New ways are needed to fight the infection Clostridium difficile and better use of antibiotics could be key, according to the authors of ground-breaking research. In a unique United Kingdom study, the team from the University of Leeds, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and Oxford University, mapped all cases of Clostridium difficile (C.diff) in Oxfordshire over a three-year period (2008 to 2011). C. diff causes severe diarrhoea, cramps and sometimes life-threatening complications, and has traditionally been thought to be transmitted within hospitals from other sick ...

WASHINGTON -- Commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors are serious problems in the United States with long-term adverse consequences for children and society as a whole, and federal agencies should work with state and local partners to raise awareness of these issues and train professionals who work with youths to recognize and assist those who are victimized or at risk, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council. Minors who are prostituted or sexually exploited in other ways should be treated as victims rather ...

ATLANTA, GA – A new study from researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Proton Therapy Center found that the use of feeding tubes in oropharyngeal carcinoma (OPC) cancer patients treated with intensity modulated proton therapy (IMPT) decreased by more than 50 percent compared to patients treated with intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). This suggests that proton therapy may offer vital quality of life benefits for patients with tumors occurring at the back of the throat. The results, presented today by the lead researcher, Steven J. Frank, M.D., associate ...

VIDEO: A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits pulses of radiation (such as X-rays and radio waves) at regular intervals. A millisecond pulsar is one with a rotational... Click here for more information. An international team of scientists using a fleet of orbiting X-ray telescopes, including NASA's Swift and Chandra X-ray Observatory, has discovered a millisecond pulsar with a dual identity. In a feat that has never before been observed, the star readily shifts ...

Ten health care innovations, if brought to scale immediately in low-resource countries, could have the potential to save the lives of some 1.2 million mothers and children in 2015. Right now the annual global death toll of mothers and children under 5 is 6.9 million. Between 2016-2020, these innovations have the potential to save the lives of nearly 7.5 million women and children. The ten, identified by international experts from hundreds of candidates, are ready to be deployed where they are needed most by the end of 2015, according to a new publication, Breakthrough ...

Ever wonder what plants do when you're not around? How about an entire forest or grassland? Not even the most dedicated plant researcher can be continuously present to track environmental effects on plant behavior, and so numerous tools have been developed to measure and quantify these effects. Time-lapse photography has been used to study many aspects of plant behavior, but typically only a few plants can be captured with a single camera at the desired level of detail. This limitation has, for the most part, confined such observations to the laboratory. Recently, however, ...

ATLANTA, GA – The North Shore-LIJ Health System Department of Radiation Medicine has developed a novel process to optimize the safety and efficacy of radiation therapy and is presenting this data at the 55th Annual Meeting of in American Society of Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) in Atlanta, GA. At most hospitals, when a patient is treated with radiation therapy, the treatment plan is usually quickly and superficially reviewed by other physicians immediately after treatment begins, leaving no time to catch errors or provide feedback on a complex treatment. Review at this late ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (September 25, 2013) - A specific gene variant is more frequent among elite athletes in power sports, reports a study in the October issue of The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, official research journal of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. A "functional polymorphism" of the angiotensiogen (AGT) gene is two to three times more common in elite power athletes, compared to nonathletes or even elite endurance athletes, according ...

URBANA, Ill. – Many families struggle to afford basic non-food household goods, such as personal care, household, and baby-care products, according to a new nationwide Feed America study that benefited from assistance from the University of Illinois Family Resiliency Center (FRC). "The study found that these families often make trade-offs with other living expenses and employ coping strategies in an effort to secure such essential household items as toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, or disposable diapers," said Barbara H. Fiese, FRC director and Pampered Chef Endowed Chair. ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (September 24, 2013) - Millions of people with scars suffer from pain, discomfort, and inability to perform regular activities. Some may have to revert to addicting pain medicine to get rid of their ailments. Now, and with a new methodology, such problems can be treated successfully. A technique using injection of the patient's own fat cells is an effective treatment for hard, contracted scars resulting from burns or other causes, reports a study in the September issue of The Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, edited by Mutaz B. Habal, MD, FRCSC, and published ...

ATLANTA, GA – The North Shore-LIJ Health System Department of Radiation Medicine presented a novel study to evaluate the reliability of different systems used by caregivers to assess toxicity for patients receiving radiation therapy. The study will be presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Therapeutic Radiation Oncology in Atlanta, GA. During the course of radiation therapy, patients may experience reactions to their treatments. Typically, the severity of reactions is assessed by a radiation oncologist and nurse using a formal grading scheme. ...

VIDEO: This video shows experimental and simulation data from Manning's experiment, in which two "droplets " of tissue join together, in a fluid-like manner, to form a single tissue. Click here for more information. A team of scientists, including M. Lisa Manning, assistant professor of physics in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences, has developed a model for studying tissue—specifically how it organizes into organs and layers during embryonic development. Their ...

URBANA, Ill. – Veterinarians and women's shelters can make it easier for abused women to decide to leave their homes, particularly when the abuser is using a beloved pet as part of a campaign to control his partner, reports a new University of Illinois study. He made me stand there and . . . watch [him kill my cat]. And he was like: That could happen to you, one woman in the study said. "These incidences are very symbolic of what the abuser is capable of doing. He's sending the message: I can do something just as severe to hurt you," said Jennifer Hardesty, a U of I ...

Three grants totaling more than $25 million over four years will help three research groups to develop authoritative information on the millions of genomic variants relevant to human disease and the hundreds that are expected to be useful for clinical practice. The awards are from the National Institutes of Health. More and more medical and research centers are sequencing the DNA of whole genomes (the body's entire genetic blueprint) or exomes (the genome's protein-coding region) of patients. Each time, millions of DNA differences in genes and the regions between the genes ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 25, 2013 – Limited health literacy can lead to difficulties in patients' self-care activities such as taking prescribed medications. Since a considerable amount of health information changes hands in the pharmacy setting, research by pharmacists into evaluating which tools are effective in practice can make a valuable contribution to goals set by the 2010 US National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy and lead to improvements in communications and health care, say experts in this special themed issue on "Pharmacy, Medication Use, and the ...

BETHESDA, Md. (Sept. 25, 2013)—Several studies have shown that expecting a reward or punishment can affect brain activity in areas responsible for processing different senses, including sight or touch. For example, research shows that these brain regions light up on brain scans when humans are expecting a treat. However, researchers know less about what happens when the reward is actually received—or an expected reward is denied. Insight on these scenarios can help researchers better understand how we learn in general. To get a better grasp on how the brain behaves when ...

Drugged driving has been a safety issue of increasing public concern in the United States and many other countries but its role in motor vehicle crashes had not been adequately examined. In a new study conducted at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, researchers assessed the association of driver drug use, as well as the combination of drugs and alcohol, with the risk of fatal crash. They found that drug use is associated with a significantly increased risk of fatal crash involvement, particularly when used in combination with alcohol. The study provides ...

A new research paper shows that a great number of nearby terrigenous pollen and charcoal have been found from the deep-sea sediments of the last 200 kyrs in Okinawa Trough. It is tesitfied that the continental shelf of the East China Sea was exposed and covered with the huge wetland and grassland ecosystems during the the last two glacial periods. They discovered that the variation of terrestrial sources is concordent with global glacial volume and sea-level changes at orbital-scale since 200 kyrs before present. Their work, entitled "A ~200 ka pollen record from Okinawa ...

DALLAS – Sept. 26, 2013 – In ongoing research aimed at battling obesity, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have deciphered how new fat cells are formed in energy-storing fat pads. In particular, researchers sought to find out the origin of "brown" fat cells and whether humans can make more of them in order to burn extra calories – a finding that could have significant impact in battling obesity and related diseases. "Much of the current excitement in the obesity field stems from recent observations highlighting that, even as adults, we have the ability to generate ...

A previously unknown genus of electric fish has been identified in a remote region of South America by a team of international researchers including University of Toronto Scarborough professor Nathan Lovejoy. The Akawaio penak, a thin, eel-like electric fish, was discovered in the shallow, murky waters of the upper Mazaruni River is northern Guyana. Lovejoy's team at UTSC analyzed tissue samples collected during a recent expedition by a researchers led by Hernán López-Fernández at the Royal Ontario Museum. By sequencing its DNA and reconstructing an evolutionary tree, ...

Parkinson disease, a neurodegenerative disorder in which both genetic and environmental factors play important roles, has been associated with epigenetic changes (those molecular modifications that alter the behavior of genes without changing the DNA sequence). Because accurate diagnosis is not easy for this disease, scientists are continuously trying to identify early signs of the disease that enable treatment before major neurological damage occurs. In an article published in the October issue of Epigenetics, those epigenetic changes appear to be great candidates as early ...

The deep-sea soft-sediment ecosystem in the immediate area of the 2010's Deepwater Horizon well head blowout and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will likely take decades to recover from the spill's impacts, according to a scientific paper reported in the online scientific journal PLoS One. The paper is the first to give comprehensive results of the spill's effect on deep-water communities at the base of the Gulf's food chain, in its soft-bottom muddy habitats, specifically looking at biological composition and chemicals at the same time at the same location. "This ...

Los Angeles, CA (September 25, 2013) For many international news followers, having a cup of coffee while reading the morning newspaper has turned into scrolling a Twitter feed to catch up on important news as it happens throughout the day. In a new article published in SAGE Open, researchers used data collected from Twitter to study readers' news preferences across the globe and discovered that different countries have stronger preference towards different types of articles – American and British readers are more drawn to opinion and world news, Spaniards to local and ...

A class of flame retardants that has been linked to learning difficulties in children has rapidly declined in pregnant women’s blood since the chemicals were banned in California a decade ago, according to a study led by researchers at UC San Francisco. Blood levels of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), tested in patients at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center fell by two-thirds since they were last tested three years ago and found to be the highest levels reported among pregnant women anywhere in the world. The findings were ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Coal-powered synthetic natural gas plants being planned in China would produce seven times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional natural gas plants, and use up to 100 times the water as shale gas production, according to a new study by Duke University researchers. These environmental costs have been largely neglected in the drive to meet the nation's growing energy needs, the researchers say, and might lock China on an irreversible and unsustainable path for decades to come. "Using coal to make natural gas may be good for China's energy security, ...