New experiments on mice show, that mouse mothers can protect their pups from developing type 1 diabetes by eating a gluten-free diet. According to preliminary studies by reseachers at the University of Copenhagen, the findings may apply to humans. More than 1% of the Danish population has type 1 diabetes, one of the highest incidence rates in the world. New experiments on mice now show a correlation between the health of the pups and their mothers eating a gluten-free diet. Our hope is that the disease may be prevented through simple dietary changes, the researchers say. "Preliminary ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Viewing partisan news reports from both the conservative and liberal viewpoints doesn't make people more accepting of citizens on the other side of the political fence, new research finds. A study of people in the United States and Israel examined citizens' media consumption: specifically, how often they viewed liberal and conservative news outlets and how often they viewed mainstream, relatively neutral news sites. Results showed that people who consumed a greater amount of partisan media content were more polarized – even if they viewed partisan content ...

A Virginia Tech team of researchers has proven that homemade, inexpensive stink bug traps crafted from simple household items outshine pricier models designed to kill the invasive, annoying bugs. This discovery comes just as warm weather is coaxing the critters out of crevices of homes they were hiding in during the cold winter and homeowners will be looking for a way to get rid of the pest. Researchers in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences found that the best way to get rid of the little buggers is to fill a foil roasting pan with water and dish soap and ...

A new study by sports scientists at Coventry University and Staffordshire University shows that anxiety about a competitive situation makes even the most physically active of us more likely to slip-up. The research, which is set to be presented at the British Psychological Society's flagship annual conference this week, tested the anticipation and coordination abilities of 18 active and healthy young adults during two sets of identical physical tests – one ostensibly a practice, the other a competition. In the 'competitive' trials, researchers found that the participants' ...

Research by the University of Liverpool has found that brief musical training can increase the blood flow in the left hemisphere of our brain. This suggests that the areas responsible for music and language share common brain pathways. Researchers from the University's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society carried out two separate studies which looked at brain activity patterns in musicians and non-musicians. The first study looking for patterns of brain activity of 14 musicians and 9 non-musicians whilst they participated in music and word generation tasks. The ...

People who use antipsychotic medication (such as clozapine or risperidone) to treat psychiatric illness are nearly half as likely to commit a violent crime compared to when they are not using such medication, according to new results published in The Lancet. The use of mood stabilising drugs (such as lithium or carbamazepine) is also associated with a reduced rate of violent crime, although the reduction is less pronounced, and only in patients with bipolar disorder. Antipsychotic and mood stabilising medication are used to treat a variety of disorders, but are most commonly ...

Human mortality and survival may have improved in the generations following the Black Death, according to results published May 7, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sharon DeWitte from University of South Carolina. As one of the most devastating epidemics in human history, the medieval Black Death (c. 1347-1351) killed tens of millions of Europeans. Previous studies have shown that the disease targeted elderly adults and sick or stressed people; however, not much is known about any substantial changes in the population, like overall health and mortality, before ...

Scientists studying the role of room ventilation in tuberculosis transmission found that students in Cape Town, South Africa, spend almost 60 percent of their day in poorly ventilated rooms, at risk of transmission, according to results published May 7, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Eugene Richardson from Stanford University School of Medicine and colleagues. The researchers propose an increase in low-cost, WHO-compliant natural ventilation to facilitate healthy indoor environments and reduce risks. Despite biomedical improvements to treat tuberculosis ...

A physical test for measuring age shows wide differences between the rates of aging among different population groups, according to new research by demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. A strong handshake can say a lot about a person—it can indicate power, confidence, health, or aggression. Now scientists say that the strength of a person's grasp may also be one of the most useful ways to measure people's true age. In a new study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, IIASA researchers Serguei Scherbov and Warren Sanderson (also at ...

The largest investigation to date has found a significant increase in the number of acute pancreatitis (AP) cases in hospitalized children in the United States. The new study, in the "PLOS ONE" journal found a 51 percent increase in the primary diagnosis of AP from 2000 to 2009. The number increased from 6,350 in 2000 to 9,561 in 2009. The study looked at hospitalization records of patients 20 years old and younger using a federal children's inpatient database. From 2000 to 2009, they identified 55,012 cases of AP in hospitalized children ages 1 – 20. According ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Different manifestations of preeclampsia, such as early vs. late timing or typical vs. high severity, appear to have distinct genetic underpinnings, suggesting that they may need to be studied and treated differently. That and several other insights are described in a newly published comprehensive review of genetic studies of the condition, which produces life-threatening complications such as high-blood pressure in as many as 8 percent of pregnancies in the United States. "There are probably very different phenotypes of preeclampsia ...

Philadelphia - A group of health care and policy experts from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is urging health care institutions to look more to their own in-house personnel, including physicians and nurses, as a source of new ideas for improving how care is delivered. The practice – referred to as insourcing – relies on an organization's existing staff to drive needed transformations. The team also suggests a four-stage design process which, when adopted internally, may help organizations implement more efficient health care delivery solutions. ...

A deep-water creature once thought to be one of the world's largest sea anemones, with tentacles reaching more than 6.5 feet long, actually belongs to a new order of animals. The finding is part of a new DNA-based study led by the American Museum of Natural History that presents the first tree of life for sea anemones, a group that includes more than 1,200 species. The report, which is published today in the journal PLOS ONE, reshapes scientists' understanding of the relationships among these poorly understood animals. "The discovery of this new order of Cnidaria—a phylum ...

WHAT:In an invited perspective article on the Ebola outbreak under way in West Africa, Heinz Feldmann, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) emphasizes the need for scientists to make their data available to colleagues in real-time to improve the public health response to outbreaks. He cites past responses to influenza and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreaks as successful examples of global information sharing. Rapid diagnoses are key to controlling outbreaks of deadly viruses such as Ebola, for which no therapies are available. The immediate ...

WHAT: Although malaria kills some 600,000 African children each year, most cases of the mosquito-borne parasitic disease in children are mild. Repeated infection does generate some immunity, and episodes of severe malaria are unusual once a child reaches age 5. However, the relative contributions of such factors as the level of malaria-causing parasites in a person's blood—parasite density—to disease severity and to development of protective immunity are not well understood. To clarify these issues, researchers from the United States and Tanzania regularly examined 882 ...

For years, scientists have had an itch they couldn't scratch. Even with the best microscopes and spectrometers, it's been difficult to study and identify molecules at the so-called mesoscale, a region of matter that ranges from 10 to 1000 nanometers in size. Now, with the help of broadband infrared light from the Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), researchers have developed a broadband imaging technique that looks inside this realm with unprecedented sensitivity and range. By ...

MINNEAPOLIS – A drug typically prescribed for erectile dysfunction or increased pressure in the arteries may help improve blood flow in the muscles of boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, according to a study published in the May 7, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive and fatal muscle disease affecting boys and young men that causes loss of muscle function. There is no specific treatment for the disease, which is genetic. Corticosteroids can slow muscle degeneration ...

A multidimensional frailty score may help predict postoperative outcomes in older adults. More than half of all operations are performed on patients 65 years and older in the United States. Frail elderly patients who undergo surgery are more likely to have postoperative complications. But tools to estimate operative risk have their limitations because they often focus on a single organ system or solitary event. In geriatric medicine, the comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) is widely used to detect disabilities and conditions associated with frailty. The authors sought ...

OAKLAND, Calif. May 7, 2014 — Radiation treatment can help reduce the recurrence of Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare and aggressive skin cancer, while chemotherapy does not appear to have any impact on recurrence or survival, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published online in the current issue of JAMA Dermatology. The study presents one of the largest single-institution datasets on Merkel cell carcinoma, which occurs in about 1,500 people in the United States annually. Most such cancers occur on the sun-exposed skin of white males and are first diagnosed at age 75, ...

WASHINGTON, May 7, 2014 — Yesterday's release of the third National Climate Assessment (NCA) should serve as a claxon call for policymakers and the general public to take action to address and mitigate the observable and documented adverse climate disruption impacts being observed in every region and key economic sector of the United States. These impacts, which have been observed and measured, are wreaking havoc with our society. This is a not a theoretical assessment; this report cites changes we are all observing and with which we are living. The future climate ...

When you get sick, your physician may take a sample of your blood, send it to the lab and wait for results. In the near future, however, doctors may be able to run those tests almost instantly on a piece of plastic about the size of credit card. These labs-on-a-chip would not only be quick—results are available in minutes—but also inexpensive and portable. They could be used miles from the nearest medical clinic to test for anything from HIV to diabetes. But as powerful as they may be, they could be far better, says Shiyan Hu, an associate professor of electrical and ...

(NEW YORK – May 7) Adults suffering from diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma, and other blood-related disorders may benefit from life-saving treatment commonly used in pediatric patients. Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified a new technique that causes cord blood (CB) stems cells to generate in greater numbers making them more useful in adult transplantation. The study, published in the May issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, looked at ways to expand the number of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) in the laboratory required ...

VIDEO: Watch the movie to see the wealth of colorful NASA observations of an X-class flare on March 29 -- the most comprehensively observed flare, ever. BROADCAST QUALITY: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011500/a011522/.... Click here for more information. On March 29, 2014, an X-class flare erupted from the right side of the sun... and vaulted into history as the best-observed flare of all time. The flare was witnessed by four different NASA spacecraft and one ground-based ...

Leesburg, VA, May 5, 2014—Glutamate imaging reveals ischemic lesions in the first 3 hours after stroke that are not distinguishable in T1-weighted and T2-weighted imaging. Researchers using chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST), an emerging MRI technology, have found that using glutamate with CEST shows high spatial resolution in vivo. The finding has the potential to speed diagnosis—and, therefore, treatment—in the critical first hours after a stroke. "I have been interested in glutamate imaging since its inception," said researcher Zhuozhi Dai of Second Affiliated ...

Premature menopause is associated with long-term negative effects on cognitive function, suggests a new study published today (7 May) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG). The average age of menopause is around 50 years in the Western World. Premature menopause refers to menopause at or before 40 years of age, this could be due to a bilateral ovariectomy, (surgically induced menopause)or non-surgical loss of ovarian function (sometimes referred to as 'natural' menopause). The study, based on a sample of 4868 women, used cognitive tests ...