There is a significant deficit in recognition and control of hypertension in the Hispanic population of the United States, according to a new study published in American Journal of Hypertension (AJH). The study, "Prevalence of hypertension, awareness, treatment and control in the Hispanic Community," led by Dr. Paul D. Sorlie of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), sampled 16,400 individuals, making it one of the largest and most rigorous health studies of the Hispanic community. Hispanics are currently the largest minority group within the US population. ...

NEW ORLEANS – As the effectiveness of anesthesia, pain management and rehabilitation continues to improve, more orthopaedic procedures are being done on an outpatient basis. In a new research study presented today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), same-day total joint replacement (TJR) patient outcomes were comparable to those of patients admitted to the hospital and staying at least one night following surgery. However, readmission rates, although statistically "non-significant," were higher for outpatient procedures. In ...

NEW ORLEANS--More than 53,000 Americans have total shoulder joint replacement (SJR) surgery each year, and yet the effects of this surgery on a patient's ability to safely drive a vehicle, and the appropriate recovery time before patients should return to driving, have yet to be determined. In a new study, "Driving Performance after Total Shoulder Arthroplasty," presented today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), the driving skills of 28 shoulder replacement patients, with a mean age of 65 ±10 years, were tested at four distinct ...

NEW ORLEANS--Female athletes are two-to-eight times more likely to suffer an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury than males. And while there have been reports about possible anatomic, hormonal and neuromuscular factors that may place females at greater risk for these injuries, little research has looked specifically at the role of genetics. For the first time, a new study, presented today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), identified varied female-to-male expression of several genes leading to proteins maintaining ligament ...

PHILADELPHIA — A patient with advanced bladder cancer experienced a complete response for 14 months to the drug combination everolimus and pazopanib in a phase I trial, and genomic profiling of his tumor revealed two alterations that may have caused this exceptional response, according to a study published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. This information can help identify cancer patients who may respond to everolimus. Exceptional responders are cancer patients who had a complete response or partial response for at least ...

Injured patients who live near trauma centers that have closed have higher odds of dying once they reach a hospital, according to a new analysis by UC San Francisco researchers. Trauma centers are specially staffed and equipped to provide care to severely injured people. They can be costly to operate and many centers struggle to keep their doors open. During the last two decades, about a third of the nation's 1,125 trauma centers have shut down. The new study, involving more than a quarter of a million patients, analyzed the impact of closures of three centers in California. ...

BOSTON -- A patient with advanced bladder cancer in a phase I trial had a complete response for 14 months to a combination of the targeted drugs everolimus and pazopanib, report scientists led by a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researcher, and genomic profiling of his tumor revealed two alterations that may have led to this exceptional response. This information can help identify cancer patients who may respond to everolimus, according to the report published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Studying exceptional responders ...

Researchers have developed a new approach to simulating the energetic processes that may have led to the emergence of cell metabolism on Earth – a crucial biological function for all living organisms. The research, which is published online today in the journal Astrobiology, could help scientists to understand whether it is possible for life to have emerged in similar environments on other worlds. Dr Terry Kee from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, one of the co-authors of the research paper, said: "What we are trying to do is to bridge the gap between ...

Oxytocin, also known as the 'love hormone', could provide a new treatment for anorexia nervosa, according to new research by a team of British and Korean scientists. The study, published today, found that oxytocin alters anorexic patients' tendencies to fixate on images of high calorie foods, and larger body shape. The findings follow an earlier study by the same group showing that oxytocin changed patients' responses to angry and disgusted faces. Anorexia nervosa affects approximately 1 in 150 teenage girls in the UK and is one of leading causes of mental health ...

A new paper published online today in the British Geriatrics Society journal Age and Ageing argues that despite a year-on-year increase in the number of people over the age of 50 being diagnosed with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), there is a reluctance of healthcare professionals to offer HIV tests to older people. This results in high rates of "late presentation" and therefore significantly increased mortality. According to the article by Dr Eva Bunting and colleagues, of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, the proportion of older patients in the UK living with ...

Sophia Antipolis, 13 March 2014. At a time when the wider prescription of statins is under renewed public scrutiny, a substantial analysis of placebo-controlled randomised trials of statins has found that only a small minority of side effects reported by those taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs are actually attributable to them. Almost all the side effects reported in these trials "occurred anyway when patients were administered placebo", say the investigators. The study, a meta-analysis involving more than 80,000 patients and reported today in the European Journal ...

A rare and potentially lethal disease of newborn babies whose bodies make too much insulin may be treatable with fish oils, according to researchers from The University of Manchester. The disease, called congenital hyperinsulinism, means that the infant's brain is starved of blood sugar which can lead to brain damage or long-term disability. But by giving the children purified fish oils similar to those used to treat some heart attack patients, alongside standard medical treatment, their blood sugar levels improve, the researchers reported today in the open-access journal ...

STANFORD, Calif. — When initiated soon after menopause, hormone therapy with estradiol prevented degeneration in key brain regions of women who were at heightened dementia risk, according to a new study led by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers. The investigators also found that another type of hormone therapy, marketed under the brand name Premarin, was far less protective. Premarin is a mixture of 30-plus substances derived from the urine of pregnant mares. Estradiol — the dominant sex-steroid hormone in woman — accounts for about 17 percent of Premarin's ...

Evolutionary analysis applied to the relationship between North American and Central Siberian languages may indicate that people moved out from the Bering Land Bridge, with some migrating back to central Asia and others into North America, according to a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 12, 2014 by Mark Sicoli, from Georgetown University and Gary Holton from University of Alaska Fairbanks. Languages evolve slowly overtime and may even follow human migratory patterns. A proposed language family known as the Dené–Yeniseian suggests that there ...

In what's thought to be the biggest review of academic literature into whether home care visits provide benefits for the elderly, researchers conclude there is 'no consistent evidence' to show they lead to the elderly living longer or having more independent lives than those without any visits. Researchers from University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford analysed 64 randomised controlled trials (RCTs), mainly in the United States, Canada and the UK. They say that they cannot rule out the possibility that some programmes involving home care visits may be ...

Gas networks in Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine and Belarus are less resilient than the UK during conflicts and crises, according to new research from mathematicians at Queen Mary University of London. The authors suggest that a decentralised approach to managing congestion on gas pipeline networks could be crucial for energy security during geopolitical conflicts or natural disasters, for example. "Natural gas accounts for 24 per cent of energy consumption in Europe*," said co-author Professor David Arrowsmith from Queen Mary's School of Mathematical Sciences. "Nations ...

A 70 million year old fossil found in the Late Cretaceous sediments of Alaska reveals a new small tyrannosaur, according to a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 12, 2014 by co-authors Anthony Fiorillo and Ronald S. Tykoski from Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Texas, and colleagues. Tyrannosaurs, the lineage of carnivorous theropod ("beast feet") dinosaurs that include T. rex, have captivated our attention, but the majority of our knowledge about this group comes from fossils from low- to mid-latitudes of North America and Asia. In this study, ...

It has been more than 10 years since the clinical battle began with community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and doctors are still grappling with how to diagnose, treat and prevent this virulent form of staph infection, which is immune to many antibiotics. As MRSA cases have increased dramatically over the decade, so have the number of skin abscesses — generally pus-filled boils or pimples with discharge — that characterize these infections. Now, researchers from UCLA have issued updated guidelines outlining the best ways to treat and manage ...

You can't catch a cold from a friend online. But can you catch a mood? It would seem so, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego. Published in PLOS ONE, the study analyzes over a billion anonymized status updates among more than 100 million users of Facebook in the United States. Positive posts beget positive posts, the study finds, and negative posts beget negative ones, with the positive posts being more influential, or more contagious. "Our study suggests that people are not just choosing other people like themselves to associate with ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Anyone with blood pressure that's higher than the optimal 120/80 mmHg may be more likely to have a stroke, according to a new meta-analysis published in the March 12, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The meta-analysis looked at all of the available research on the risk of developing stroke in people with "prehypertension," or blood pressure higher than optimal but lower than the threshold to be diagnosed with high blood pressure, which is 140/90 mmHg. A total of 19 prospective cohort studies with ...

Pregnant women may face an increased risk of early heart disease when they develop gestational diabetes, according to research in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Gestational diabetes, which develops only during pregnancy and usually disappears after the pregnancy, increases the risk that the mother will develop diabetes later. The condition is managed with meal planning, activity and sometimes insulin or other medications. In the 20-year study, researchers found that a history of gestational diabetes may be a risk factor for early atherosclerosis in women ...

PHILADELPHIA— People who try to quit smoking often say that kicking the habit makes the voice inside telling them to light up even louder, but why people succumb to those cravings so often has never been fully understood. Now, a new brain imaging study in this week's JAMA Psychiatry from scientists in Penn Medicine and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Intramural Research Program shows how smokers suffering from nicotine withdrawal may have more trouble shifting from a key brain network—known as default mode, when people are in a so-called "introspective" or ...

OAKLAND, Calif. — Women who experience gestational diabetes may face an increased risk of early heart disease later in life, even if they do not develop type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome subsequent to their pregnancy, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association. "Our research shows that just having a history of gestational diabetes elevates a woman's risk of developing early atherosclerosis before she develops type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome," said Erica P. Gunderson, PhD, MPH, study lead author and ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – When use of a dominant hand is lost by amputation or stroke, a patient is forced to compensate by using the nondominant hand exclusively for precision tasks like writing or drawing. Presently, the behavioral and neurological effects of chronic, forced use of the nondominant hand are largely understudied and unknown. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have shed light on ways in which a patient compensates when losing a dominant hand and suggest new and improved rehabilitation techniques for those suffering from amputation or stroke. "Half of ...

Los Angeles, CA (March 12, 2014) Researchers have found that sutures embedded with stem cells led to quicker and stronger healing of Achilles tendon tears than traditional sutures, according to a new study published in the March 2014 issue of Foot & Ankle International (published by SAGE). Achilles tendon injuries are common for professional, collegiate and recreational athletes. These injuries are often treated surgically to reattach or repair the tendon if it has been torn. Patients have to keep their legs immobilized for a while after surgery before beginning their ...