Bethesda, MD -- Despite previous data showing beneficial effects, the probiotic Saccharomuces boulardii (S. boulardii) does not prevent clinical relapse in patients with Crohn's disease, according to a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. As more people seek natural or non-drug ways to maintain their health, products containing probiotics have flooded the marketplace. While safe and tolerable, this study discovered that the probiotic S. boulardii does not appear ...

Watermelon juice's reputation among athletes is getting scientific support in a new study, which found that juice from the summer favorite fruit can relieve post-exercise muscle soreness. The report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry attributes watermelon's effects to the amino acid L-citrulline. Encarna Aguayo and colleagues cite past research on watermelon juice's antioxidant properties and its potential to increase muscle protein and enhance athletic performance. But scientists had yet to explore the effectiveness of watermelon juice drinks enriched ...

A type of MRSA found in humans originated in cattle at least 40 years ago, new research has found. The study provides clear evidence that livestock were the original source of an MRSA strain which is now widespread in people. Researchers studied the genetic make-up of more than 40 strains of a bacterium -- called Staphylococcus aureus -- that can build up antibiotic resistance to develop into MRSA. At least two genetic subtypes of the bacterium, which have become endemic in people, have been traced back to cattle by the scientists, who are based at The Roslin Institute ...

"Energy cane" may sound like a trendy sports drink, but it actually is among a new generation of energy crops that could yield up to 5 times more ethanol per acre than corn. They are the topic of the cover story in this week's Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. C&EN Senior Editor Melody M. Bomgardner explains that energy cane is a new, high-fiber variety of sugarcane now being grown in California's Imperial Valley. Scientists bred it specifically as an "energy crop," a ...

This news release is available in German. Regulatory T cells (or "Tregs" for short) play a central role in the human immune system: They guide all of the other immune cells and make sure they are tolerant of the body's own cells and harmless foreign substances. How Tregs become Tregs in the first place has been only incompletely understood -- until now. Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany, along with their colleagues at the Hannover Medical School (MHH) have recently gleaned important new insights into the workings ...

Five beer brands – Budweiser, Steel Reserve, Colt 45, Bud Ice and Bud Light – were consumed in the highest quantities by emergency room patients, according to a new pilot study from researchers at The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Three of these are "malt liquors" with higher alcohol content than regular beer. The pilot study, published by Substance Use and Misuse, is the first study of its kind to assess alcohol consumption by brand and type from patients reporting to the emergency department with ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 14, 2013) — What if we could pinpoint a hereditary cause for Alzheimer's, and intervene to reduce the risk of the disease? We may be closer to that goal, thanks to a team at the University of Kentucky. Researchers affiliated with the UK Sanders-Brown Center on Aging have completed new work in Alzheimer's genetics; the research is detailed in a paper published today in the Journal of Neuroscience. Emerging evidence indicates that, much like in the case of high cholesterol, some Alzheimer's disease risk is inherited while the remainder is environmental. ...

When it comes to what's for dinner – or breakfast and lunch for that matter-- many people suffer from chemophobia, an irrational fear of natural and synthetic chemicals that pose no risk to our health, a Dartmouth study finds. Chemistry Professor Gordon Gribble, whose paper appears in the journal Food Security, argues that low doses of chemicals in modern food are inherent, typically harmless and often highly beneficial. He says most people don't know they are routinely exposed to a host of compounds in non-toxic concentrations in what they eat and drink each day. Even ...

STANFORD, Calif. — When it comes to getting motivated to exercise and do things that are good for our health, sometimes all it takes is a little help from our friends. This was certainly the case for a group of older, Latino adults in Northern California: They benefited from the advice and encouragement of a virtual friend — a physical-activity adviser named Carmen, a new study reports. Individuals who participated in an exercise program guided by the virtual adviser had an eight-fold increase in walking compared with those who did not, according to the study, published ...

HOUSTON -- (Aug. 14, 2013) -- A new study by Rice University biophysicists offers the most comprehensive picture yet of the molecular-level action of melittin, the principal toxin in bee venom. The research could aid in the development of new drugs that use a similar mechanism as melittin's to attack cancer and bacteria. The study appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Melittin does its damage by penetrating the outer walls of cells and opening pores that allow the contents of the cell to escape. At low concentrations, melittin forms ...

Twelve national dementia clinical practice guidelines included only half of 31 ethical issues the authors had identified as important in patient care, finds a study by Daniel Strech, of Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany, and colleagues, published in this week's issue of PLOS Medicine. The authors identified current national clinical practice guidelines for dementia care published in English or German. They had previously systematically reviewed ethical issues in dementia care and they used thematic text analysis to assess whether and how the ethical issues were ...

An assessment of expert members of panels making decisions about definitions or diagnostic criteria for common conditions in the US, which were published in guidelines used by physicians and other healthcare professionals caring for patients, found that most members had ties to industry. The assessment was made in a study from Ray Moynihan of Bond University, Queensland, Australia, and colleagues published in this week's issue of PLOS Medicine. Of the 16 expert panel publications appearing between 2000 and April 2013 that met the authors' criteria of changing disease ...

While there have been substantial improvements in mortality rates and an increase in access to reproductive health interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the global health community is neglecting prevention, screening, and treatment for cervical cancer in LMICs. These are the conclusions of a new article in PLOS Medicine this week by Ruby Singhrao and colleagues from the University of California San Francisco, San Francisco. Using a framework including equity and socio-economic, gender, public health, and health services dimensions, the authors propose ...

STANFORD, Calif. —The steady accumulation of a protein in healthy, aging brains may explain seniors' vulnerability to neurodegenerative disorders, a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine reports. The study's unexpected findings could fundamentally change the way scientists think about neurodegenerative disease. The pharmaceutical industry has spent billions of dollars on futile clinical trials directed at treating Alzheimer's disease by ridding brains of a substance called amyloid plaque. But the new findings have identified another ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Patients with severe mitral valve regurgitation who are otherwise healthy should have mitral valve repair surgery sooner rather than later, even if they feel no symptoms, a Mayo Clinic-led study by U.S. and European researchers found. The results challenge the long-held belief that it is safer to "watch and wait" until a patient has symptoms, such as shortness of breath. This is the largest study to show that patients who undergo surgery early after diagnosis have improved long-term survival and lower risk of heart failure. The findings will be published ...

In a large population of Medicare beneficiaries with heart failure who underwent implantation of a cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillator, patients who had the cardiac characteristics of left bundle-branch block and longer QRS duration had the lowest risks of death and all-cause, cardiovascular, and heart failure readmission, according to a study in the August 14 issue of JAMA. "Clinical trials have shown that cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) improves symptoms and reduces mortality and readmission among selected patients with heart failure and left ventricular ...

In a study that included patients with mitral valve regurgitation due to a condition known as flail mitral valve leaflets, performance of early surgical correction compared with initial medical management was associated with greater long-term survival and lower risk of heart failure, according to a study in the August 14 issue of JAMA. "Degenerative mitral regurgitation [backflow of blood from the left ventricle to the left atrium due to mitral valve insufficiency] is common and can be surgically repaired in the vast majority of patients, improving symptoms and restoring ...

"Although screening programs prior to participation in sports have been used for many years for young competitive athletes, it has been suggested that screening programs might also be worthwhile in the general population. Description of the incidence of sports-related sudden death by specific sports as well as by sex and age may help inform the debate," write Eloi Marijon, M.D., of the Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, and colleagues. As reported in a Research Letter, the study was performed in France between 2005 and 2010, and overall, 60 of 96 ...

The study's findings are surprising as much research so far suggests that the survivors of mass extinctions are often presented with new ecological opportunities because the loss of many species in their communities allows them to evolve new lifestyles and new anatomical features as they fill the roles vacated by the victims. However, it turns out that not all survivors respond in the same way, and some may not be able to exploit fully the new opportunities arising after a mass extinction. Dr Marcello Ruta of the University of Lincoln, with colleagues from the Field ...

Frontiers in Psychology People who often recall their dreams respond more strongly to their name Dreaming remains one of the great mysteries of human cognition. It is still not fully known when dreams occur, and which mechanisms in the brain produce them. A major difficulty for studying dreams is that they leave only a fleeting memory upon awakening. Perrine Ruby and colleagues from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center chose a new approach to investigate dreaming. They recorded brain activity of two groups of participants: high dream recallers who recall dreams ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- About 10 percent of the U.S. population suffers from dyslexia, a condition that makes learning to read difficult. Dyslexia is usually diagnosed around second grade, but the results of a new study from MIT could help identify those children before they even begin reading, so they can be given extra help earlier. The study, done with researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, found a correlation between poor pre-reading skills in kindergartners and the size of a brain structure that connects two language-processing areas. Previous studies have shown that ...

A radical shortening of their bony tails over 100 million years ago enabled the earliest birds to develop versatile legs that gave them an evolutionary edge, a new study shows. A team led by Oxford University scientists examined fossils of the earliest birds from the Cretaceous Period, 145-66 million years ago, when early birds, such as Confuciusornis, Eoenantiornis, and Hongshanornis, lived alongside their dinosaur kin. At this point birds had already evolved powered flight, necessitating changes to their forelimbs, and the team investigated how this new lifestyle related ...

Black patients preoccupied with racial concerns have higher blood pressure than those who aren't, according to results of new Johns Hopkins-led research. The findings suggest that heightened race consciousness could at least in part account for the disproportionately high rate of hypertension in black Americans — the highest prevalence of any group in the United States and one of the highest rates in the world. "A preoccupation with race among blacks leads to hyper-vigilance, a heightened awareness of their stigmatized status in society and a feeling that they need to ...

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, ILL. (Aug. 13, 2013) – The number of children being diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder (ADHD), allergy and asthma is increasing in the United States. And according to a new study, there might be a link between the growth of these three conditions. The study, published in the August issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the scientific journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), found there is an increased risk of ADHD in boys that have a history of allergy or asthma. "ADHD, a chronic mental health disorder, ...

Wildfires continue to be a problem in Canada. Currently in the central region, including the Northern Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, numerous fires were spotted by the Aqua satellite on this image captured on August 12, 2013. In the past week, 508 new fires started in Canada, burning over half a million acres (208,308 ha). Most of the past week's fires occurred from Manitoba westward, particularly in British Columbia, while Saskatchewan accounted for roughly half of the area burned. Seasonal fire occurrence remains below average, but the area burned ...