The press release
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Medicine17 Jul 2014

Chemokine receptor 4 gene silencing blocks neuroblastoma metastasis in vitro

Chemokine receptor 4 is a chemokine receptor that participates in tumor occurrence, growth and metastasis in vitro and its expression is upregulated during neuroblastoma metastasis. Dr. Xin Chen, the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, China successfully constructed chemokine receptor 4 sequence-specific small interfering RNA (siRNA) plasmids, transfected into SH-SY5Y cells and found that down-regulation of chemokine receptor 4 can inhibit in vitro invasion of neuroblastoma. This paper was published in Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 10, 2014). Article: ...

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Science17 Jul 2014

Intrathecal bumetanide has analgesic effects through inhibition of NKCC1

Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that the sodium-potassium-chloride co-transporter 1 (NKCC1) and potassium-chloride co-transporter 2 (KCC2) have a role in the modulation of pain transmission at the spinal level through chloride regulation in the pain pathway and by effecting neuronal excitability and pain sensitization. Dr. Yanbing He Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, China and his team found that intrathecal bumetanide could increase NKCC1 expression and decrease KCC2 expression in spinal cord neurons of rats with incisional pain. The authors presumed ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

Attenuated inhibition of neuron membrane excitability contributes to childhood depression

Accumulating evidence suggests that the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in mechanisms of reward and addiction, plays a role in the pathogenesis of depression and in the action of antidepressants. Dandan Liu and her team, Bio-X Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China for the first time using electrophysiological method studied the signaling transduction pathway mediated by dopamine D2-like receptor in the medium spiny neurons in the core of the nucleus accumbens in the juvenile Wistar Kyoto rat model of depression. They concluded that impaired inhibition of ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

NYU research on persons w/ HIV/AIDS not taking medication and not engaged in care

Regular attendance at HIV primary care visits and high adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) are vital for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA), as these health behaviors lead to lowered rates of morbidity and mortality, increased quality of life, and reducing the risk of HIV transmission to others. However, a large proportion of PLHA in the United States are not sufficiently engaged in care and not taking ART when it is medically necessary. A new study, "HIV-infected individuals who delay, decline, or discontinue antiretroviral therapy: Comparing clinic- and peer-recruited ...

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Science17 Jul 2014

Eradicating fatal sleeping sickness by killing off the tsetse fly

A Brigham Young University ecologist is playing a role in the effort to curb a deadly disease affecting developing nations across equatorial Africa. Steven L. Peck, a BYU professor of biology, has lent his expertise in understanding insect movement to help shape a UN-sanctioned eradication effort of the tsetse fly—a creature that passes the fatal African sleeping sickness to humans, domestic animals, and wildlife. Using Peck's advanced computer models, crews from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization will know where to concentrate their efforts to eliminate the ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

Investing in sexual and reproductive health of 10 to 14 year olds yields lifetime benefits

WASHINGTON -- Age 10 to 14 years, a time when both girls and boys are constructing their own identities and are typically open to new ideas and influences, provides a unique narrow window of opportunity for parents, teachers, healthcare providers and others to facilitate transition into healthy teenage and adulthood years according to researchers from Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health who note the lack worldwide of programs to help children of this age navigate passage from childhood to adulthood. An estimated 1.2 billion adolescents live in the ...

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Science17 Jul 2014

Women's professional self-identity impacts on childcare balance, but not men's

A new study finds that the more a woman self-identifies with her profession, the more paid hours she works and the less time she spends with the couple's children, but the more equal the childcare balance is between a couple. However, the more a woman identifies herself with motherhood, the less time the father spends with the children. And while the more a man self-identifies as a parent the more time he spends with children, this had no impact on the amount of time the woman spends on childcare – regardless of her self-identity. The study, from Cambridge University's ...

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Environment17 Jul 2014

Duck migration study reveals importance of conserving wetlands, MU researchers find

COLUMBIA, Mo. – During the 2011 and 2012 migration seasons, University of Missouri researchers monitored mallard ducks with new remote satellite tracking technology, marking the first time ducks have been tracked closely during the entirety of their migration from Canada to the American Midwest and back. The research revealed that mallards use public and private wetland conservation areas extensively as they travel hundreds of miles across the continent. Dylan Kesler, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

National Xenopus resource at the MBL innovates new way to study proteins

WOODS HOLE, Mass.— Proteomics, the study of large groups of proteins, can enhance our understanding of a wide range of organisms, with applications in medicine and developmental biology. Such analyses traditionally require a complete genome for the organism being studied in order to obtain a reference set of proteins. However, many organisms that hold potential for proteomic analysis do not yet have completely sequenced and well-interpreted genomes because the costs, in terms of both time and money, can be prohibitive. Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, is one such ...

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Technology17 Jul 2014

Birdsongs automatically decoded by computer scientists

Birdsongs automatically decoded by computer scientists Scientists from Queen Mary University of London have found a successful way of identifying bird sounds from large audio collections, which could be useful for expert and amateur bird-watchers alike. The analysis used recordings of individual birds and of dawn choruses to identify characteristics of bird sounds. It took advantage of large datasets of sound recordings provided by the British Library Sound Archive, and online sources such as the Dutch archive called Xeno Canto. Publishing in the journal PeerJ, ...

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Science17 Jul 2014

Study shows how effects of starvation can be passed to future generations

NEW YORK, NY — Evidence from human famines and animal studies suggests that starvation can affect the health of descendants of famished individuals. But how such an acquired trait might be transmitted from one generation to the next has not been clear. A new study, involving roundworms, shows that starvation induces specific changes in so-called small RNAs and that these changes are inherited through at least three consecutive generations, apparently without any DNA involvement. The study, conducted by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers, offers ...

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Science17 Jul 2014

How does working part-time versus working full-time affect breastfeeding goals?

Los Angeles, CA -- Breastfeeding is known to provide significant health benefits for both infants and their mothers. However, while many women intend to breastfeed despite returning to work, a new study finds that mothers who plan to breastfeed for at least three months but return to work full-time are less likely to meet their breastfeeding goals. Conversely, there is no association between women who return to work part-time and failure to reach the breastfeeding goal of at least three months. This new study was published today in the Journal of Human Lactation. Studying ...

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Environment17 Jul 2014

Improving the cost and efficiency of renewable energy storage

A major challenge in renewable energy is storage. A common approach is a reaction that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen, and uses the hydrogen as a fuel to store energy. The efficiency of 'water splitting' depends heavily on a solid substance called a catalyst. However, only the surface of the catalyst acts on the reaction, while its bulk is inactive. This restricts how much catalyst can be used, and limits the efficiency of water splitting in energy systems. Publishing in Nature Communications, EPFL scientists have developed a new method for maximizing the catalyst's ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

For the sickest emergency patients, death risk is lowest at busiest emergency centers

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — When a medical emergency strikes, our gut tells us to get to the nearest hospital quickly. But a new study suggests that busier emergency centers may actually give the best chance of surviving – especially for people suffering life-threatening medical crises. In fact, the analysis finds that patients admitted to a hospital after an emergency had a 10 percent lower chance of dying in the hospital if they initially went to one of the nation's busiest emergency departments, compared with the least busy. The risk of dying differed even more for patients ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

Best anticoagulants after orthopedic procedures depends on type of surgery

Current guidelines do not distinguish between aspirin and more potent blood thinners for protecting against blood clots in patients who undergo major orthopedic operations, leaving the decision up to individual clinicians. A new analysis published today in the Journal of Hospital Medicine provides much-needed information that summarizes existing studies about which medications are best after different types of surgery. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo major orthopedic surgery such as hip and knee replacements and hip fracture repairs. Patients undergoing ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

Findings suggest antivirals underprescribed for patients at risk for flu complications

Patients likely to benefit the most from antiviral therapy for influenza were prescribed these drugs infrequently during the 2012-2013 influenza season, while antibiotics may have been overprescribed. Published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and now available online, the findings suggest more efforts are needed to educate clinicians about the appropriate use of antivirals and antibiotics in the outpatient setting. Influenza is a significant cause of mortality and morbidity, resulting in more than 200,000 hospitalizations in the U.S. each year, on average. While annual ...

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Earth Science17 Jul 2014

New view of Rainier's volcanic plumbing

SALT LAKE CITY, July 17, 2014 – By measuring how fast Earth conducts electricity and seismic waves, a University of Utah researcher and colleagues made a detailed picture of Mount Rainier's deep volcanic plumbing and partly molten rock that will erupt again someday. "This is the most direct image yet capturing the melting process that feeds magma into a crustal reservoir that eventually is tapped for eruptions," says geophysicist Phil Wannamaker, of the university's Energy & Geoscience Institute and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "But it does not provide ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

Asthma drugs suppress growth

Corticosteroid drugs that are given by inhalers to children with asthma may suppress their growth, evidence suggests. Two new systematic reviews published in The Cochrane Library focus on the effects of inhaled corticosteroid drugs (ICS) on growth rates. The authors found children's growth slowed in the first year of treatment, although the effects were minimised by using lower doses. Inhaled corticosteroids are prescribed as first-line treatments for adults and children with persistent asthma. They are the most effective drugs for controlling asthma and clearly reduce ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

Niacin too dangerous for routine cholesterol therapy

CHICAGO --- After 50 years of being a mainstay cholesterol therapy, niacin should no longer be prescribed for most patients due to potential increased risk of death, dangerous side effects and no benefit in reducing heart attacks and strokes, writes Northwestern Medicine® preventive cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, M.D., in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial. Lloyd-Jones's editorial is based on a large new study published in the journal that looked at adults, ages 50 to 80, with cardiovascular disease who took extended-release niacin (vitamin B3) and laropiprant ...

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Medicine17 Jul 2014

NIH scientists identify gene linked to fatal inflammatory disease in children

Investigators have identified a gene that underlies a very rare but devastating autoinflammatory condition in children. Several existing drugs have shown therapeutic potential in laboratory studies, and one is currently being studied in children with the disease, which the researchers named STING-associated vasculopathy with onset in infancy (SAVI). The findings appeared online today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research was done at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), part of the National Institutes of Health. "Not ...

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Science17 Jul 2014

No-wait data centers

Big websites usually maintain their own "data centers," banks of tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers, all passing data back and forth to field users' requests. Like any big, decentralized network, data centers are prone to congestion: Packets of data arriving at the same router at the same time are put in a queue, and if the queues get too long, packets can be delayed. At the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, in August, MIT researchers will present a new network-management system that, in experiments, reduced the average ...

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Science16 Jul 2014

Marginal life expectancy benefit from contralateral prophylactic mastectomy

The choice of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) by women with breast cancer (BC) diagnosed in one breast has recently increased in the US but may confer only a marginal life expectancy benefit depending on the type and stage of cancer, according to a study published July 16 in the JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute. To assess the survival benefit of CPM, Pamela R. Portschy, of the Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and colleagues, developed a model simulating survival outcomes of CPM or no CPM for women with newly diagnosed ...

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Science16 Jul 2014

Screening costs increased in older women without changing detection rates of ESBC

Medicare spending on breast cancer screening increased substantially between 2001 and 2009 but the detection rates of early stage tumors were unchanged, according to a new study published July 16 in the JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The effect of introduction of new breast cancer screening modalities, such as digital images, computer-aided detection (CAD), and use of ultrasound and MRI on screening costs among older women is unknown, although women over the age of 65 represent almost one-third of the total women screened in the US annually. There is ...

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Medicine16 Jul 2014

Even mild traumatic brain injury may cause brain damage

MINNEAPOLIS – Even mild traumatic brain injury may cause brain damage and thinking and memory problems, according to a study published in the July 16, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. For the study, 44 people with a mild traumatic brain injury and nine people with a moderate traumatic brain injury were compared to 33 people with no brain injury. All of the participants took tests of their thinking and memory skills. At the same time, they had diffusion tensor imaging scans, a type of MRI scan that is more sensitive ...

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Science16 Jul 2014

RNs' delayed retirement boosts US nursing supplies, study finds

Older registered nurses are working longer than in the past, one reason that the nation's supply of RNs has grown substantially in recent years, according to a new study. Researchers found that from 1991 to 2012, among registered nurses working at age 50, 24 percent remained working as late as age 69. This compared to 9 percent during the period from 1969 to 1990. The findings are published online by the journal Health Affairs. "We estimate this trend accounts for about a quarter of an unexpected surge in the supply of registered nurses that the nation has experienced ...

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