Athens-- The 2013 ESC Guidelines on Cardiac Pacing and Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy¹ developed in collaboration with the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA), have created a new classification system for bradyarrhythmias according to mechanisms rather than aetiology. The guidelines, presented at the EHRA EUROPACE meeting 23-26 June in Athens, Greece, and published simultaneously in the European Heart Journal and Europace, have been redesigned to offer a more accessible format for users. Greater emphasis than ever before has been placed on a practical 'how to' approach ...

A new palm-sized microarray that holds 1,200 individual cultures of fungi or bacteria could enable faster, more efficient drug discovery, according to a study published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Scientists at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston have developed a microarray platform for culturing fungal biofilms, and validated one potential application of the technology to identify new drugs effective against Candida albicans biofilms. The nano-scale ...

HUNTSVILLE (6/25/13) -- Gun possession arrests made by a concentrated, proactive patrol unit in the Houston Police Department were linked to significant reductions in subsequent crimes involving firearms, a study by Sam Houston State University found. "These findings add to the growing evidence that supports the use of directed patrols to target illegal gun possession in high crime locations," wrote Dr. William Wells, who co-authored the study with Yan Zhang and Jihong Zhao at SHSU's College of Criminal Justice. "An interesting phenomenon observed in Houston and in other ...

Jerusalem, June 23, 2013 –Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in California have achieved a breakthrough in understanding how and why a promising anti-cancer therapy has failed to achieve hoped-for success in killing tumor cells. Their work could lead to new insights into overcoming this impasse. The problematic therapy investigated involves suppression of the protein mTOR (mammalian target Of Rapamycin). MTOR plays an important role in regulating how cells process molecular signals from their environment, and it is observed as strongly activated in ...

New research shows that to prevent starvation at night, plants perform accurate arithmetic division. The calculation allows them to use up their starch reserves at a constant rate so that they run out almost precisely at dawn. "This is the first concrete example in a fundamental biological process of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation," said mathematical modeller Professor Martin Howard from the John Innes Centre. Plants feed themselves during the day by using energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and starch. Once the sun has set, they must ...

Cholera remains common in non-industrialized parts of the world today. It persists in part because V. cholera, the bacteria that causes the disease, is able to survive in diverse environments ranging from the intestinal lumen, to fresh water, to estuaries, to the sea. A study in The Journal of General Physiology provides new insights about the membrane components of V. cholera that enable it to withstand otherwise deadly increases in osmotic pressure resulting from changes in its surrounding environment. Like other bacteria, V. cholera utilizes mechanosensitive channels ...

A prenatal trigger for postnatal obesity During pregnancy, the health of the mother and the intrauterine environment can have dramatic and lasting effects on the child. Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP) is a liver disease that affects 0.5-2% of pregnant women and is characterized by increased bile acid levels in the maternal serum. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Catherine Williamson and colleagues at Imperial College London studied the long term impact of ICP in a cohort of Finnish families. They found that as teenagers, individuals ...

During pregnancy, the health of the mother and the intrauterine environment can have dramatic and lasting effects on the child. Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP) is a liver disease that affects 0.5-2% of pregnant women and is characterized by increased bile acid levels in the maternal serum. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Catherine Williamson and colleagues at Imperial College London studied the long term impact of ICP in a cohort of Finnish families. They found that as teenagers, individuals born to women with ICP had altered metabolic ...

In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Scott Pruitt at Duke University and Merck Research Laboratories report on a human clinical trial in which modified dendritic cells, a component of the immune system, were tested in patients with melanoma. All cells express a complex known as the proteasome, which acts as the garbage disposal for the cell. There are two types of proteasomes: constitutive proteasomes (cPs), which are found in normal tissues, and immunoproteasomes (iPs), which are found in stressed or damaged cells. In a damaged cell, ...

OAKLAND, Calif., June 24, 2013 – Patients are not at increased risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome in the six-week period after vaccination with any vaccine, including influenza, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. The retrospective study by researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center spanned 13 years and was controlled for seasonality. "If there is a risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome following any vaccine, including influenza vaccines, it is extremely low," said Roger Baxter, MD, co-director of the Kaiser Permanente ...

Myelin, the fatty coating that protects neurons in the brain and spinal cord, is destroyed in diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Researchers have been striving to determine whether oligodendrocytes, the cells that produce myelin, can be stimulated to make new myelin. Using live imaging in zebrafish to track oligodendrocytes in real time, researchers reporting in the June 24 issue of the Cell Press journal Developmental Cell discovered that individual oligodendrocytes coat neurons with myelin for only five hours after they are born. If the findings hold true in humans, ...

Athens, Greece, 24 June 2013. Moderation seems to be key when it comes to eating fish to prevent atrial fibrillation (AF) according to an observational study presented at the EHRA EUROPACE congress held 23 to 26 June in Athens, Greece. The study found a U-shaped association between consumption of marine n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA) and the risk of developing AF, with people who have both low and high intakes found to suffer more from AF than those with median intakes. The lowest risk of AF was found in those who consumed around 0.63 g marine n-3 PUFA per ...

A five-year programme that mobilised communities to improve the quality of care for mothers and newborns reduced newborn mortality by 30 percent and saved at least 1,000 newborn lives in rural Malawi. The study, carried out in three rural districts in Malawi with a combined population of more than two million, was designed to test whether a combined effort to increase both community awareness and strategies for perinatal care and to improve the quality of healthcare would be more effective than either one alone. The study showed that the combination worked best. "The ...

In an analysis that included a sample of patients in the top portion of Medicare spending, only a small percentage of their costs appeared to be related to preventable emergency department visits and hospitalizations, limiting the ability to lower costs for these patients through better outpatient care, according to a study in the June 26 issue of JAMA. The study is being released early to coincide with its presentation at the AcademyHealth annual research meeting. "High and increasing health care costs are arguably the single biggest threat to the long-term fiscal solvency ...

An NJIT research professor known for his cutting-edge work with carbon nanotubes is overseeing the manufacture of a prototype lab-on-a-chip that would someday enable a physician to detect disease or virus from just one drop of liquid, including blood. "Scalable nano-bioprobes with sub-cellular resolution for cell detection," Biosensors and Bioelectronics, (Elsevier, Vol. 45), which will publish on July 15, 2013 but is available now online, describes how NJIT research professors Reginald Farrow and Alokik Kanwal, his former postdoctoral fellow, and their team have created ...

We now understand the nature of the giant storms on Saturn. Through the analysis of images sent from the Cassini space probe belonging to the North American and European space agencies (NASA and ESA respectively), as well as the computer models of the storms and the examination of the clouds therein, the Planetary Sciences Group of the University of the Basque Country has managed to explain the behaviour of these storms for the very first time. The article explaining the discovery, the lead author being Enrique García Melendo, researcher at the Fundació Observatori Esteve ...

After being drained by the millions of acres to make way for agriculture, wetlands are staging a small comeback these days on farms. Some farmers restore or construct wetlands alongside their fields to trap nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, and research shows these systems can also retain pesticides, antibiotics, and other agricultural pollutants. Important as these storage functions of wetlands are, however, another critical one is being overlooked, says Bill Mitsch, director of the Everglades Wetland Research Park at Florida Gulf Coast University and an emeritus professor ...

Most species at greatest risk from climate change are not currently conservation priorities, according to an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) study that has introduced a pioneering method to assess the vulnerability of species to climate change. The paper, published in the journal PLOS ONE, is one of the biggest studies of its kind, assessing all of the world's birds, amphibians and corals. It draws on the work of more than 100 scientists over a period of five years, including Wits PhD student and leader of the study, Wendy Foden. Up to 83% of birds, ...

This news release is available in German. In microsystems, metallic components are increasingly replaced by components made of inexpensive polymers. As polymers yield when they are subjected to pressure, the layer thicknesses cannot be measured with sufficient accuracy by means of conventional contact stylus instruments. But precision is of decisive importance in microsystem technology. Here, the scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) come into play: In the medium term, industrial enterprises which measure the thickness of soft polymer layers ...

Hospitals across England reduced the rate of serious bloodstream infections in intensive care units (ICUs) during a two-year programme, research has shown. More than 200 ICUs in England participated in the National Patient Safety Agency's Matching Michigan programme, which aimed to bring down infections linked to central venous catheters to the rate seen in a landmark programme in the US state of Michigan. Reducing the number of infections by more than 60%, the English ICUs were able to equal the low rates seen in the US. "This is a very impressive result," said Professor ...

A promising new treatment for breast cancer being developed at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and the VCU Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM) has been shown in cell culture and in animal models to selectively kill cancer stem cells at the original tumor site and in distant metastases with no toxic effects on healthy cells, including normal stem cells. Cancer stem cells are critical to a cancer's ability to recur following conventional chemotherapies and radiation therapy because they can quickly multiply and establish new tumors that are often ...

Babies born to mothers who suffer from a rare metabolic complication during pregnancy are programmed to be overweight, according to a study published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study is the first to look at the long term effects on babies born to mothers with intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP), also called obstetric cholestasis, a rare complication of pregnancy characterised by the build-up of bile acids in the bloodstream. The findings add to the strong evidence that the environment that babies are exposed to in the womb is a major ...

VIDEO: One in 10 female German or British tourists holidaying in southern Europe suffers sexual harassment. Click here for more information. The European Institute of Studies on Prevention (Irefrea) surveyed more than 6,000 people in various airports in Mediterranean countries during summer 2009 to find out the levels of harassment and sex against one's will that had occurred. According to the experts, one in ten female English or German tourists has fallen victim to these ...

Wild bird populations are generally thought to benefit from being given additional food in winter but our understanding of the effects of such food provision is incomplete. The results of a new study, carried out by researchers at the University of Exeter and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), has found that feeding wild blue tits in winter resulted in less successful breeding during the following spring. The research, just published in Scientific Reports, revealed that woodland blue tits that were provided with fat balls as a supplementary food during the winter ...

PHILADELPHIA (June 24, 2013)— The brain's pleasure response to tasting food can be measured through the eyes using a common, low-cost ophthalmological tool, according to a study just published in the journal Obesity. If validated, this method could be useful for research and clinical applications in food addiction and obesity prevention. Dr. Jennifer Nasser, an associate professor in the department of Nutrition Sciences in Drexel University's College of Nursing and Health Professions, led the study testing the use of electroretinography (ERG) to indicate increases in the ...