The heart's regular rhythm is crucial to the delivery of oxygenated blood and nutrients to all the organs of the body. It is regulated by a bundle of cells called "the pacemaker," which use electrical signals to set the pace of the heart. Dysfunction in this mechanism can lead to an irregular heartbeat, known as arrhythmia, and often necessitates the implantation of an artificial pacemaker. Previously, scientists found that many cases of inherited arrhythmias originating in the pacemaker could be attributed to functional defects in the channels responsible for the flow ...

A study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has for the first time found that a mother's higher exposure to some common environmental contaminants was associated with more frequent and vigorous fetal motor activity. Some chemicals were also associated with fewer changes in fetal heart rate, which normally parallel fetal movements. The study of 50 pregnant women found detectable levels of organochlorines in all of the women participating in the study—including DDT, PCBs and other pesticides that have been banned from use for more than ...

It is more important to patients suffering from depression that they show a noticeable response to treatment in the first place than being completely cured. It is exactly the opposite in physicians treating people with this disease: they consider remission to have higher priority than response. This is the result of a pilot project carried out by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) together with external experts. Using the example of depression, IQWiG tested whether the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is in principle suitable ...

ANN ARBOR—Facebook is a mirror and Twitter is a megaphone, according to a new University of Michigan study exploring how social media reflect and amplify the culture's growing levels of narcissism. The study, published online in Computers in Human Behavior, was conducted by U-M researchers Elliot Panek, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath. "Among young adult college students, we found that those who scored higher in certain types of narcissism posted more often on Twitter," said Panek, who recently received his doctorate in communication studies from U-M and will join ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- At least among mice, females have innate protection from certain digestive conditions, according to a new Michigan State University study. While it's tricky to draw conclusions for human health, the findings could eventually help scientists better understand and treat the 1.4 million Americans suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases, or IBD. Crohn's disease and colitis, the two most common forms of IBD, involve abnormal functioning of the immune system that can damage the digestive tract, causing inflammation, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Telephone-based counseling, when combined with physician advice, can help breast cancer survivors become more physically active, which can improve quality of life and lessen the side effects of cancer treatment, according to new research from The Miriam Hospital. Researchers say women who received exercise advice from their surgeon or oncologist, followed by three months of telephone support, reported 30 more minutes of physical activity per week than patients who received exercise advice and follow-up calls about their general health. The findings, ...

This news release is available in French. Physicians and researchers from Sherbrooke, Montreal and Quebec City have conducted a study that has led to the discovery of a gene that causes multiple intestinal atresia (MIA), a rare and life-threatening hereditary disorder that affects newborns. In addition to exploring novel therapeutic treatments for children with the disease, the discovery of the gene TTC7A will make it possible to develop a prenatal diagnostic test and a screening test for parents who are carriers. The Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) ...

Health organisations need to give careful consideration to schemes which encourage people with chronic diseases to seek support from peers, to avoid the potential negative effects, new research shows. The study was led by the University of Exeter Medical School will be published in the July edition of the journal Patient Education and Counseling, and is now available online. The research, supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in the South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC), has highlighted both ...

No-till management practices can reduce soil erosion, but evidence suggests they can also lead to increased runoff of dissolved phosphorus from soil surfaces. Meanwhile, farmers looking to avoid herbicides often have to combat weeds with tillage, which causes erosion. With all of the tradeoffs of different management systems, which one should growers use? To answer that question, researchers from the USDA Agricultural Research Service compared nutrient and sediment loss from no-till, conventional tillage, and reduced-input rotation watersheds in a study published online ...

Tropical Storm Yagi is not expected to make landfall in Japan, but NASA satellite imagery showed that the storm was just south of the big island. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Yagi on Tuesday, June 11 at 04:10 UTC (12:10 a.m. EDT/1:10 p.m. Japan local time) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument captured a visible image of the storm. The image showed that clouds associated with the northern fringes of the storm were draped over southeastern coastal Japan. The MODIS image also revealed that Yagi has a long "tail" ...

Advanced metastatic melanoma is a disease that has proven difficult to eradicate. Despite the success of melanoma-targeting drugs, tumors inevitably become drug resistant and return, more aggressive than before. In the current issue of the journal Cancer Cell, however, researchers at The Wistar Institute describe how they increase the effectiveness of anti-melanoma drugs by combining anticancer therapies with diabetes drugs. Their studies, conducted in cell and animal models of melanoma, demonstrate that the combined therapy could destroy a subset of drug-resistant ...

A new study finds that stroke patients' brains show strong cortical motor activity when observing others performing physical tasks – a finding that offers new insight into stroke rehabilitation. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a team of researchers from USC monitored the brains of 24 individuals — 12 who had suffered strokes and 12 age-matched people who had not — as they watched others performing actions made using the arm and hand that would be difficult for a person who can no longer use their arm due to stroke – actions like lifting a pencil or ...

Toronto – If policy-makers want to do something about falling birth rates, they may want to take a look at improving how people are treated at work when they step outside of traditional family roles at home. New studies show that middle-class men who take on non-traditional caregiving roles are treated worse at work than men who stick closer to traditional gender norms in the family. Women without children and mothers with non-traditional caregiving arrangements are treated worst of all. "Their hours are no different than other employees', but their co-workers appear ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 11, 2013—The lifetime risk for cancer is greater than 1 in 3 for women in the U.S., but most women do not make the lifestyle choices recommended by the American Cancer Society to reduce that risk and prevent cancer. A multifaceted new survey determined how women view diet and exercise in relationship to cancer and whether they believe they are engaging in healthy behaviors, and whether their diet and exercise choices really meet the minimum recommendations. The results are presented in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary ...

1. Evidence Insufficient on Primary Care Interventions for Preventing Child Abuse The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) concludes that current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of primary care interventions to prevent child maltreatment. Child abuse and neglect affected more than 680,000 children in the U.S. in 2011, and an estimated 1,570 died as a result of maltreatment. Survivors of abuse face potentially significant health, emotional, and behavioral consequences of abuse. Physicians and other health care providers ...

The new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides a detailed consumption-based accounting of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in China. Consumption-based accounting allocates emissions to the province where products are ultimately consumed, rather than simply focusing on where emissions occur. It shows that policies to reduce emissions in China may tend to push factories and production into developing regions of the country. "China has set emissions targets which are more stringent in affluent coastal provinces than in less-developed ...

The way to a man's heart may be his wrist. More U.S. doctors are unclogging heart arteries (in men and women) by entering through the radial artery in the wrist, which is linked to less bleeding complications than the traditional route through the groin, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. Doctors reopen blocked arteries by threading a catheter through the femoral artery in the groin or the radial artery in the wrist in a procedure called percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). For the study, researchers examined data of ...

Since 1996, farmers worldwide have planted more than a billion acres (400 million hectares) of genetically modified corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt for short. Bt proteins, used for decades in sprays by organic farmers, kill some devastating pests but are considered environmentally friendly and harmless to people. However, some scientists feared that widespread use of these proteins in genetically modified crops would spur rapid evolution of resistance in pests. A team of experts at the University of Arizona ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- A study examining trends in X-ray computed tomography (CT) use in children in the United States has found that reducing unnecessary scans and lowering the doses for the highest-dose scans could lower the overall lifetime risk of future imaging-related cancers by 62 percent. The research by a UC Davis Health System scientist is published online today in JAMA Pediatrics. The 4 million CT scans of the most commonly imaged organs conducted in children each year could result in approximately 4,870 future cancers, the study found. Reducing the highest ...

Irvine, Calif. – Just as wealthy nations like the United States are outsourcing their dangerous carbon dioxide emissions to China, rich coastal provinces in that country are outsourcing emissions to poorer provinces in the interior, according to UC Irvine climate change researcher Steve Davis and colleagues. The findings, to be published the week of June 10 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that more developed areas such as Beijing and Shanghai import steel, heavy industrial equipment and other materials from provinces such as Inner Mongolia, where ...

SEATTLE—Use of computed tomography (CT) scans—and thus exposure to ionizing radiation—increased over 15 years in children at a set of nonprofit health care delivery systems in a new study. But currently available strategies could greatly reduce this cancer risk, according to the HMORN Cancer Research Network study, published in JAMA Pediatrics. Led by Diana L. Miglioretti, PhD, and Rebecca Smith-Bindman, MD, the study also documented substantial variation in the radiation doses that were used in CT scans. This is an important area where quality can be improved by lowering ...

Diabetes-associated episodes of low blood sugar may increase the risk of developing dementia, while having dementia or even milder forms of cognitive impairment may increase the risk of experiencing low blood sugar, according to a UC San Francisco scientist who led a new study published online today (June 10) in JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers analyzed data from 783 diabetic participants and found that hospitalization for severe hypoglycemia among the diabetic elderly in the study was associated with a doubled risk of developing dementia later. Similarly, study participants ...

According to a study of seven U.S. healthcare systems, the use of computed tomography (CT) scans of the head, abdomen/pelvis, chest or spine, in children younger than age 14 more than doubled from 1996 to 2005, and this associated radiation is projected to potentially increase the risk of radiation-induced cancer in these children in the future, according to a study published Online First by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. The use of CT in pediatrics has increased over the last two decades. The ionizing radiation doses delivered by the tests are higher than ...

The association between district and state policies or legal requirements regarding competitive food and beverages (food and beverages sold outside the school meal program) and public elementary school availability of foods and beverages high in fats, sugars, or sodium was examined in a study Jamie F. Chriqui, Ph.D., M.H.S., and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Online First) Survey respondents at 1,814 elementary schools (1,485 unique) in 957 districts in 45 states (food analysis) and 1,830 elementary schools (1,497 unique) in 962 districts and 45 ...

Preschool children who have been neglected or emotionally abused exhibit a range of emotional and behavioral difficulties and adverse mother-child interactions that indicate these children require prompt evaluation and interventions, according to a systematic review by Aideen Mary Naughton, M.B., B.Ch., B.A.O., D.C.H., F.R.C.P.C.H., of Public Health Wales, Pontypool, England, and colleagues. (Online First) A total of 42 studies of children age 0 to 6 years with confirmed neglect or emotional abuse who had emotional, behavioral, and developmental features recorded or for ...