New cohort studies presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) have shown the amino acid valine at position 11 of HLA-DRB1 gene to be the strongest independent genetic determinant of radiological damage in rheumatoid arthritis (RA).1 In addition, positions 71 and 74 were found to represent independent predictors, with the three positions together: 11, 71 and 74 strongly associated with disease outcomes.1 According to lead author Dr Sebastien Viatte of the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Genetics and Genomics, Manchester, United ...

A new study presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) highlights the increased health care costs associated with musculoskeletal conditions compared to other diseases. Health care costs were almost 50% higher for people with a musculoskeletal condition compared to any other singly occurring condition.1 This disparity remained high where two conditions co-existed, with health care costs still one third higher (36%) for those people with one of their two conditions musculoskeletal in nature, highlighting the significant impact ...

A new study presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) showed a significantly increased risk of heart attack in patients with Sjögren's syndrome (SjS), particularly in the first year following diagnosis. There was also a trend towards an increased risk for stroke. SjS is an auto-immune inflammatory disease where the body's immune system attacks glands that secrete fluid, such as the tear and saliva glands.2 Inflammation within the glands reduces fluid production causing painful burning in the eyes, dry mouth, and sometimes dryness ...

Data presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) demonstrate the possibility of using biomarkers (developed from whole blood gene expression profiles) in children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) to predict the status of their disease at 12 months. The long-term disease status at 12 months was accurately predicted only after treatment had been initiated, in newly diagnosed patients.1 JIA is the most common childhood* chronic rheumatic disease,2 affecting 16-150 children in every 100,000. As indicated by the name, the ...

WASHINGTON — The inexpensive anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) reverses resistance to tamoxifen, a widely used breast cancer drug, in mice. In the June 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, investigators from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center say adding HCQ to tamoxifen could provide a new treatment option for some women with advanced, postmenopausal estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer. The ER+ subtype accounts for an estimated 70 percent of all breast cancers. While many of these women are treated with tamoxifen, which blocks estrogen ...

A new study of pollution records indicates that the Western Amazon, an area of unparalleled biological and cultural diversity, may have been contaminated by widespread oil pollution over a 30-year period. This work will be presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California Most of the world's tropical rainforests contain oil and gas reserves. Oil production started in the Western Amazon in the 1920s and peaked in the 1970s, but current growing global demand is stimulating a renewed growth in oil and gas extraction. Nearly 70% of the Peruvian Amazon was ...

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) shows that children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes have a less balanced composition of gut bacteria compared with children of the same age without diabetes. The research is by Dr Marcus de Goffau and Dr Hermie Harmsen, University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues. The incidence of type 1 diabetes is increasing worldwide, showing a particularly sharp increase among children under the age of 5 years. Recent studies indicate that adverse changes ...

Phone dating apps used by gay men to find a sexual partner carry a higher risk of getting common sexually transmitted infections than meeting online or in bars and clubs, suggests research published online in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. Previous research has suggested that gay and bi-curious men who meet online are more likely to indulge in unprotected sex and to have more partners than men meeting potential partners in other ways. But since 2009 smartphone apps, such as Grindr, Scruff, and Recon, have become an increasingly popular way to hook up with ...

The use of cement in partial hip replacement surgery may be linked to a risk of death - often occurring within minutes - finds research published in the online journal BMJ Open. The risk is relatively rare. But the alarm was first sounded in 2009, and most of the cases that have come to light have occurred since that date, say the authors, who include the former chief medical officer for England. This suggests that measures to reduce the risks are not being acted on widely enough, they say. They base their findings on an analysis of cases submitted between 2005 and ...

The first cases of Mad Cow disease in humans (properly called variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease, or vCJD) occurred in the late 1990s and are thought to be the consequence of eating contaminated beef products. Since then, several cases of secondary infections caused by transfusions with blood from donors who subsequently developed vCJD have been reported, raising concerns about the safety of blood and blood products. A paper published in PLOS Pathogens on June 12th now describes an assay that can detect prions in blood samples from humans with vCJD and in animals at early ...

Washington, DC (June 12, 2014) — Among young adult dialysis patients living in poor neighborhoods, blacks have a significantly higher risk of dying while young compared with whites. The findings, which come from a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN), suggest that more work is needed to understand social factors that could worsen outcomes among young black adults with kidney failure. Among young dialysis patients aged 18 to 30 years, blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to die while still young. The reasons ...

A new study published in PLOS Computational Biology shows that genes associated with hereditary diseases occur throughout the human body. The study, by Esti Yeger-Lotem et al., used network biology to model the interactions between proteins associated with diseases such as Parkinson's in different tissues. Using these networks, they show that proteins carrying the disease are found throughout the body. In tissues vulnerable to hereditary diseases, the networked proteins had unique interactions relevant for the mechanism of the disease. Disease causing genes tend to ...

Men who eat moderate amounts of processed red meat may have an increased risk of incidence and death from heart failure, according to a study in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal. Processed meats are preserved by smoking, curing, salting or adding preservatives. Examples include cold cuts (ham, salami), sausage, bacon and hot dogs. "Processed red meat commonly contains sodium, nitrates, phosphates and other food additives, and smoked and grilled meats also contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, all of which may contribute to the increased ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that persons with lower blood levels of vitamin D were twice as likely to die prematurely as people with higher blood levels of vitamin D. The finding, published in the June 12 issue of American Journal of Public Health, was based on a systematic review of 32 previous studies that included analyses of vitamin D, blood levels and human mortality rates. The specific variant of vitamin D assessed was 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the primary form found in blood. "Three years ago, the Institute ...

Lincoln, Neb. — Younger generations are closing the social class gap between evangelical Protestants and mainline denominations, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist of religion has found. And in what appears to be an important shift in the U.S. religious landscape, a growing number of younger-generation working-class Americans are not affiliated with any particular religious denomination. "When lower-class Americans aren't choosing to be evangelical, they're increasingly choosing to be nothing," said Philip Schwadel, associate professor ...

In today's digitally driven world, access to information appears limitless. But when you have something specific in mind that you don't know, like the name of that niche kitchen tool you saw at a friend's house, it can be surprisingly hard to sift through the volume of information online and know how to search for it. Or, the opposite problem can occur – we can look up anything on the Internet, but how can we be sure we are finding everything about the topic without spending hours in front of the computer? Computer scientists from the University of Washington and the ...

Selecting graduate students in the fields of science and engineering based on an assessment of their character instead of relying almost entirely on their scores on a standardized test would significantly improve the quality of the students that are admitted and, at the same time, boost the participation of women and minorities in these key disciplines. That is the argument made in the essay "A test that fails" published in the June 12 issue of the journal Nature. The authors are Associate Professor of Physics Casey Miller of the University of South Florida and Keivan ...

DALLAS – June 12, 2014 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have generated fresh insights that could aid in the development of rapid-acting antidepressants for treatment-resistant depression. The researchers found that by blocking NMDA receptors with the drug ketamine, they could elicit rapid antidepressant effects in patients with treatment-resistant depression. Ketamine was developed as an anesthetic, but is better known publicly for its abuse as the party drug Special K. Researchers are now seeking alternatives because ketamine can produce side effects that ...

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have discovered that populating the gastrointestinal (GI) tracts of mice with Bacteroides species producing a specific enzyme helps protect the good commensal bacteria from the harmful effects of antibiotics. Their research is published ahead of print in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Antibiotics are powerful weapons against pathogens, but most are relatively indiscriminate, killing the good bacteria, along with the bad. Thus, they may render patients vulnerable to invasion, particularly by virulent, ...

For some cigarette smokers, strategies to aid quitting work well, while for many others no method seems to work. Researchers have now identified an aspect of brain activity that helps to predict the effectiveness of a reward-based strategy as motivation to quit smoking. The researchers observed the brains of nicotine-deprived smokers with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found that those who exhibited the weakest response to rewards were also the least willing to refrain from smoking, even when offered money to do so. "We believe that our findings may ...

DALLAS – June 12, 2014 – Orexin proteins, which are blamed for spontaneous daytime sleepiness, also play a crucial role in bone formation, according to findings by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers. The findings could potentially give rise to new treatments for osteoporosis, the researchers say. Orexins are a type of protein used by nerve cells to communicate with each other. Since their discovery at UT Southwestern more than 15 years ago, they have been found to regulate a number of behaviors, including arousal, appetite, reward, energy expenditure, and wakefulness. ...

This news release is available in German. One of the most remarkable consequences of the rules in quantum mechanics is the capability of a quantum particle to penetrate through a potential barrier even though its energy would not allow for the corresponding classical trajectory. This is known as the quantum tunnel effect and manifests itself in a multitude of well-known phenomena. For example, it explains nuclear radioactive decay, fusion reactions in the interior of stars, and electron transport through quantum dots. Tunneling also is at the heart of many technical ...

The first large-scale, comprehensive analysis of the genomic diversity of Mexico — led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of California-San Francisco and the Mexican National Institute of Genomic Medicine — has identified a dazzling mosaic of genotypes and population substructures across the country. Some groups are as genetically different from one another as Europeans are from East Asians. The study, which will be published June 13 in Science, soundly refutes the current practice of lumping together Mexicans or Latinos as ...

Scientists from the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have conducted a first-of-its-kind study that characterizes the cellular diversity within glioblastoma tumors from patients. The study, which looked at the expression of thousands of genes in individual cells from patient tumors, revealed that the cellular makeup of each tumor is more heterogeneous than previously suspected. The findings, which appear online in Science Express, will help guide future investigations into potential treatments for this devastating disease. This is the first time ...

In the most comprehensive genetic study of the Mexican population to date, researchers from UC San Francisco and Stanford University, along with Mexico's National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), have identified tremendous genetic diversity, reflecting thousands of years of separation among local populations and shedding light on a range of confounding aspects of Latino health. The study, which documented nearly 1 million genetic variants among more than 1,000 individuals, unveiled genetic differences as extensive as the variations between some Europeans and Asians, ...