Bottom Line: Stiffening of the arteries appears to be associated with the progressive buildup of β-amyloid (Αβ) plaque in the brains of elderly patients without dementia, suggesting a relationship between the severity of vascular disease and the plaque that is a hallmark of Alzheimer disease. Author: Timothy M. Hughes, Ph.D., M.P.H., of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., and colleagues. Background: Evidence suggested arterial stiffness is related to brain aging, cerebrovascular disease, impaired cognitive function and dementia in the elderly. ...

Bottom Line: The blood pressure medication angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) appear to reduce major cardiovascular events and death, as well death from all other causes, in patients with diabetes, while angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) appear to have no such effect on those outcomes. Author: Jun Cheng, M.D., of the Medical School of Zhejiang University, China, and colleagues. Background: Approximately 285 million adults worldwide have diabetes, and diabetes is a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases (CV). The American Diabetes Association recommends ...

Bottom Line: An increasing workload for hospitalists (physicians who care exclusively for hospitalized patients) was associated with increased length of stay and costs at a large academic community hospital system in Delaware, which may undermine the efficiency and cost of care. Author: Daniel J. Elliott, M.D., M.S.C.E, of the Christiana Care Health System, Newark, Del., and colleagues. Background: Hospital medicine is a fast growing medical specialty in the United States because evidence has suggested that hospitalists provide inpatient care to patients more efficiently ...

Bottom Line: Parental monitoring of the time children spend watching television, playing video games and being online can be associated with more sleep, improved school performance and better behavior by the children. Author: Douglas A. Gentile, Ph.D., of Iowa State University, Ames, and colleagues. Background: Previous research suggests high levels of screen time are associated with less sleep, attention problems and lower academic progress. How the Study Was Conducted: The study included self-reported data from 1,323 school children (in the third through fifth ...

Bottom Line: Treating inmates for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) while they were incarcerated in Connecticut helped a majority of them achieve viral suppression by the time they were released. Author: Jaimie P. Meyer, M.D., of the Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn., and colleagues. Background: Of the 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States, about one-sixth of them will be incarcerated annually, and HIV prevalence is three-fold greater in prisons compared with community settings. How the Study Was Conducted: The authors ...

A Yale University-led study has found that using more wood and less steel and concrete in building and bridge construction would substantially reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel consumption. Despite an established forest conservation theory holding that tree harvesting should be strictly minimized to prevent the loss of biodiversity and to maintain carbon storage capacity, the new study shows that sustainable management of wood resources can achieve both goals while also reducing fossil fuel burning. The results were published in the Journal of ...

(Lebanon, NH, 3/31/14) — Fast food giants attempts at depicting healthier kids' meals frequently goes unnoticed by children ages 3 to 7 years old according to a new study by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center. In research published on March 31, 2014 in JAMA Pediatrics, Dartmouth researchers found that one-half to one-third of children did not identify milk when shown McDonald's and Burger King children's advertising images depicting that product. Sliced apples in Burger King's ads were identified as apples by only 10 percent of young viewers; instead most ...

Alexandria, Va. – Turtles are the last major living vertebrate group to be placed firmly on the tree of life, and the arguments are getting messy. Three fields in particular — paleontology, developmental biology and microbiology/genomics — disagree about how, and from what, turtles may have evolved. In the latest EARTH Magazine feature story, contributing writer Naomi Lubick investigates how these creatures confound scientists on many levels — from their morphology in the paleontological record and in modern day turtles, to the analysis of their genome. Where do they belong ...

AMES, Iowa – Parents may not always see it, but efforts to limit their children's screen time can make a difference. A new study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, found children get more sleep, do better in school, behave better and see other health benefits when parents limit content and the amount of time their children spend on the computer or in front of the TV. Douglas Gentile, lead author and an associate professor of psychology at Iowa State, says the effect is not immediate and that makes it difficult for parents to recognize. As a result, parents may think it ...

Young adults with such cardiac risk factors as high blood pressure and elevated glucose levels have significantly worse cognitive function in middle age, according to a new study by dementia researchers at UC San Francisco. The findings bolster the view that diseases like Alzheimer's develop over an individual's lifespan and may be set in motion early in life. And they offer hope that young adults may be able to lower their risk of developing dementia through diet and exercise, or even by taking medications. "These cardiovascular risk factors are all quite modifiable," ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Researchers at The Ohio State University have found a way for computers to recognize 21 distinct facial expressions—even expressions for complex or seemingly contradictory emotions such as "happily disgusted" or "sadly angry." In the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that they were able to more than triple the number of documented facial expressions that researchers can now use for cognitive analysis. "We've gone beyond facial expressions for simple emotions like 'happy' or 'sad.' We found a strong consistency ...

A humble ingredient of bread – baker's yeast – has provided scientists with remarkable new insights into understanding basic processes likely involved in diseases such as Parkinson's and cancer. In a new study published today (Monday March 31) in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science), the team from Germany, Leicester, and Portugal detail a new advance – describing for the first time a key feature in cellular development linked to the onset of these devastating diseases. The research team is from the University Medical Center Goettingen, ...

(PHILADELPHIA) -- The code for every gene includes a message at the end of it that signals the translation machinery to stop. Some diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, can result from mutations that insert this stop signal into the middle of an essential gene, causing the resulting protein to be truncated. Some antibiotics cause the cell's translation machinery to ignore the stop codons and are therefore being explored as a potential therapy for these diseases. But new research reported online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...

VIDEO: After veins grow into the implanted engineered muscle fibers, blood cells can be seen traveling through them, sustaining and nourishing the new tissue. Click here for more information. DURHAM, N.C. -- Biomedical engineers have grown living skeletal muscle that looks a lot like the real thing. It contracts powerfully and rapidly, integrates into mice quickly, and for the first time, demonstrates the ability to heal itself both inside the laboratory and inside an animal. The ...

Evidence left at the crime scene is abundant and global: Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet's five known mass extinctions. But pinpointing the culprit has been difficult, and controversial. Now, a team of MIT researchers may have found enough evidence to convict the guilty parties — but you'll need a microscope to see the killers. The perpetrators, this new work suggests, were not asteroids, volcanoes, or raging coal fires, all of which have ...

Johns Hopkins researchers say that an experimental anticancer compound appears to have reversed behaviors associated with schizophrenia and restored some lost brain cell function in adolescent mice with a rodent version of the devastating mental illness. The drug is one of a class of compounds known as PAK inhibitors, which have been shown in animal experiments to confer some protection from brain damage due to Fragile X syndrome, an inherited disease in humans marked by mental retardation. There also is some evidence, experts say, suggesting PAK inhibitors could be used ...

Ribosomes are essential for life, generating all of the proteins required for cells to grow. Mutations in some of the proteins that make ribosomes cause disorders characterized by bone marrow failure and anemia early in life, followed by elevated cancer risk in middle age. These disorders are generally called "ribosomopathies." How can ribosomopathies first appear as diseases caused by too few cells, but later turn into diseases caused by too many cells? This paradox has puzzled the scientific community for years. A new study, which uses a genetic approach to examine ...

This news release is available in German. After several years of discussions, researchers from Aarhus University (Denmark), Lund University (Sweden) and Stockholm University (Sweden) have determined that nutrients from the land are the main cause of widespread areas of oxygen depletion. The results were published on 31 March in the prestigious American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nutrients are the villain The deepest areas of the Baltic Sea have always had a low oxygen content. The inflow of fresh water is actually limited by low thresholds ...

Scientists have for the first time come closer to understanding how a clone of E. coli, described as the most important of its kind to cause human infections, has spread across the world in a very short time. E. coli clone ST131 is one of the leading causes of urinary tract and blood stream infections and has crossed the globe at a rapid rate. Worryingly, members of this clone are becoming more resistant to antibiotics. As an indication of scale, more than half of all women will suffer a urinary tract infection at least once in their lives. An international team of scientists, ...

Using an acoustic metadevice that can influence the acoustic space and can control any of the ways in which waves travel, engineers have demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to dynamically alter the geometry of a three-dimensional colloidal crystal in real time. The colloidal crystals designed in the study, called metamaterials, are artificially structured materials that extend the properties of existing naturally occurring materials and compounds. The research by academics from the University of Bristol's Department of Mechanical Engineering is published ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Making a snap decision usually means following your initial reaction -- going with your gut. That intuitive feeling sprouts from the limbic system, the evolutionarily older and simpler part of the brain that affects emotion, behavior and motivation. But during adolescence, the limbic system connects and communicates with the rest of the brain differently than it does during adulthood, leaving many adolescents vulnerable to riskier behaviors, according to Duke University researchers. "We know adolescence is a time of profound social change. It's also ...

(Boston) – Child and adolescent hematologists at Boston Medical Center (BMC) have developed a tool to gauge how ready young adults with sickle cell disease are for a transition into adult care. In a new article for the Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, Amy Sobota, MD, MPH, and her collaborators have shown that a questionnaire geared to the needs of young adults with sickle cell disease can pinpoint areas of need before the patient goes into an adult clinic. BMC's sickle cell disease transition clinic, which is unique in Boston, was established in 2008 and serves ...

Wounds may heal more quickly if exposed to low-intensity vibration, report researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The finding, in mice, may hold promise for the 18 million Americans who have type 2 diabetes, and especially the quarter of them who will eventually suffer from foot ulcers. Their wounds tend to heal slowly and can become chronic or worsen rapidly. Timothy Koh, UIC professor of kinesiology and nutrition in the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences, was intrigued by studies at Stony Brook University in New York that used very low-intensity ...

ST. LOUIS -- Removing pressure from medical school while teaching students skills to manage stress and bounce back from adversity improves their mental health and boosts their academic achievement, Saint Louis University research finds. Stuart Slavin, M.D., M.Ed., associate dean for curriculum at SLU School of Medicine, is the lead author of the paper, which is published the April edition of Academic Medicine. The problem of depression among medical school students is significant, Slavin said, affecting between 20 and 30 percent of medical students in the U.S., and potentially ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study of older men found a link between poor sleep quality and the development of cognitive decline over three to four years. Results show that higher levels of fragmented sleep and lower sleep efficiency were associated with a 40 to 50 percent increase in the odds of clinically significant decline in executive function, which was similar in magnitude to the effect of a five-year increase in age. In contrast, sleep duration was not related to subsequent cognitive decline. "It was the quality of sleep that predicted future cognitive decline in this ...