Drugs used to treat blindness-causing disorders could be successfully administered by eye drops rather than unpleasant and expensive eye injections, according to new research led by UCL scientists that could be a breakthrough for the millions worldwide suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and other eye disorders. 1 in 5 people over 75 have AMD with well-known sufferers including actress Dame Judi Dench and author Stephen King. The research findings are significant due to growing patient numbers and an increasing demand for the eye injections that halt ...

The experiences of doctors, patients and carers of initial cancer consultations have informed new guidelines developed at the University of Leicester, in collaboration with University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and Imperial College London, to help patients better understand their cancer consultations. The research, published today (6 March 2014) in the British Journal of Health Psychology, found patients' experiences of being given their diagnosis differed both between participants and within the same participant. This means a doctor's role in communicating information ...

Working parents are often caught between the needs of their sick child and their job, which can lead to continued day care use even when their child is ill. New research has found children going to nursery when they are unwell with respiratory tract infections (RTIs) may be an important factor in the spread of these illnesses in the community. The findings, to be presented today [Thursday 6 March] at the South West Society for Academic Primary Care (SW SPAC) meeting, explored why parents send their children to nursery when they are unwell. The Parents' Choices About ...

The last decade has seen a remarkable shift in how people use the internet in relation to their health and it is now talked of as a routine feature of being ill. Professor Sue Ziebland, Director of the Health Experiences Research Group, based in the Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care at the University of Oxford, will share these findings with health practitioners and researchers at the South West Society for Academic Primary Care (SW SAPC) meeting hosted by the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol, today [Thursday 6 March]. This study ...

Diets low in saturated fat don't curb heart disease risk or help you live longer, says a leading US cardiovascular research scientist and doctor of pharmacy in an editorial in the open access journal Open Heart. And current dietary advice to replace saturated fats with carbohydrates or omega 6-rich polyunsaturated fats is based on flawed and incomplete data from the 1950s, argues Dr James DiNicolantonio. Dietary guidelines should be urgently reviewed and the vilification of saturated fats stopped to save lives, he insists. DiNicolantonio points out that the demonisation ...

A new criminal offence of "wilful neglect" is needed for individuals and organisations in the healthcare sector, to send out a clear message that appalling care warrants public censure and sanction, say leading lawyers in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety. Existing regulation is not up to the job, argue Professors Karen Yeung of The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, and Jeremy Horder of the Department of Law at the London School of Economics. Many patients are just as vulnerable as those who are mentally incapacitated, they point out, yet they do not ...

Nurses and patients are struggling to identify qualified doctors or to grade their seniority from their generic name badges, finds a survey of one hospital in England, published online in BMJ Quality & Safety. The findings prompt the researchers to call for a review of currently used terminology, deployed since the Modernisation of Medical Careers initiative in 2009, which revamped the length of training and introduced a range of new job titles. Staff and patients must be able to correctly identify professional status and communicate effectively, if optimal care is ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Women's reproductive health may never be the same, thanks to Northwestern University biomedical engineer Patrick Kiser and his first-of-its-kind intravaginal ring that reliably delivers an antiretroviral drug and a contraceptive for months. Kiser's one ring delivers two drugs that do three important things: the device is designed to protect against HIV and herpes as well as unwanted pregnancy. It will be the first device with the potential to offer this protection to be tested in women. The easy-to-use ring delivers controlled doses of tenofovir (a ...

PHILADELPHIA—University of Pennsylvania researchers have successfully genetically engineered the immune cells of 12 HIV positive patients to resist infection, and decreased the viral loads of some patients taken off antiretroviral drug therapy (ADT) entirely—including one patient whose levels became undetectable. The study, appearing today in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first published report of any gene editing approach in humans. The phase I study was co-authored by researchers at Penn Medicine, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and scientists ...

Human activity influences ocean beach bacterial communities, and bacterial diversity may indicate greater ecological health and resiliency to sewage contamination, according to results published March 5, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Halliday from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and colleagues. Beaches all contain bacteria, but some bacteria are usually from sewage and may contaminate the water, posing a public health risk. In this study, scientists studied bacterial community composition at two distant beaches (Avalon, California, and Provincetown, ...

A new dinosaur species found in Portugal may be the largest land predator discovered in Europe, as well as one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic, according to a paper published in PLOS ONE on March 5, 2014 by co-authors Christophe Hendrickx and Octavio Mateus from Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinhã. Scientists discovered bones belonging to this dinosaur north of Lisbon. They were originally believed to be Torvosaurus tanneri, a dinosaur species from North America. Closer comparison of the shin bone, upper jawbone, teeth, and partial ...

Boston, MA -- More than 230,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year in the United States, but determining their course of treatment remains a source of considerable debate. A new study by researchers from Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and colleagues—which draws from one of the few randomized trials conducted to directly address this issue—finds a substantial long-term reduction in mortality for men with localized cancer who undergo a radical prostatectomy. While the benefit on mortality appears to be limited ...

The results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Human and Molecular Genetics journals, demonstrate for the first time that mutation in STAG3 gene is the major cause of human fertility disorders as it provokes a loss of function of the protein it encodes. STAG3 encodes a meiosis-specific subunit of the cohesin ring, the biological process through which, from a diploid somatic cell, a haploid cell or gamete is produced. Cohesins are protein complexes that bind two straps of DNA and are implicated in its repair, replication and recombination, as well as ...

Early Lapita inhabitants of Vanuatu, a South Pacific Island, ate fish, marine turtles, and wild or domestic animals, rather than relying on horticulture during early colonization, according to a study published March 5, 2014, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rebecca Kinaston from University of Otago in New Zealand and colleagues. Around 3000 BP, human populations with cultural and biological links to South East Asian islands, a culture or people known as Lapita, sailed to Remote Oceania (islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean) with domestic plants and animals, a ...

A team of academics from the University of Leicester has been instrumental in shaping National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance that will influence medical policy towards diabetes prevention nationwide. NICE's recommendations in the form of a local government briefing, which have been developed with advice from NICE's Local Government Reference Group using feedback from council officers, councillors and directors of public health, encourage local authorities and partner organisations to use body mass index (BMI) as a signal for preventive action ...

In humans, a tiny area in the center of the retina called the fovea is critically important to viewing fine details. Densely packed with cone photoreceptor cells, it is used while reading, driving and gazing at objects of interest. Some animals have a similar feature in their eyes, but researchers believed that among mammals the fovea was unique to primates — until now. University of Pennsylvania vision scientists report that dogs, too, have an area of their retina that strongly resembles the human fovea. What's more, this retinal region is susceptible to genetic blinding ...

Researchers from New Zealand's University of Otago studying 3000-year-old skeletons from the oldest known cemetery in the Pacific Islands are casting new light on the diet and lives of the enigmatic Lapita people, the likely ancestors of Polynesians. Their results—obtained from analysing stable isotope ratios of three elements in the bone collagen of 49 adults buried at the Teouma archaeological site on Vanuatu's Efate Island—suggest that its early Lapita settlers ate reef fish, marine turtles, fruit bats, free-range pigs and chickens, rather than primarily relying on ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Atypical development can be detected as early as 12 months of age among the siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder, a study published by researchers with the UC Davis MIND Institute and UCLA has found. Published online in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the study found that close to half of the younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) develop in an atypical fashion, with 17 percent developing ASD and another 28 percent showing delays in other areas of development or behavior. ...

MINNEAPOLIS – A new study suggests that Alzheimer's disease may contribute to close to as many deaths in the United States as heart disease or cancer. The research is published in the March 5, 2014, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Currently, Alzheimer's disease falls sixth on the list of leading causes of death in the United States according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whereas heart disease and cancer are numbers one and two, respectively. These numbers are based on what is reported on ...

(Boston)--A nationally-recognized sleep expert has published an editorial describing Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) as a possible biomarker for underlying disease. The editorial appears in the March 5, 2014 issue of Neurology the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology and was authored by Boston Medical Center neurologist Sanford H. Auerbach, MD. RLS is a disorder of the nervous system. Patients with RLS have uncomfortable sensations in their legs which lead to an overwhelming urge to move them – most often at night or whenever the patient is resting. The ...

Improving radiation therapies for cancer mathematically In a paper published in December in the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, authors Li-Tien Cheng, Bin Dong, Chunhua Men, Xun Jia, and Steve Jiang propose a method to optimize radiation therapy treatments in cancer patients. Radiation therapy is one of the primary methods used for cancer treatment, along with chemotherapy and surgery. While doses of radiation are delivered to eliminate cancerous tissue, care is taken to keep radiation within acceptable levels so as not to affect neighboring tissues and organs. ...

New findings reveal how a mutation, a change in the genetic code that causes neurodegeneration, alters the shape of DNA, making cells more vulnerable to stress and more likely to die. The particular mutation, in the C9orf72 gene, is the most common cause for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), and frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), the second most common type of dementia in people under 65. This research by Jiou Wang, Ph.D., and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) was published in Nature and was partially funded by ...

URBANA, Ill. – Soybean improvement through plant breeding has been critical over the years for the success of the crop. In a new study that traces the genetic changes in varieties over the last 80 years of soybean breeding, researchers concluded that increases in yield gains and an increased rate of gains over the years are largely due to the continual release of greater-yielding cultivars by breeders. "This research in some ways looks back and informs us how soybean varieties have changed. It's useful to document these traits and changes," said Brian Diers, a University ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 5, 2014 – Preserving a fallopian tube following an ectopic pregnancy seems like it would favor a woman's fertility prospects, right? A new study from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center looked at pregnancy outcomes in regards to the two surgical treatments for ectopic pregnancy -- salpingectomy, in which the affected fallopian tube is removed, or salpingotomy, in which the tube is preserved. The aim of the study, said co-author Tamer Yalcinkaya, M.D., a reproductive endocrinologist at Wake Forest Baptist, was to assess whether salpingotomy ...

Scientists have known for years that together, bacteria and plants can remediate contaminated sites. Ramakrishna Wusirika, of Michigan Technological University, has determined that how you add bacteria to the mix can make a big difference. He has also shed light on the biochemical pathways that allow plants and bacteria to clean up some of the worst soils on the planet while increasing their fertility. Wusirika, an associate professor of biological sciences, first collected stamp sands near the village of Gay, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. For decades, copper mining ...