Karin B. Nelson, M.D., scientist emeritus at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health, and her colleagues from the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia and Sydney Adventist Hospital in Australia examined the degree to which four specific risk factors contributed to cerebral palsy and young infant death. The risk factors were asphyxial birth events (incidences during labor and delivery that had the potential to interfere with oxygen getting to the newborn's brain), inflammation (signs ...

WASHINGTON and NEW YORK—A new study by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) finds no evidence that primary care physicians provide "second-class" care to Medicaid, uninsured and other patients who rely on the nation's safety-net system. The study, which appears in the September issue of the journal Health Affairs, challenges previous claims that the care provided to low-income and vulnerable patients is substandard. The new study was supported by the Geiger/Gibson RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative. "The ...

About 5 percent of U.S. children and teens are "severely obese" — a newly defined class of risk, according to an American Heart Association scientific statement published online in the journal Circulation. "Severe obesity in young people has grave health consequences," said Aaron Kelly, Ph.D., lead author of the statement and a researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis. "It's a much more serious childhood disease than obesity." While childhood obesity rates are starting to level off, severe obesity has increased, Kelly said. Severely ...

Boston, MA -- Blacks are more likely than whites to sleep less than seven hours a night and the black-white sleep disparity is greatest in professional occupations, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). "Short sleep" has been linked with increased risk of health problems, including obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and death. The researchers also found that black professionals had the highest prevalence of short sleep and white professionals had the lowest prevalence. The study appears online September 9, 2013 in the ...

UK commercial baby foods don't meet infants' dietary weaning needs, because they are predominantly sweet foods that provide little extra nutritional goodness over breast milk, indicates research published online in Archives of Disease in Childhood. Furthermore, they are promoted for infants from the age of four months -- an age when they should still be on an exclusive breast milk diet, say the researchers. They wanted to find out what sort of products are available in the UK for weaning infants from a predominantly milk based diet to a family food based diet, and to ...

A lack of clearly defined goals, a surfeit of box ticking and regulation, and highly variable staff support are stifling the almost universal desire to provide high quality care in the English NHS, finds the largest ever analysis of its culture and behaviours, published online in BMJ Quality & Safety. While there are many examples of exemplary and innovative care, the sorts of issues which came to light in this year's Robert Francis Inquiry into the failings at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust are likely to be found elsewhere, even if not to the same extent, suggest ...

Men with smaller testes than others are more likely to be involved in hands-on care of their toddlers, a new study conducted by anthropologists at Emory University finds. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the results of the study Sept. 9. Smaller testicular volumes also correlate with more nurturing-related brain activity in fathers as they are looking at photos of their own children, the study shows. "Our data suggest that the biology of human males reflects a trade-off between investments in mating versus parenting effort," says Emory ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Nearly one in five older adults who have common operations will end up in the emergency department within a month of their hospital stay, a new study finds – a surprisingly high number found in the first national look at the issue. What's even more surprising? The wide variation between hospitals, in keeping their older surgery patients from needing emergency care after surgery on their hearts, hips, backs, colons and major blood vessels. Some hospitals had four times the rate of post-surgery emergency care for their patients, compared with others. In ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — States that choose to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to millions of uninsured adults may see an increase in younger people and white men qualify for the coverage, a new University of Michigan study says. Potential new enrollees are also generally healthier than the current Medicaid population, with less prevalence of obesity and depression – but they are more likely to be smokers and heavy drinkers. The new group of potential Medicaid beneficiaries may also cost less than what lawmakers projected, according to the study that appears ...

In the battle to reduce childhood overweight and obesity, several in-home factors have been identified as reducing those risks – participation of children in regular family dinners, getting enough sleep and less time watching television or other "screen time." A new study appearing in JAMA Pediatrics describes how a home-based program that helped at-risk families improve household routines was able to slow weight gain in a group of young children. "While childhood obesity rates may have stabilized in some population subgroups, overall rates remain stubbornly high, and ...

Campaigns to get young people to stop smoking may be more successful by focusing on the positive benefits, such as having more money and better skin, rather than emphasising negative outcomes like increased disease risk, a study from Wellcome Trust researchers suggests. The findings reveal that young people have greater difficulty in learning from bad news to interpret their risk of future events, which might explain why they often do not respond to warnings. We all make decisions based on what we believe may happen in the future as a consequence of our actions. We ...

In one of the first studies of its kind, a joint UCLA/RAND Corporation study addressed the prevalence and cost of critical care therapies provided in intensive care units (ICU) that were perceived by physicians as "futile." Reported in the Sept. 9 online issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers found that the majority of patients received appropriate care, but 11 percent of patients received treatments during their ICU course that their physicians perceived to be futile. The study took place at a single health care system. Advances in medicine have enabled critical ...

Critical care treatment for patients that was perceived to be futile was common and cost an estimated at $2.6 million at one academic medical center during a three-month period, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Physicians often perceive as futile those intensive care interventions that prolong life without achieving an effect for the patient that would be viewed as a benefit. Thanh N. Huynh, M.D., M.S.H.S., of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues sought to ...

An intervention to improve household routines known to be associated with obesity increased sleep duration and reduced TV viewing among low-income, minority children, and the approach may be an effective tool to reduce body mass index (BMI) in that population, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. Racial and ethnic minority children and those who live in low-income households are disproportionately overweight and it is urgent to develop an intervention for them, Jess Haines, Ph.D., M.H.Sc., of the University of Guelph, Ontario, ...

Undervaccination with the diptheria, tetanus toxoids and acelluar pertussis (DTaP) vaccine appears to be associated with an increased risk of pertussis (whooping cough) in children 3 to 36 months of age, according to a study by Jason M. Glanz, Ph.D., of the Institute for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, Denver. "Undervaccination is an increasing trend that potentially places children and their communities at an increased risk for serious infectious disease," according to the study. The study involved children born between 2004 and 2008 and cared for at ...

White matter loss in an area of the brain known as the fornix may be associated with cognitive decline in healthy elderly patients and may be helpful in predicting the earliest clinical deterioration, according to a study by Evan Fletcher, Ph.D., of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues. Atrophy in the hippocampus is well recognized in the later stages of cognitive decline and is one of the most studied changes associated with the Alzheimer disease process. However, changes to the fornix and other regions of the brain structurally connected to the hippocampus ...

While great strides have been achieved in cancer treatment, scientists are looking for the new targets and next generation of therapeutics to stop this second leading cause of death nationwide. A new platform for drug discovery has been developed through a collaborative effort linking chemists at NYU and pharmacologists at USC. In a study appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research groups of Paramjit Arora, a professor in NYU's Department of Chemistry, and Bogdan Olenyuk from the USC School of Pharmacy have developed a synthetic molecule, ...

The varied influence of climate change on temperature and precipitation may have an equally wide-ranging effect on the spread of West Nile virus, suggesting that public health efforts to control the virus will need to take a local rather than global perspective, according to a study published this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. University of Arizona researchers Cory Morin and Andrew Comrie developed a climate-driven mosquito population model to simulate the abundance across the southern United States of one type of mosquito ...

A team of University of Montreal and McGill University researchers have devised a method to identify how signaling molecules orchestrate the sequential steps in cell division. In an article published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists explain how they could track the relationship between signaling molecules and their target molecules to establish where, when and how the targets are deployed to perform the many steps necessary to replicate an individual cell's genome and surrounding structures. Breakdowns in individual ...

Subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) is one of the most devastating cerebrovascular catastrophes causing death in 40 to 50% of the cases. The most common cause of SAH is a rupture of an intracranial aneurysm. If the aneurysm is found, it can be treated before the possible rupture. However, some intracranial aneurysms will never rupture – the problem is that the doctors don't know which aneurysms will and which will not. So, they don't know which patients should be treated and who can safely be left untreated. A long-term, population-based Finnish study on SAH, which is based ...

As the Tobacco End Game conference takes place in New Delhi, India, this week, The World Heart Federation today calls on countries worldwide to follow the example set by nations such as Finland, New Zealand, and Scotland to set a target year to end tobacco use in their populations. Ending tobacco use in this sense means reducing population smoking levels to 5% or below, as well as implementing further measures in the international tobacco control treaty 'The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.' Finland (2030), Scotland (2034), New Zealand (2025), and other nations ...

Mercenary soldiers are notoriously unreliable because their loyalty is as thin as the banknotes they get paid, and they may turn against their employers before moving on to the next dirty job. Not so in fungus-farming ants, where a new study reports that permanent parasites that are normally a chronic social burden protect their hosts against a greater evil. "Our experiments show that the scouts can detect whether or not a host colony has a cohabiting guest ant colony before deciding to initiate a raid so the guest ants serve as an effective front line defense. Dr. ...

Women with ectopic pregnancies could be spared surgery if they are treated with a lung cancer drug, a study suggests. Researchers treated ectopic pregnancies – where an embryo implants inside the Fallopian tube – by combining an existing treatment with a lung cancer therapy. They found that prescribing both drugs together was more effective at helping cure an ectopic pregnancy than the conventional drug alone. The lung cancer drug – called gefitinib – helps by blocking a protein that is known to encourage cell growth, and which was found to be present in high levels ...

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated a new mechanism for extracting energy from light, a finding that could improve technologies for generating electricity from solar energy and lead to more efficient optoelectronic devices used in communications. Dawn Bonnell, Penn's vice provost for research and Trustee Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, led the work, along with David Conklin, a doctoral student. The study involved a collaboration among additional Penn researchers, through the ...

In summer excavations at the foot of the Temple Mount, Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar made a stunning discovery: two bundles of treasure containing thirty-six gold coins, gold and silver jewelry, and a gold medallion with the menorah (Temple candelabrum) symbol etched into it. Also etched into the 10-cm medallion are a shofar (ram's horn) and a Torah scroll. A third-generation archaeologist working at the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology, Dr. Mazar directs excavations on the City of David's summit and at the Temple Mount's southern ...