Scores on a survey to measure parental hesitancy about vaccinating their children were associated with immunization status, according to a study by Douglas J. Opel, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Research Institute, and colleagues. The Parent Attitudes About Childhood Vaccines survey (PACV) was designed to identify parents who underimmunize their children. Researchers gave it to English-speaking parents of children ages 2 months old and born between July 10 and December 10, 2010, who belonged to an integrated health care delivery ...

Frequent bedsharing between a mother and infant was associated with longer duration of breastfeeding, but researchers warned of the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) associated with bedsharing, in a study by Yi Huang, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues. The authors write that while some experts and professional societies advocate bedsharing to promote breastfeeding, others recommend against it to reduce the risk of SIDS. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a separate, but nearby, sleeping area for infants, according to ...

Prenatal exposure to antiepileptic medications was associated with an increased risk of impaired fine motor skills (small muscle movements) in children at age 6 months, but breastfeeding by women taking the medications was not associated with any harmful effects on child development at ages 6 to 36 months, according to a report published by JAMA Neurology, a JAMA Network publication. Few studies have examined development during the first months of life of children of mothers with epilepsy, according to background in the study by Gyri Veiby, M.D., of the University of ...

As humans continue to heat the planet, a northward shift of Earth's wind and rain belts could make a broad swath of regions drier, including the Middle East, American West and Amazonia, while making Monsoon Asia and equatorial Africa wetter, says a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study authors base their prediction on the warming that brought Earth out of the last ice age, some 15,000 years ago. As the North Atlantic Ocean began to churn more vigorously, it melted Arctic sea ice, setting up a temperature contrast with the southern hemisphere ...

BOSTON—People who are married when diagnosed with cancer live longer than those who are not, report researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Married patients also tended to have cancers diagnosed at an earlier stage – when it is often more successfully treated – and to receive more appropriate treatment. The study's findings will be published online by the Journal of Clinical Oncology on Sept. 23. "Our data suggests that marriage can have a significant health impact for patients with cancer, and this was consistent among every cancer ...

In 2012, 11 weather disasters in the United States crossed the billion-dollar threshold in economic losses. Seven of those events were related to severe thunderstorms. New climate analyses led by Stanford scientists indicate that global warming is likely to cause a robust increase in the conditions that produce these types of storms across much of the country over the next century. Severe thunderstorms are one of the primary causes of catastrophic losses in the United States and often exhibit the conditions that generate heavy rainfall, damaging winds, hail and tornadoes. Sparse ...

Many animals, including humans, have internal clocks and calendars to help them regulate behavior, physiological functions and biological processes. Although scientists have extensively studied the timekeeping mechanisms that inform daily functions (circadian rhythms), they know very little about the timekeeping mechanisms that inform seasonal functions. New research to be published this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows, for the first time, that this measurement of seasonal time has an epigenetic component. ...

Men with type 1 diabetes appear to be better at blood sugar control than women, but there is no significant difference in blood sugar control between boys and girls. These are the findings of new research presented at this week's annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Barcelona, Spain. The research is by Professor Sarah Wild, University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues from the International quality of care for type 1 diabetes group. Since there are limited data showing differences in blood sugar control in type 1 diabetes between ...

Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER), and Brookhaven National Laboratory, have discovered a new family of non-precious metal catalysts. These catalysts exhibit better performance than platinum in oxygen-reduction reaction (ORR) only with 10 % of the production cost of a platinum catalyst. The finding, described in Nature's Scientific Reports (published online on Step. 23, 2013), provides an important step towards circumventing the biggest obstacle to widespread- commercialization of fuel ...

BOSTON – Nursing home residents with advanced dementia commonly experience burdensome, costly interventions that do not improve their quality of life or extend their survival. Now a new study suggests that providing intensive primary care services may result in less burdensome and less costly care for these terminally ill residents. Led by researchers at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife, New York University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the study appears in ...

SAN DIEGO, CA – Researchers from Boston University's Slone Epidemiology Center and UC San Diego, in collaboration with the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI), have found 'reassuring' evidence of the H1N1 influenza vaccine's safety during pregnancy. The national study, which was launched shortly after the pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak of 2009 and funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), will be summarized in two companion papers published online this month in the journal, ...

(Boston)--Researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found frequency of marijuana use was not significantly associated with health services utilization or health status. These findings currently appear online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. As marijuana's legal status changes across the US, its impact on health has become of great interest. Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug, yet its impact on health and healthcare utilization has not been studied extensively. The researchers studied ...

Approximately 30 million pounds of fumigant pesticides are used each year on soil that yields valuable California crops— strawberries, tomatoes, peppers and the like — in an attempt to control pests. Responsibility for the safety of pesticides must be evaluated and approved by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation in a process known as registration. A new report issued by UCLA's Sustainable Technology and Policy Program, a joint program of the Fielding School of Public Health and the School of Law, shows that in at least one case, the system failed by approving ...

ATLANTA – Sept. 23, 2013. Protecting the stem cells that reside in and around the hippocampus – a C-shaped area in the temporal lobe on both sides of the brain associated with the ability to form and store memories – substantially reduces the rate of cancer patients' memory loss during whole-brain radiotherapy without a significant risk of recurrence in that area of the brain, a new study shows. Results of the Phase II clinical trial of patients with brain metastases are being presented today at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) annual meeting. "Memory ...

Working with mice, Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that weeks of treatment with a repurposed FDA-approved drug halted the growth of — and ultimately left no detectable trace of — brain tumor cells taken from adult human patients. The scientists targeted a mutation in the IDH1 gene first identified in human brain tumors called gliomas by a team of Johns Hopkins cancer researchers in 2008. This mutation was found in 70 to 80 percent of lower-grade and progressive forms of the brain cancer. The change occurs within a single spot along a string of thousands of genetic ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Rice containing an overactive gene that makes it resistant to a common herbicide can pass that genetic trait to weedy rice, prompting powerful growth even without a weed-killer to trigger the modification benefit, new research shows. Previously, scientists have found that when a genetically modified trait passes from a crop plant to a closely related weed, the weed gains the crop's engineered benefit – resistance to pests, for example – only in the presence of the offending insects. This new study is a surprising example of gene flow from crops to ...

WACO, Texas (Sept. 23, 2013) — Baylor University professors Stephen Trumble, Ph.D., and Sascha Usenko, Ph.D., have developed a novel technique for reconstructing contaminant and hormone profiles using whale earplugs, determining—for the first time—lifetime chemical exposures and hormone profiles—from birth to death—for an individual whale, information that was previously unattainable. (Find this story on our website: http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=132825) Using a blue whale's earplug, Trumble and Usenko were able to extract and ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Many ancient crustaceans went extinct following a massive collapse of reefs across the planet, and new University of Florida research suggests modern species living in rapidly declining reef habitats may now be at risk. Available online and scheduled to appear in the November issue of Geology, the study shows a direct correlation between the amount of prehistoric reefs and the number of decapod crustaceans, a group that includes shrimp, crab and lobster. The decline of modern reefs due to natural and human-influenced changes also could be detrimental, ...

Anyone who's stuffed a smart phone in their back pocket would appreciate the convenience of electronic devices that could bend. Flexible electronics could spawn new products: clothing wired to cool or heat, reading tablets that could fold like newspaper, and so on. Alas, electronic components such as chips, displays and wires are generally made from metals and inorganic semiconductors -- materials with physical properties that make them fairly stiff and brittle. In the quest for flexibility many researchers have been experimenting with semiconductors made from plastics ...

After more than four decades of research, strong evidence now shows that Kawasaki disease has a distinct seasonal occurrence shared by regions across the Northern hemisphere. The first global analysis of the seasonality of Kawasaki disease, published September 18 by PLOS ONE, was carried out using data obtained between 1970 and 2012. It included 296,203 cases from 39 locations in 25 countries around the globe, with 27 of those locations in the extra-tropical Northern hemisphere, eight in the tropics, and four in the extra-tropical Southern hemisphere. Kawasaki disease ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Fiber optics has made communication faster than ever, but the next step involves a quantum leap –– literally. In order to improve the security of the transfer of information, scientists are working on how to translate electrical quantum states to optical quantum states in a way that would enable ultrafast, quantum-encrypted communications. A UC Santa Barbara research team has demonstrated the first and arguably most challenging step in the process. The paper, published in Nature Physics, describes a nanomechanical transducer that provides strong ...

Certain pediatric surgeries carry such low risk of serious blood loss that clinicians can safely forgo expensive blood typing and blood stocking before such procedures, suggest the results of a small study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. The finding, published ahead of print in the journal Pediatric Anesthesia, was accompanied by a list of 10 operations with "zero" transfusion risk, according to the investigators who reviewed the records of thousands of pediatric surgeries performed at The Johns Hopkins Hospital over 13 months. Unnecessary pre-emptive ...

Imagine an electronic display nearly as clear as a window, or a curtain that illuminates a room, or a smartphone screen that doubles in size, stretching like rubber. Now imagine all of these being made from the same material. Researchers from UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a transparent, elastic organic light-emitting device, or OLED, that could one day make all these possible. The OLED can be repeatedly stretched, folded and twisted at room temperature while still remaining lit and retaining its original shape. OLED ...

SEATTLE – Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have uncovered a new mechanism by which influenza can infect cells – a finding that ultimately may have implications for immunity against the flu. Influenza viruses have two main proteins on their surface that allow them to do their dirty work: a protein called hemagglutinin allows viruses to infect cells, while a protein called neuraminidase allows viruses to escape from cells. Now in a paper published online ahead of the December print issue of the Journal of Virology, Jesse Bloom, Ph.D., an evolutionary ...

A new study by a team of University of Notre Dame researchers, which appears in the Sept. 2 edition of the journal PLoS ONE, is a significant step in understanding the molecular genetic and physiological basis for a spectrum of metabolic diseases related to circadian function. Obesity and diabetes have reached epidemic levels and are responsible for increased morbidity and mortality throughout the world. Furthermore, the incidence of metabolic disease is significantly elevated in shift-work personnel, revealing an important link between the circadian clock, the sleep-wake ...