Among patients with prehypertension and coronary artery disease, use of the renin (an enzyme secreted by the kidneys) inhibitor aliskiren, compared with placebo, did not result in improvement or slowing in the progression of coronary atherosclerosis, according to a study published by JAMA. The study is being released early online to coincide with its presentation at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2013. "Guidelines recommend blood pressure reduction in patients with hypertension with a treatment goal of 140 mm Hg for systolic and 90 mm Hg diastolic blood ...

ANN ARBOR—When the tiny roundworm C. elegans reaches middle age—at about 2 weeks old—it can't quite move like it did in the bloom of youth. But rather than imposing an exercise regimen to rebuild the worm's body-wall muscles, researchers can bring the wriggle back by stimulating the animal's neurons. And, they say, pharmaceuticals might have a similar effect in mammals. Scientists at the University of Michigan's Life Sciences Institute and Medical School have found that the loss of motor ability associated with aging begins in neurons and spreads to muscles, and that ...

According to new research on epilepsy, zebrafish have certainly earned their stripes. Results of a study in Nature Communications suggest that zebrafish carrying a specific mutation may help researchers discover treatments for Dravet syndrome (DS), a severe form of pediatric epilepsy that results in drug-resistant seizures and developmental delays. Scott C. Baraban, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), carefully assessed whether the mutated zebrafish could serve as a model for DS, and then developed a new screening method ...

A long-term study of children with a complex heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) found that the risk of death or need for immediate listing for heart transplantation was greatest for those who developed this disease as infants with congestive heart failure and for children who also had selective inborn errors of metabolism, a group of rare genetic disorders in which one or more of the body's key metabolic processes are disrupted. The findings will be published online Tuesday in The Lancet to coincide with a presentation at the European Society of ...

Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Tuesday 3 September 2013: Being underweight increases the death risk of women with coronary artery disease (CAD) by 2-fold, according to research presented at the ESC Congress today by Dr Aziza Azimi from Denmark. The study suggests that underweight women with CAD should gain weight to reduce their risk of death. Dr Azimi said: "The increasing prevalence of obesity is concerning because it is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, early death and other diseases like diabetes mellitus type 2, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. ...

Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Tuesday 3 September 2013: Infections cause a lower proportion of lead extractions than expected, according to preliminary results from the ELECTRa Registry presented at ESC Congress 2013 today by Dr Maria Grazia Bongiorni from Italy. The European Lead Extraction ConTRolled (ELECTRa) Registry is the first large prospective, multicentre, European controlled registry of consecutive patients undergoing transvenous lead extraction (TLE) procedures in European real world practice. It is carried out by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering have solved a problem that previously presented a serious hurdle for the use of graphene in electronic devices. Scanning electron microscopy image of graphene device used in the study. The scale bar is one micrometer. The UCR logo next to it is implemented with etched graphene. Graphene is a single-atom thick carbon crystal with unique properties beneficial for electronics including extremely high electron mobility and phonon thermal conductivity. However, ...

Removing one of the tiniest organs in the body has shown to provide effective treatment for high blood pressure. The discovery, made by University of Bristol researchers and published in Nature Communications, could revolutionise treatment of the world's biggest silent killer. The carotid body — a small nodule (no larger than a rice grain) found on the side of each carotid artery — appears to be a major culprit in the development and regulation of high blood pressure. Researchers, led by British Heart Foundation (BHF)-funded researcher Professor Julian Paton, found ...

Only a fraction of the biodiversity on the planet is known to scientists and exploration of new places and habitats continue to yield exciting discoveries and new species to describe by taxonomists. This task is becoming increasingly urgent as a function of the continuous overexploitation of natural resources and destruction of habitats. In fact, it has recently been estimated that it takes on average 21 years from the discovery of a species in nature to its formal scientific description. The 'shelf life' can sometimes be significantly longer, as for the millipede Ommatoiulus ...

The first systematic review of related research confirms a positive impact on cognitive function, but an inconsistent effect on mild cognitive impairment Over recent years many pieces of research have identified a link between adherence to a Mediterranean diet and a lower risk of age-related disease such as dementia. Until now there has been no systematic review of such research, where a number of studies regarding a Mediterranean diet and cognitive function are reviewed for consistencies, common trends and inconsistencies. A team of researchers from the University ...

Several millions of people around the world suffer from insulin deficiencies. Insulin is a hormone, secreted by the beta cells in the pancreas, which plays a major role in the regulation of energy substrates such as glucose. This insufficiency, primarily caused by diabetes (types 1 and 2), has lethal consequences if it is not treated. As of now, only daily insulin injections allow patients to survive. Several millions of people around the world suffer from insulin deficiencies. Insulin is a hormone, secreted by the beta cells in the pancreas, which plays a major role ...

A precisely designed macromolecule that mimics the binding of HIV to immune system cells could be used to stop the virus from physically entering the body, according to a new study led by a materials scientist at Queen Mary University of London. The researchers created the large molecule with several sugar molecules, known as glycopolymers. By using different sugars attached to the macromolecule in solution, the scientists were able to investigate which sugar molecules were the most effective in inhibiting the potential binding of the virus. They then measured how ...

This news release is available in German. Leipzig/Dübendorf, Switzerland -- Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Envi-ronmental Research (UFZ), together with colleagues from the Swiss Eawag aquatic research institute, have discovered a protein which transports chemicals out of the embryo of the zebrafish and in this way protects the embryo against toxic substances. However, certain environmental chemicals render this protective mechanism ineffective, so that the fish embryos become more sensitive to toxic substances. The study, published in the scientific journal ...

Scientists have for the first time provided proof of principle for a drug-based treatment of acute pancreatitis – a disease which is often alcohol-related and for which currently there is no treatment. Each year around 20,000 people in the UK are admitted to hospital with acute pancreatitis. One in five of these cases are severe, resulting in around 1000 deaths annually. Published in the US-based PNAS journal*, findings reveal that tests undertaken by scientists at Cardiff University, using an existing calcium channel-blocking compound developed by GlaxoSmithKline, ...

Washington, DC -- September 3, 2013 -- The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) released its first international poll today, the 2013 International Bedroom Poll, comparing sleep times, attitudes, habits and bedtime routines of those in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan between the ages of 25 and 55 years old. Japan and the United States report the least amount of sleep. Japanese and Americans report sleeping about 30 to 40 minutes less on workdays than those in the other countries surveyed, averaging 6 hours and 22 minutes and 6 hours ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Ground-breaking new research from a team of evolutionary biologists at Indiana University shows for the first time how asexual lineages of a species are doomed not necessarily from a long, slow accumulation of new mutations, but rather from fast-paced gene conversion processes that simply unmask pre-existing deleterious recessive mutations. Geneticists have long bet on the success of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction based in a large part on the process known as Muller's ratchet, the mechanism by which a genome accrues deleterious and ...

Scientists have pushed back the boundaries of atom-based transport, creating a current by characterizing the many-body effects in the transport of the atoms along a periodic lattice. This work by Anton Ivanov and colleagues from the Institute for Theoretical Physics, at the University of Heidel-berg, Germany, adopted a new analytical approach before comparing it to approximate numerical simulations, and is reported in a paper recently published in EPJ B. Ultra-cold atoms trapped in optical potentials offer solutions for the transport of particles capable of producing ...

An international team of scientists, including biologists from, the University of York, has discovered five new species of bats in West Africa. The team, which also included researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences and the Academy of Sciences, Charles University in the Czech Republic, discovered a wealth of unexpected diversity among Vesper bats in Senegal. During seven expeditions to the Niokolo-Koba National Park in south-eastern Senegal, and subsequent genetic analysis, the scientists discovered that five species of bats looked similar to other populations ...

UPTON, NY - Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have identified a series of clues that particular arrangements of electrical charges known as "stripes" may play a role in superconductivity-the ability of some materials to carry electric current with no energy loss. But uncovering the detailed relationship between these stripe patterns and the appearance or disappearance of superconductivity is extremely difficult, particularly because the stripes that may accompany superconductivity are very likely moving, or fluctuating. As ...

Researchers from the universities in Mainz, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Ulm have proposed a new platform for quantum simulation. In a theoretical paper recently published in Physical Review Letters, they show that a combined system of ultracold trapped ions and fermionic atoms could be used to emulate solid state physics. This system may outperform possibilities of existing platforms as a number of phenomena found in solid state systems are naturally included, such as the fermionic statistics of the electrons and the electron-sound wave interactions. Quantum simulation was ...

New drugs which may have the potential to stop faulty brain cells dying and slow down the progression of Parkinson's, have been identified by scientists in a pioneering study which is the first of its kind. Experts from the world leading Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) conducted a large scale drugs trial in the lab using skin cells from people with this progressive neurological condition which affects one in every 500 people in the UK. The researchers tested over 2,000 compounds to find out which ones could make faulty mitochondria work ...

Washington, DC, September 3, 2013 – 100 percent of student nurses surveyed observed lapses in infection prevention and control practices during their clinical placements, according to a British study published in the September issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). Infection prevention and control (IPC) education is a fundamental component of the nursing curriculum, but little is understood about nursing students' experience of IPC in the clinical setting ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (September 1, 2013) - For older adults undergoing surgery for spinal stenosis, some simple indicators of poor preoperative health predict a high risk of major medical complications, reports a study in the September 1 issue of Spine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. In combination, these risk factors may help in identifying patients at increased risk of heart attack and other serious events after spinal stenosis surgery, according to the report by Dr Richard A. Deyo and colleagues of Oregon ...

Monday, Sept. 3, 2013, Cleveland: Patients with coronary artery disease and low levels of "good cholesterol – or high-density lipoprotein (HDL) – who were treated with a drug designed to increase HDL levels and reduce coronary plaque build-up, experienced no better results than those treated with placebo, according to research conducted by the Cleveland Clinic Coordinating Center for Clinical Research (C5Research). The drug, RVX-208, induces the production of apolipoprotein A1 (apoA1), a major protein in HDL. Prior research has shown that higher levels of HDL are associated ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT researchers have shown that they can turn genes on or off inside yeast and human cells by controlling when DNA is copied into messenger RNA — an advance that could allow scientists to better understand the function of those genes. The technique could also make it easier to engineer cells that can monitor their environment, produce a drug or detect disease, says Timothy Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering and the senior author of a paper describing the new approach in the journal ACS ...