation had a higher prevalence of prior psychiatric diagnoses and an increased risk of a new psychiatric diagnosis and medication use after hospital discharge, according to a study in the March 19 issue of JAMA. With recent advances in medical care, more patients are surviving critical illness. Critically ill patients are exposed to stress, including pain, respiratory distress, and delirium, all of which may impact subsequent mental health. The extent of psychiatric illness prior to critical illness, as well as the magnitude ...

In a surveillance study of infection with the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae among women of reproductive age in England and Wales from 2009-2012, pregnancy was associated with a greater risk of this infection, which was associated with poor pregnancy outcomes such as premature birth and stillbirth, according to a study in the March 19 issue of JAMA. Haemophilus influenzae can cause illnesses that include respiratory infections. Some studies have suggested an increased risk of invasive H influenzae disease during pregnancy, although these were based on a small number ...

Using a patient's age to raise the threshold for an abnormal result of a blood test used to assess patients with a suspected pulmonary embolism (blood clot in lungs) appeared to be safe and led to fewer healthy patients with the diagnosis, according to a study in the March 19 issue of JAMA. D-dimer is a breakdown product of a blood clot, and measuring D-dimer levels is one way doctors exclude a diagnosis of pulmonary embolism (PE). Several studies have shown that D-dimer levels increase with age. As a result, the proportion of healthy patients with abnormal test results ...

Men who as children had glomerular disease, a disorder of the portion of the kidney that filters blood and one that usually resolves with time, were more likely than men without childhood glomerular disease to have high blood pressure as an adult, according to a study in the March 19 issue of JAMA. Glomerular disease was defined for this study as glomerulonephritis or nephrotic syndrome (both are kidney disorders). Most children who develop glomerular disease have a favorable prognosis with complete resolution of all signs and symptoms. Yet the long-term complications ...

NEW YORK, NY (March 18, 2014) — Vitamin D deficiency has been implicated in numerous health conditions in recent years, including depressed mood and major depressive disorder. Recent observational studies provide some support for an association of vitamin D levels with depression, but the data do not indicate whether vitamin D deficiency causes depression or vice versa. These studies also do not examine whether vitamin D supplementation improves depression. A systematic review of clinical trials that have examined the effect of vitamin D supplementation on depression ...