The Joint British Societies' consensus recommendations for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (JBS3), which have been drawn up by *11 UK professional societies and charitable organisations, are based on the latest available scientific evidence. They emphasise the importance of putting patients in the driving seat and starting preventive action early on, using a new method of risk assessment - the JBS3 risk calculator. Heart disease deaths have almost halved over the past 40-50 years, particularly in high income countries, thanks largely to the identification of ...

Doctors routinely record blood pressure levels that are significantly higher than levels recorded by nurses, the first thorough analysis of scientific data has revealed. A systematic review led by the University of Exeter Medical School, and supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in the South West Peninsula (NIHR PenCLAHRC), has discovered that recordings taken by doctors are significantly higher (by 7/4mmHg) than when the same patients are tested by nurses. Dr Christopher Clark, of the ...

VIDEO: Millions of children in the UK are potentially receiving penicillin prescriptions below the recommended dose for common infections, according to new research led jointly by researchers at King's College London,... Click here for more information. Millions of children in the UK are potentially receiving penicillin prescriptions below the recommended dose for common infections, according to new research led jointly by researchers at King's College London, St George's, ...

Scientists have used one of the brightest lights in the Universe to expose the biochemical structure of a 50 million-year-old fossil plant to stunning visual effect. The team of palaeontologists, geochemists and physicists investigated the chemistry of exceptionally preserved fossil leaves from the Eocene-aged 'Green River Formation' of the western United States by bombarding the fossils with X-rays brighter than a million suns produced by synchrotron particle accelerators. Researchers from Britain's University of Manchester and Diamond Light Source and the Stanford ...

Knowing what another person wants is not a trivial issue, particularly when the other's desires are different from our own. The ability to disengage from our own desire to cater to someone else's wishes is thought to be a unique feature of human cognition. New research challenges this assumption. Despite wanting something different to eat, male Eurasian jays can disengage from their own current desire in order to feed the female what she wants even when her desires are different to his. The study, which was funded by the BBSRC, is published today in the Royal Society ...

A study published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) is the first to provide direct evidence that fetal brain response to a dose of sugar given orally to its mother is associated with the mother's insulin sensitivity. This may indicate that the risk of subsequent obesity and diabetes may be pre-programmed in the womb. The study is by Dr Hubert Preissl and Dr Andreas Fritsche, University of Tübingen, Germany and German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD), Neuherberg, Germany, and colleagues. Diabetes or obesity in the mother ...

Improving cooking fuels and kitchen ventilation is associated with better lung function and reduced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to research published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The study, led by Pixin Ran from the Guanzhou Medical University, China, followed 996 villagers from southern China for 9 years to examine the effects of cleaner fuels and better kitchen ventilation on lung function and disease. An estimated 3 billion people worldwide heat their homes and cook by burning biomass such as wood or animal dung. The resulting indoor air ...

VIDEO: This video shows the insect thorax reconstructed from tomograms and highlights the external movements of the thorax and the location of the indirect power and steering muscles. Click here for more information. Scientists have used a particle accelerator to obtain high-speed 3D X-ray visualizations of the flight muscles of flies. The team from Oxford University, Imperial College, and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) developed a groundbreaking new CT scanning technique ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—Millions of people worldwide – mostly women – suffer from recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs) that seriously degrade their health and quality of life. Antibiotics treat individual infections, but preventing recurrent ones largely has been unattainable because of the way bacteria lodge in the inner layers of the bladder and quietly hide from drugs that can kill them. In new studies with mice, however, researchers led by University of Utah microbiologists have shown that when chitosan, an FDA-approved compound for pharmaceutical, agricultural and ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In life, many tasks have a context that dictates the right actions, so when people learn to do something new, they'll often infer cues of context and rules. In a new study, Brown University brain scientists took advantage of that tendency to track the emergence of such rule structures in the frontal cortex — even when such structure was not necessary or even helpful to learn — and to predict from EEG readings how people would apply them to learn new tasks speedily. Context and rule structures are everywhere. They allow an iPhone user ...

VIDEO: This is a 3D movie of a blowfly's flight muscles moving created by Oxford University and Imperial scientists using a new X-ray scanning technique. Click here for more information. The flight muscles moving inside flies have been filmed for the first time using a new 3D X-ray scanning technique. 3D movies of the muscles were created by a team from Oxford University, Imperial College London, and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), using the PSI's Swiss Light Source, ...

TORONTO, March 25, 2014--Strictly limiting the number of hours surgical residents can work has not improved patient outcomes but may have increased complications for some patients and led to higher failure rates on certification exams, a research paper concludes. Traditionally, doctors in the residency phase of their training spent very long hours in a hospital –often around-the-clock--so they could see a wide variety and high volume of patients. In the last 10 years, health authorities started limiting those hours in the hopes of improving patient safety and the education ...

LA JOLLA, Calif., March 25, 2014 — A team of scientists, led by Stuart Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., professor and director of the Neuroscience and Aging Research Center at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham), recently discovered why cerebellar granule cell neurons in patients suffering from ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) were unable to repair DNA damage and thus died. A-T is a hereditary condition that begins early in childhood, and causes a gradual loss of certain nerve cells in the cerebellum of the brain. A-T occurs in about 1 in 40,000 births, with symptoms ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered impaired neuronal activity in the parts of the brain associated with anticipatory functioning among occasional 18- to 24-year-old users of stimulant drugs, such as cocaine, amphetamines and prescription drugs such as Adderall. The brain differences, detected using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are believed to represent an internal hard wiring that may make some people more prone to drug addiction later in life. Among the study's main implications is the possibility ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – Veterans with liver disease who live more than 100 miles from a Veterans Administration hospital that offers liver transplants are only half as likely to be placed on the liver transplant waitlist to receive a new organ compared to veterans who live closer to transplant centers, according to a new study from the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. The findings, which are published in the March 26 issue of JAMA, also reveal that the further liver disease patients live from these five transplant centers, the more likely they are ...

Among patients with the condition known as Barrett esophagus, treatment of abnormal cells with radiofrequency ablation (use of heat applied through an endoscope to destroy cells) resulted in a reduced risk of this condition progressing to cancer, according to a study in the March 26 issue of JAMA. In the last 3 decades, the incidence of esophageal cancer has increased more rapidly that other cancers in the Western world. This type of cancer often originates from Barrett esophagus, a condition that involves abnormal changes in the cells of the lower portion of the esophagus, ...

Among university students in New Zealand, a web-based alcohol screening and brief intervention program produced a modest reduction in the amount of alcohol consumed per drinking episode but not in the frequency of drinking, overall amount consumed, or in related academic problems, according to a study in the March 26 issue of JAMA. Unhealthy alcohol use is common among young people, including university students. Using an internet site to screening students for unhealthy alcohol use and intervene if appropriate has been suggested as an inexpensive means of reaching large ...

Among veterans meeting eligibility for liver transplantation, greater distance from a Veterans Affairs transplant center or any transplant center was associated with lower likelihood of being put on a waitlist or receiving a transplant, and a greater likelihood of death, according to a study in the March 26 issue of JAMA. Centralization of specialized health care services is used to control costs, concentrate expertise, and minimize regional differences in quality of care. Although efficient, centralization may offset gains in care delivery by increasing the distance ...

In a study that included nearly 300,000 adults without a known history of diabetes or cardiovascular disease (CVD), adding information about glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), a measure of longer-term blood sugar control, to conventional CVD risk factors like smoking and cholesterol was associated with little improvement in the prediction of CVD risk, according to a study in the March 26 issue of JAMA. Because higher glucose levels have been associated with higher CVD incidence, it has been proposed that information on blood sugar control might improve doctors' ability to ...

There has been a sharp decline since 2006 in the use of nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI; an imaging procedure used to determine areas of the heart with decreased blood flow), a decrease that cannot be explained by an increase in other imaging methods, according to a study in the March 26 issue of JAMA. Nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging accounted for much of the rapid growth in cardiac imaging that occurred from the 1990s through the middle 2000s. Edward J. McNulty, M.D., of Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, San Francisco, and colleagues conducted a study ...

COLLEGE STATION – Lab tests at Texas A&M AgriLife Research have shown that treatments with peach extract inhibit breast cancer metastasis in mice. AgriLife Research scientists say that the mixture of phenolic compounds present in the peach extract are responsible for the inhibition of metastasis, according to the study, which was this month published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. "Cancer cells were implanted under the skin of mice with an aggressive type of breast cancer cells, the MDA-MB-435, and what we saw was an inhibition of a marker gene in the lungs ...

VIDEO: In early tests, the research team used a Kuka KR5 sixx R650 robot, seen in action here. Click here for more information. When life on Earth was first getting started, simple molecules bonded together into the precursors of modern genetic material. A catalyst would have been needed, but enzymes had not yet evolved. One theory is that the catalytic minerals on a meteorite's surface could have jump-started life's first chemical reactions. But scientists need a way to directly ...

Epigenetic alterations disrupt intestinal T cell homeostasis A precise balance between mature T cell subsets is important for intestinal homeostasis. Disruption of T cell populations underlies autoimmune colitis, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Specific transcriptional programs are activated to determine the differentiation fate of naïve T cells; however, the role of epigenetic regulation in T cell maturation in the intestine is unclear. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Colby Zaph and colleagues from the University of British Columbia ...

Wild salamanders living in some of North America's best salamander habitat are getting smaller as their surroundings get warmer and drier, forcing them to burn more energy in a changing climate. That's the key finding of a new study, published March 25 in the journal Global Change Biology, that examined museum specimens caught in the Appalachian Mountains from 1957 to 2007 and wild salamanders measured at the same sites in 2011-2012. The salamanders studied from 1980 onward were, on average, 8% smaller than their counterparts from earlier decades. The changes were most ...

AMES, Iowa – Let's say plant scientists want to develop new lines of corn that will better tolerate long stretches of hot, dry weather. How can they precisely assess the performance of those new plants in different environmental conditions? Field tests can provide some answers. Greenhouse tests can provide some more. But how can plant scientists get a true picture of a plant's growth and traits under a wide variety of controlled environmental conditions? That job has been too big and too precise for most laboratories. There are a few labs around the world that can ...