INDIANAPOLIS -- An Indiana University and Regenstrief Institute study of nearly 10,000 average-risk, asymptomatic men and women from 90 sites across the United States reports that a multi-target stool DNA test -- a new noninvasive colorectal cancer screening tool that has not yet been approved for sale by the Food and Drug Administration -- detects 92.3 percent of colon cancers, compared to only 73.8 percent of cancers detected by a fecal immunochemical test, the most commonly used noninvasive test today. Study results were published online March 19 and in the April ...

This week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of French and Swedish researchers present the earliest fossil evidence for the presence of bone marrow in the fin of a 370 million-year-old fish. Long bones, which are found in the limb of tetrapods, are not only important for locomotion and supporting the weight of the body, but also host the bone marrow. The latter plays a major role in haematopoiesis, i.e. the formation of blood cells. In a healthy adult human, about a hundred billion to one trillion new blood cells are produced every day to maintain ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 19, 2014—The number of menopausal women is projected to reach 50 million by 2020. With changing views on appropriate therapies to control symptoms and new treatments available and on the horizon, most internists lack the core competencies and experience to meet the needs of women entering menopause, according to a provocative Commentary published in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Women's Health website at http://www.liebertpub.com/jwh. The ...

A non-invasive test that includes detection of the genetic abnormalities related to cancer could significantly improve the effectiveness of colon cancer screening, according to research published by a team of scientists including David Ransohoff, MD, professor of medicine at the UNC School of Medicine and UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center member. The large-scale, cross-sectional study was published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study compared two different types of tests used for screening colorectal cancer: a non-invasive, multitarget ...

Scientists at UNC's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) report that high school students with autism can learn under Common Core State Standards (CCSS), boosting their prospects for college and employment. Newly published recommendations from FPG's team also provide strategies for educating adolescents with autism under a CCSS curriculum. "The number of students with autism who enter high school settings continues to grow," said Veronica P. Fleury, lead author and postdoctoral research associate with FPG's Center on Secondary Education for Students with ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new processing technique that makes light emitting diodes (LEDs) brighter and more resilient by coating the semiconductor material gallium nitride (GaN) with a layer of phosphorus-derived acid. "By coating polar GaN with a self-assembling layer of phosphonic groups, we were able to increase luminescence without increasing energy input," says Stewart Wilkins, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work. "The phosphonic groups also improve stability, making the GaN less likely ...

Patients with terminal forms of leukaemia and lymphoma who have run out of treatment options could soon benefit from a new drug, which not only puts an end to chemotherapy and has virtually no side effects but also improves a patient's life expectancy and quality of life. It has been described as a breakthrough in cancer treatment by a leading professor in haematology, who presented the findings of the Phase 1 trial at an international conference in New Orleans in December 2013. Professor Simon Rule, Consultant Haematologist at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust and researcher ...

Influential policy-informing 'evidence' that children's brains are irreversibly 'sculpted' by parental care is based on questionable evidence. The researchers warn that the success that advocates of 'brain-based' parenting have had in influencing government policy could undermine parent-child relationships. The study identified that although there is a lack of scientific foundation to many of the claims of 'brain-based' parenting, the idea that years 0-3 are neurologically critical is now repeated in policy documents and has been integrated into professional training ...

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) are part of a research team that has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. The team, including scientists from California Institute of Technology, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Arizona, applied a sophisticated Doppler technique to the infrared to directly detect the planet and demonstrate the presence of water in its atmosphere. The discovery is described in the March 10, 2014 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The ...

Vanderbilt University scientists have found evidence that the insulin-secreting beta cells of the pancreas, which are either killed or become dysfunctional in the two main forms of diabetes, have the capacity to regenerate. The surprising finding, posted online recently by Cell Metabolism, suggests that by understanding how regeneration occurs, scientists one day may be able to stop or reverse the rising tide of diabetes, which currently affects more than 8 percent of the U.S. population. The study "provides clues to how we might learn what signals promote beta-cell ...

Fortunately, more and more people survive critical illnesses and accidents. A new Danish-American survey shows, however, that hospitalisation where the patient has received mechanical ventilation can have serious consequences: - Of course, the good news is that more and more patients survive critical illness and treatment using ventilators. But at the same time, the bad news is that we have now documented that the ventilator patients have a considerable risk of developing psychological problems. The first few months after discharge are really critical, says professor ...

BOSTON (March 19, 2014) – Experts across academia, industry and government propose a new method for health care providers to get the right treatments to the right patients at the right time. This new approach, A Proposal for Integrated Efficacy-to-Effectiveness (E2E) Clinical Trials, published in Nature Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, recommends a seamless transition from controlled experiments to real-world comparative effectiveness trials. This continuum will improve the accuracy of treatment selection and better determine how those treatments work on different ...

People lie – we know this. People lie to kids – we know this, too. But what happens next? Do children who've been lied to lie more themselves? Surprisingly, the question had not been asked experimentally until Chelsea Hays, then an undergraduate student in psychology at the University of California, San Diego, approached professor Leslie Carver with it. Now the pair have a paper out in Developmental Science, suggesting that adult dishonesty does make a difference, and not in a good way. "As far as we know," said Carver, associate professor of psychology and human development ...

University of Adelaide mathematicians have devised a method for identifying how cell clusters have formed by analysing an image of the cluster. Published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, their mathematical modelling tool will be useful in helping biologists and tissue engineers to move towards growing human tissue such as liver in the laboratory. "When any tissue or organ develops, the cells have to organise themselves into the correct structure," says Dr Edward Green, researcher in the University's School of Mathematical Sciences. "This self-organisation process ...

A study by Curtin University researchers and colleagues from Denmark and New Zealand strengthens the case for human involvement in the disappearance of New Zealand's iconic megaherbivore, the moa - a distant relative of the Australian Emu. All nine species of New Zealand moa, the largest weighing up to 250 kilograms, became extinct shortly after Polynesians arrived in the country in the late 13th century. Researchers have previously suggested, from limited genetic evidence, that huge populations of moa had collapsed before people arrived and hence influences other ...

DALLAS, March 19, 2014 — A new kind of single-dose vaccine that comes in a nasal spray and doesn't require refrigeration could dramatically alter the public health landscape — get more people vaccinated around the world and address the looming threats of emerging and re-emerging diseases. Researchers presented the latest design and testing of these "nanovaccines" at the 247th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. Their talk was one of more than 10,000 presentations at the meeting, being held here ...

VIDEO: In this JoVE video article, a set of methods to measure food-related motivation and values are described in JoVE's peer-reviewed video article format. Click here for more information. March 19, 2014 —Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a novel method for evaluating the treatment of obesity-related food behavior. In an effort to further scientific understanding of the underlying problem, they have published the first peer-reviewed video of their technique ...

The heart disease drug perhexiline is one of 101 compounds predicted to prevent cancer growth in most patients suffering from our most common liver cancer, HCC. This is an outcome from a novel simulation-based approach using personal sets of proteins of six HCC patients. "This is the first time personalized models have been used to find and evaluate new potential drugs," says Professor Jens Nielsen at Chalmers University of Technology. -- Our most common liver cancer, Hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC, causes more than half a million deaths worldwide every year. If the ...

Babies born prematurely are surviving in increasing numbers. But many withstand complications of early birth only to suffer late-onset sepsis — life-threatening bloodstream infections that strike after infants reach 72 hours of age. While early-onset sepsis often is caused by pathogens acquired from the amniotic sac or birth canal, the causes of late-onset sepsis have been far less clear. But now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered that preterm babies' guts harbor infectious microbes that can cause late-onset sepsis. The ...

Consuming alcohol more frequently than twice a week increases the risk of stroke mortality in men, according to a study carried out at the University of Eastern Finland. The results show that the effects of alcohol are not limited to the amount consumed, but also the frequency of drinking matters. The results were published in Acta Neurologica Scandinavica on 8 March. Excessive consumption of alcohol is associated with a variety of different diseases. The relationship between alcohol consumption and ischaemic stroke shows a J curve pattern, which means that in people ...

This news release is available in German. FRANKFURT. WaterGAP (Water Global Assessment and Prognosis) is a hydrological model used to model water shortage, groundwater depletion, and floods and droughts (e.g. as impacted by climate change) over the land area of the globe. The Frankfurt hydrologist Prof. Petra Döll has examined how good a fit this model provides, using GPS observations and data from the GRACE satellite, which measures the gravitational field of the Earth. The study, published in the current issue of the scientific journal Surveys in Geophysics indicates ...

Researchers from the University of Melbourne and University of Sydney are confident their new reaserach results will make significant differences to the calculations of surface tension of water used by the next generation of atmospheric scientists, biophysicists and engineers of technology like inkjet printers. These latest investigations have clinched a long-standing controversy amongst the physical Chemistry community; the air-water interface is negatively charged by the adsorption of hydroxide ions. Prof Angus Gray-Weale from the Chemistry, Department of Chemistry ...

Ottawa, ON, March 19, 2014 — Scientists at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) Research Institute have discovered a cellular pathway that is responsible for keeping blood sugar levels low in obese or pre-diabetic people, and may prevent the onset of Type 2 diabetes. The discovery published this month in a leading journal Nature Cell Biology. Following a meal, beta cells found in islets of the pancreas secrete insulin that helps to store food energy for future use. The inability of islet beta cells to produce enough insulin leads to diabetes. Unlike other ...

Older persons, in particular, tend to suffer from memory lapses and other types of cognitive impairment after undergoing surgical procedures (postoperative cognitive dysfunction, POCD). Surgery has been performed on older patients much more commonly in recent years than ever before, and their pre- and postoperative care has become an important matter. Ingrid Rundshagen, an anesthesiologist, has surveyed the available literature to find out what kinds of patients are more likely to have cognitive impairment after surgery, and how the clinical manifestations should best be ...

The global diversity of plants being cultivated by Britain's gardeners is playing a key role in the fight to save the nation's threatened bumblebees, new research has revealed. Ecologists at Plymouth University, in a study published this week, have shown the most common species of bumblebee are not fussy about a plant's origin when searching for nectar and pollen among the nation's urban gardens. But other species – and, in particular, long-tongued bees – do concentrate their feeding upon plants from the UK and Europe, for which they have developed a preference evolved ...