The bulk of knowledge about alcohol consumption and problems comes from high-income countries. The International Alcohol Control (IAC) study was established to collect and compare data from both high- and middle/low-income countries. New IAC results show that heavy-drinking New Zealanders tend to buy cheaper, off-premise alcohol, and purchase it at later times. The International Alcohol Control (IAC) study is a newly developed international collaborative project designed to collect comparative data on alcohol consumption and policy-relevant behaviors in both high- ...

Studies examining the potential health benefits of moderate drinking generally focus on average levels of drinking rather than drinking patterns. A new study shows that, among older moderate drinkers, those who binge drink have a significantly greater mortality risk than regular moderate drinkers. Numerous studies have highlighted the purported association between moderate drinking and reduced mortality. However, these analyses have focused overwhelmingly on average consumption, a measure that masks diverse, underlying drinking patterns such as weekend heavy episodic ...

A series of papers in the March issue of Health Affairs examines how the Affordable Care Act could affect two sectors of the most vulnerable Americans — those living with HIV/AIDS and people who have recently cycled through jail. The issue features several studies by researchers with the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, one of the nation's premier policy research centers dedicated to promoting health and value in healthcare delivery through innovative research and policy, including: When it comes to HIV treatment, timing is everything Dana P. ...

WASHINGTON, DC (March 3, 2014)—Under the Affordable Care Act, an estimated 4 million people who have spent time in jail will have better access to health coverage for conditions that might—if left untreated—result in higher health care costs and an increased risk of recidivism. That's the conclusion of an analysis by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS). "Health reform gives people with a history of jail time access to continuous health care for the first time ever," says lead author Marsha Regenstein, PhD, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The very premise of prison invites members of society to think of the people there as walled-off and removed. But more than 95 percent of prisoners will return to the community, often carrying significant health burdens and associated costs with them. In an article in the March issue of the journal Health Affairs, several experts who participated in a scientific workshop convened by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine recommend several steps and ideas consistent with health reform to improve care for prisoners ...

HOUSTON — For women with breast cancer undergoing radiation therapy, yoga offers unique benefits beyond fighting fatigue, according to research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The preliminary findings were first reported in 2011 by Lorenzo Cohen, Ph.D., professor and director of the Integrative Medicine Program at MD Anderson, and are now published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. This research is part of an ongoing effort to scientifically validate mind-body interventions in cancer patients and was conducted in collaboration with India's ...

People's racial prejudices are influenced by where they live, reports a new study led by Oxford University psychologists. The researchers found that levels of racial prejudice among white people drop significantly when they live in ethnically mixed communities, even when they do not have direct contact with minorities. Simply seeing white strangers interacting positively with ethnic minorities is enough to reduce racial prejudice. The researchers have called this positive effect 'passive tolerance', likening it to the negative effect of 'passive smoking' where a smoky ...

CALI, COLOMBIA (3 MARCH 2014)—A comprehensive new study of global food supplies confirms and thoroughly documents for the first time what experts have long suspected: over the last five decades, human diets around the world have grown ever more similar—by a global average of 36 percent—and the trend shows no signs of slowing, with major consequences for human nutrition and global food security. "More people are consuming more calories, protein and fat, and they rely increasingly on a short list of major food crops, like wheat, maize and soybean, along with meat and dairy ...

The surface of the sea takes up nitrogen oxides that build up in polluted air at night, new measurements on the coast of southern California have shown. The ocean removes about 15 percent of these chemicals overnight along the coast, a team of atmospheric chemists reports in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 3. Nitrogen oxides, formed by the burning of fossil fuels, generate photochemical smog. Atmospheric chemists would like to account for the fates of these molecules in a kind of budget that indentifies ...

Washington, D.C.— In many ways, plants act as chemical factories, using energy from sunlight to produce carbon-based energy and taking nutrients from the soil in order to synthesize a wide variety of products. Carnegie scientists asked the question: How much does the portfolio of chemicals generated by plants vary, depending on the surrounding environment, and what can this tell us about how we interact with forests? The answer involved climbing into the Amazonian canopy, resulting in the discovery that the forest's chemical portfolios form a rich mosaic that varies with ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Many Americans are confused about the best ways to conserve water and have a slippery grasp on how much water different activities use, according to a national online survey conducted by an Indiana University researcher. Experts say the best strategy for conserving water is to focus on efficiency improvements such as replacing toilets and retrofitting washing machines. However, the largest group of the participants, nearly 43 percent, cited taking shorter showers, which does save water but may not be the most effective action. Very few participants ...

Keck School of Medicine of USC neuroscientists have unlocked a piece of the puzzle in the fight against Lou Gehrig's disease, a debilitating neurological disorder that robs people of their motor skills. Their findings appear in the March 3, 2014, online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the official scientific journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. "We know that both people and transgenic rodents afflicted with this disease develop spontaneous breakdown of the blood-spinal cord barrier, but how these ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists at Brown University reports a major step forward in determining the specific behavior of the ubiquitous enzyme PP1 implicated in a wide range of diseases including cancer. PP1, whose role is to enable the passage of molecular messages among cells, is found pretty much everywhere in the body. Its wide range of responsibilities means it is essential to many healthy functions and, when things go wrong, to diseases. But its very versatility has prevented it from ...

New York, NY – Prevention and reversal of chronic kidney disease is an urgent public health need. The disease affects 1 in 10 Americans, is debilitating and deadly, and existing drugs, at best, offer only mild delay in progression to end-stage kidney failure. New research led by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai investigators has uncovered abnormal molecular signaling pathways from disease initiation to irreversible kidney damage, kidney failure, and death. Results from their preclinical and human research are published online March 3 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. "Our ...

Researchers at New York University and the University of Texas at Austin have discovered that carbohydrates serve as identifiers for cancer cells. Their findings, which appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show how these molecules may serve as signals for cancer and explain what's going on inside these cells, pointing to new ways in which sugars function as a looking glass into the workings of their underlying structures. "Carbohydrates can tell us a lot about what's going on inside of a cell, so they are potentially good markers for ...

There have been great expectations regarding the production of a drug to block the enzyme LTA4 hydrolase, which plays a key role in the body's inflammatory response. However, in clinical trials, such molecules have proven to be only moderately effective. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have successfully refined their understanding of why previous substances have been less effective – and in so doing have produced a molecule that gets around the problem. Consequently, there is once again hope of a new anti-inflammatory drug based on the principal of blocking LTA4 ...

Researchers from Denmark demonstrate in a study that the large grazers and browsers of the past created a mosaic of varied landscapes consisting of closed and semi-closed forests and parkland. The study will be published on Monday 3 March 2014 in the renowned journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America). Dung beetles recount the nature of the past The biologists behind the new research findings synthesized decades of studies on fossil beetles, focusing on beetles associated with the dung of large animals in the past ...

Usually, microelectronic devices are made of silicon or similar semiconductors. Recently, the electronic properties of metal oxides have become quite interesting. These materials are more complex, yet offer a broader range of possibilities to tune their properties. An important breakthrough has now been achieved at the Vienna University of Technology: a two dimensional electron gas was created in strontium titanate. In a thin layer just below the surface electrons can move freely and occupy different quantum states. Strontium titanate is not only a potential future alternative ...

It is not only genetics that predispose to bowel cancer; microbes living in the gut help drive the development of intestinal tumors, according to new research in mice published in the March issue of The Journal of Experimental Medicine. Bowel cancer, also called colorectal cancer, results from a series of genetic changes (mutations) that cause healthy cells to become progressively cancerous, first forming early tumors called polyps that can eventually become malignant. Although mutations can occur anywhere in the human intestine, certain types of colorectal cancer tend ...

In academic circles at least, women tend to cooperate with same-sex individuals of higher or lower rank less often than men do. So say researchers who report evidence on March 3 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology. The findings are based on a study of the publication records of professors working at 50 North American universities. "People are often upset to hear evidence of sex differences in behavior," says Joyce Benenson of Harvard University. "But the more we know, the more easily we can promote a fair society." The findings might seem somewhat counterintuitive. ...

People with sleep apnea appear to be at higher risk of pneumonia than people without, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Sleep apnea is characterized by disrupted sleep, caused when the upper airway becomes obstructed by soft tissue, cutting off oxygen. It has been linked to several types of heart disease and cognitive impairment. People with obstructive sleep apnea are at higher risk of aspiration while sleeping. To determine whether sleep apnea is linked to the development of pneumonia, Taiwanese researchers followed 34 ...

It's long been a popular stereotype: Men are hugely competitive, meaning cooperative effort is the exception rather than the norm, while women have a tendency to nurture relationships with others, making them much more likely to cooperate with one another. A new Harvard study, however, is turning that cliché on its head. In fact, within academic departments women of different social or professional "ranks" cooperate with each other less well than men do, according to Joyce Benenson, an Associate of Harvard's Human Evolutionary Biology Department and Professor of Psychology ...

A new study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Illinois at Chicago finds that Medicare Part D prescription coverage significantly reduced hospital admissions and program expenditures totaling $1.5 billion annually. In the largest and most rigorous impact analysis of Medicare Part D to date, researchers found that gaining prescription drug insurance through Medicare Part D reduced hospitalizations by 8%, decreased annual Medicare expenditures for hospitalization by 7% and reduced hospital charges associated with hospitalization ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, March 3, 2014 – Myriad Genetics, Inc. (Nasdaq: MYGN) today announced that it has published data from the PROCEDE 500 study in the journal Current Medical Research and Opinion, demonstrating that 65 percent of physicians changed their original treatment plans for men with prostate cancer based on results from the Prolaris test. Prolaris is a 46-gene molecular diagnostic test that has been evaluated in 11 clinical studies with more than 5,000 patients. "Prolaris is an absolute game changer for urologists because it adds meaningful new prognostic ...

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