The pain and itching associated with shingles and herpes may be due to the virus causing a "short circuit" in the nerve cells that reach the skin, Princeton researchers have found. This short circuit appears to cause repetitive, synchronized firing of nerve cells, the researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This cyclical firing may be the cause of the persistent itching and pain that are symptoms of oral and genital herpes as well as shingles and chicken pox, according to the researchers. These diseases are all caused by ...

Treatment with two common drugs reduced viral replication and lung damage when given to monkeys infected with the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. The condition is deadly pneumonia that has killed more than 100 people, primarily in the Middle East. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, was first reported in Saudi Arabia last year. The infection is caused by a coronavirus, called MERS-CoV, which is closely related to several coronaviruses that infect bats. About half of patients who developed the syndrome have died. Currently, there is no proven ...

Paying doctors for how they perform specific medical procedures and examinations yields better health outcomes than the traditional “fee for service” model, where everyone gets paid a set amount regardless of quality or patient outcomes, according to new research conducted by UC San Francisco and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “‘Pay for performance’ programs shift the focus from basic care delivery to high quality care delivery,” said first author Naomi Bardach, MD, assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Pediatrics. “So they are ...

Move over, plaques and tangles. Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center have identified a previously unrecognized type of pathology in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease. These tangle-like structures appear at early stages of Alzheimer's and are not found in other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease. What makes these tangles distinct is that they sequester proteins involved in RNA splicing, the process by which instructional messages from genes are cut and pasted together. The researchers ...

The search for the cause of multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease that affects up to a half million people in the United States, has confounded researchers and medical professionals for generations. But Steven Schutzer, a physician and scientist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, has now found an important clue why progress has been slow – it appears that most research on the origins of MS has focused on the wrong part of the brain. Look more to the gray matter, the new findings published in the journal PLOS ONE suggest, and less to the white. That change of approach ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – After a period of relative calm during the 1990s, rapid changes in American families began anew during the 2000s, a new analysis suggests. Young people delayed marriage longer than ever before, permanent singlehood increased, and divorce and remarriage continued to rise during the first decade of the century. (See the top 5 trends in American families during the 2000s: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/5Trends.htm) But the most troubling finding, researchers say, may be how American families have taken divergent paths: White people, the educated ...

Researchers have discovered the first inherited gene mutation linked exclusively to acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) occurring in multiple relatives in individual families. The discovery of the PAX5 gene mutation was led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and others. The work appears in the current advance online edition of the scientific journal Nature Genetics. The mutation was identified in two unrelated families in which pediatric ALL has been diagnosed in multiple generations. The mutation involved a single change in the DNA sequence of PAX5, a gene that ...

Dingoes have been unjustly blamed for the extinctions on the Australian mainland of the Tasmanian tiger (or thylacine) and the Tasmanian devil, a University of Adelaide study has found. In a paper published in the journal Ecology, the researchers say that despite popular belief that the Australian dingo was to blame for the demise of thylacines and devils on the mainland about 3000 years ago, in fact Aboriginal populations and a shift in climate were more likely responsible. "Perhaps because the public perception of dingoes as 'sheep-killers' is so firmly entrenched, ...

PORTLAND, Ore. — During a three-year period in seven metropolitan areas in the western United States, the emergency medical services system sent more than 85,000 injured patients to major trauma hospitals who didn't need to go there — costing the health care system more than $130 million per year, according to an Oregon Health & Science University study published today in the journal Health Affairs. The study gathered data from emergency services calls from 94 EMS agencies in the seven metropolitan areas from January 2006 through December 2008. The agencies were using ...

Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6042 Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society American Chemical Society issues guidelines for safer research laboratories INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 10, 2013 — The world's largest scientific society today issued guidelines to better ensure the safety of the tens of thousands of personnel who work in research laboratories around the country. The American Chemical Society ...

Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6042 Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society The real reason to worry about bees INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 10, 2013 — Honeybees should be on everyone's worry list, and not because of the risk of a nasty sting, an expert on the health of those beneficial insects said here today at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's ...

INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 10, 2013 — One of the first analyses of laws banning disposal of electronic waste (e-waste) in municipal landfills has found that state e-waste recycling bans have been mostly ineffective, although California's Cell Phone Recycling Act had a positive impact on cell phone recycling. However, e-waste recycling rates remain "dismally low," and many demographic groups remain unaware of their alternatives for properly disposing of e-waste, according to the study. Presented here today at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society ...

Charlottesville, VA (September 10, 2013). University of Toronto researchers examined data on patients who had been hospitalized in the United States for subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) and found racial/ethnic differences in the rates of inpatient mortality and hospital discharge to institutional care. Compared to white patients, Asian/Pacific Islander patients were more likely and Hispanic patients less likely to die while in the hospital. African-American patients were more likely than white patients to require institutional care following discharge from the hospital, although ...

The ability to form a general concept that connects what we know about the members of a category allows humans to respond appropriately when they encounter a novel member of that category. At an early age, children form categories to, for example, differentiate animals from inanimate objects and to differentiate dogs from cats. New research shows that other apes may form similar categories to represent different types of animals. There are at least two ways to visually identify an animal as being similar to any other: the animals may be within a species and therefore ...

By combining the experience of self-reported positive and negative emotions among 1,400 US-residents, researchers created four affective profiles which they then used to discern differences in happiness, depression, life satisfaction and happiness-increasing strategies. The differences between these profiles suggested that promoting positive emotions can positively influence a depressive-to-happy state (defined as increasing levels of happiness and decreasing levels of depression across the affective profile model), as well as increasing life satisfaction. The study, ...

Barcelona, Spain: A doctor from the UK has shown how an innovative music video can help increase awareness of how to treat asthma. Dr Tapas Mukherjee, from Glenfield Hospital in the UK, produced and starred in a music video to draw attention to new guidelines showing a better way of managing asthma. A study presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Annual Congress in Barcelona today (10 September 2013), has demonstrated the success of this video and suggests that social media can be used to successfully improve medical practice. In April 2012, an audit ...

Barcelona, Spain: Researchers have developed a new strategy for prescribing antibiotics that could reduce patient harm and help combat the rise in antibiotic resistance. A new study, which is due to be presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Annual Congress in Barcelona tomorrow (11 September 2013), found that a new prescribing protocol could significant reduce potential misuse of antibiotics. The research followed over 500 patients with lower respiratory tract infections during the course of one year. The new prescribing protocol included automatic stop ...

Barcelona, Spain: An electronic decision support tool helped to reduce deaths from pneumonia in four hospital emergency departments in a new study. The findings, which will be presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Annual Congress in Barcelona tomorrow (11 September 2013), could lead to improvements in pneumonia care and outcomes for patients. Although guidelines for treating pneumonia exist, it is often difficult for these to be fully implemented in an emergency setting. The researchers therefore developed an electronic tool, linked to a patient's medical ...

Analysis: Political drive to screen for pre-dementia: not evidence based and ignores the harms of diagnosis A political drive, led by the UK and US, to screen older people for minor memory changes (often called mild cognitive impairment or pre-dementia) is leading to unnecessary investigation and potentially harmful treatment for what is arguably an inevitable consequence of ageing, warn experts on bmj.com today. Their views come as the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference opens in New Hampshire, USA today (10 September), partnered by BMJ's Too Much Medicine campaign, ...

Glioblastoma is the most common ma-lignant primary brain tumor in adults. The aggressive growth manner, characterized by marked angiogenesis and extensive tumor cell invasion into normal brain parenchyma with frequent formation of tumor microsatellites at distal sites, makes eradication impossible even after extensive microsurgical resection combined with current standard chemoradiation and adjuvant temozolomide. Thus, novel therapeutic strategies must to be investigated for the development of a more effective treatment strategy. Stem cell-based therapies are emerging as ...

At present, fiber tracking algorithms are divided into deterministic tractography and probabilistic tractography. In deterministic algorithms, scholars proposed the fiber assignment by continuous tracking algorithm, the tensor deflection algorithm, the tensorline algorithm. Deterministic algorithms track fibers mainly depending on diffusion direction; however, they are susceptible to noise and partial volume effects, which result in the accumulation of tracking errors. Probabilistic algorithms can effectively reduce noise and partial volume effects, thus decreasing the ...

Spinal cord ischemia/reperfusion injury is a stress injury to the spinal cord. Therefore, research on the expression of stress-related protein in neurons could be of great significance for the pathological mechanism and control measures for spinal cord ischemia/reperfusion injury. Previous studies from Dr. Shanyong Zhang and colleagues from China-Japan Friendship Hospital of Jilin University identified 21 differentially expressed proteins in rabbits with spinal cord ischemia/reperfusion injury using differential proteomics. Of these proteins, stress-related proteins included ...

The new study, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by researchers at IIASA and in Norway, Finland, and Russia, finds that gas flaring from oil extraction in the Arctic accounts for 42% of the black carbon concentrations in the Arctic, with even higher levels during certain times of the year. In the month of March for example, the study showed that flaring accounts for more than half of black carbon concentrations near the surface. Globally, in contrast, gas flaring accounts for only 3% of black carbon emissions. The researchers also found that residential ...

Researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) have discovered that more than 70% of bladder tumours display somatic mutations in the TERT gene (telomerase reverse transcriptase). The TERT gene is involved in the protection of DNA and in cellular ageing processes and cancer. These results make this gene the most mutated in these tumours. The study was led by Francisco X. Real, head of the Epithelial Carcinogenesis Group at CNIO, together with Nuria Malats, the head of the Genetic & Molecular Epidemiology Group at CNIO, as well as other European groups, ...

Dairy goats are usually separated from their mothers a few days to weeks after birth and reintroduced into the herd months later – on most farms either in the last months of first pregnancy or shortly after parturition/kidding. The practice is supposed to ensure stable milk production in the herd but it clearly causes stress to the goats. Problems arise because goat herds have a strictly hierarchical social structure and changes in herd composition may lead to serious rivalries and increased aggressive behaviour. Farmers are on the lookout for ways to keep the stress to ...