Once famously described as "orphan diseases, too small to be noticed, too small to be funded" in the Hollywood drama Lorenzo's Oil, rare diseases are getting unprecedented attention today among drug manufacturers, who are ramping up research efforts and marketing new medicines that promise fuller lives for children and other patients with these heartbreaking conditions. That's the finding of a major examination, published today in the weekly newsmagazine of the world's largest scientific society, of the status of new drugs for the 7,000 conditions that affect 200,000 ...

A study by Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Washington, D.C., and colleagues suggest voluntary reductions in sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods is inconsistent and slow. (Online First) The study measured the sodium content in selected processed foods and fast-food restaurant foods in 2005, 2008, and 2011. Between 2005 and 2011, the sodium content in 402 processed foods declined by approximately 3.5 percent, while the sodium content in 78 fast-food restaurant products increased by 2.6 percent. Although some products ...

A research letter by Mary R. L'Abbe, Ph.D., of the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues examined the nutritional profile of breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals from sit-down restaurants (SDR). (Online First) A total of 3,507 different variations of 685 meals, as well as 156 desserts from 19 SDRs were included in the study. Nutrients evaluated included calories, fat, saturated fat, and sodium; excess consumption of these nutrients is associated with obesity, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Nutrient values were calculated as a percentage of the ...

Creative arts therapies (CATs) can improve anxiety, depression, pain symptoms and quality of life among cancer patients, although the effect was reduced during follow-up in a study by Timothy W. Puetz, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., and colleagues. Authors reviewed the available medical literature and included 27 studies involving 1,576 patients. Researchers found that during treatment, CAT significantly reduced anxiety, depression and pain, and increased quality of life. However, the effects were greatly diminished during follow-up, ...

A study by David Finkelhor, Ph.D., of the University of New Hampshire, and colleagues updates estimates and trends for childhood exposure to a range of violence, crime and abuse victimizations. (Online First) The study used the National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence, which was based on a national telephone survey conducted in 2011. The participants included 4,503 children and teenagers between the ages of one month to 17 years. According to the results, 41.2 percent of children and youth experienced a physical assault in the last year; 10.1 percent experienced ...

A novel drug candidate, J147, is able to reverse memory deficits and improve several aspects of brain function in mice with advanced symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD), finds research in BioMed Central's open access journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy. Previous studies have demonstrated that several compounds, including J147, are able to prevent or delay onset of AD-like symptoms in young mice. This does not mimic the situation in humans where symptoms usually precede the diagnosis. To address this problem, researchers from the Salk Institute used older mice, whose ...

Human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain's frontal lobes, say researchers. Research into the comparative size of the frontal lobes in humans and other species has determined that they are not - as previously thought - disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas of the brain, according to the most accurate and conclusive study of this area of the brain. It concludes that the size of our frontal lobes cannot solely account for humans' superior cognitive abilities. The study by Durham and Reading universities suggests that supposedly more ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods and much more. But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression -- even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells. It's the first direct evidence of altered circadian rhythms in the brain of people with depression, ...

Non-smokers should give hotels that allow smoking in certain rooms a wide berth, say the authors, and instead choose completely smoke free hotels. The researchers analysed the surfaces and air quality of rooms for evidence of tobacco smoke pollution (nicotine and 3EP), known as third hand smoke, in a random sample of budget to mid-range hotels in San Diego, California. Ten hotels in the sample operated complete bans and 30 operated partial smoking bans, providing designated non-smoking rooms. Non-smokers who spent the night at any of the hotels, provided urine and ...

The authors base their findings on more than 1100 adults who had sustained a stroke between 1999 and 2004 and had been admitted to hospital in the greater Boston area of Massachusetts in the US. On admission, each patient's serum creatinine was measured. This is a by-product of muscle metabolism and is filtered out of the body by the kidney, known as the glomerular filtration rate or GFR. The GFR is therefore an indicator of the health of the kidneys and how well they are working. Half the patients lived within 1 km of a major road, with the rest living between 1 and ...

CHICAGO --- The dangerously high salt levels in processed food and fast food remain essentially unchanged, despite numerous calls from public and private health agencies for the food industry to voluntarily reduce sodium levels, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study conducted with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The study, which will be published May 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine, assessed the sodium content in selected processed foods and in fast-food restaurants in 2005, 2008 and 20011. The main finding was that the sodium content of food is as ...

BOSTON, MA (EMBARGOED UNTIL Monday, May 13, 2013, 4pm EDT) – As the restaurant industry prepares to implement new rules requiring chains with 20 or more locations to post calorie content information, the results of a new study suggest that it would be beneficial to public health for all restaurants to provide consumers with the nutritional content of their products. Researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University analyzed meals from independent and small-chain restaurants, which account for approximately 50% of the ...

Environments containing species that are distantly related to one another are more productive than those containing closely related species, according to new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). The experimental result from Marc William Cadotte confirms a prediction made by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859. Darwin had said that a plot of land growing distantly related grasses would be more productive than a plot with a single species of grass. Since then, many experiments have shown that multi-species plots are ...

Researchers have identified the dose of dengue virus in human blood that is required to infect mosquitoes when they bite. Mosquitoes are essential for transmitting the virus between people so the findings have important implications for understanding how to slow the spread of the disease. By defining the threshold of the amount of virus needed for transmission, the research also provides a target that experimental dengue vaccines and drugs must prevent the virus from reaching in order to be successful at preventing the spread of disease during natural infection. Dengue, ...

Scientists at Imperial College London have identified four new proteins that act as receptors for an essential signalling molecule in bacteria such as MRSA. The receptors are thought to play an important role in enabling bacteria to respond to their environment. Their discovery provides scientists with vital clues in the hunt for new antibiotics, which are increasingly in need as bacteria become resistant to existing treatments. The bacterium Staphylococcus aureus causes life-threatening diseases in hospital patients and in previously healthy people. Methicillin-resistant ...

The impact of industrial fishing on coastal ecosystems has been studied for many years. But how it affects food webs in the open ocean―a vast region that covers almost half of the Earth's surface―has not been very clear. So a team of Smithsonian and Michigan State University scientists and their colleagues looked to the ancient bones of seabirds for answers, revealing some of the dramatic changes that have happened within open-ocean food webs since the onset of industrial fishing. The team's research is published this week in the Proceedings of the National ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A study has identified microRNA-155 as a new independent prognostic marker and treatment target in patients with acute myeloid leukemia that has normal-looking chromosomes under the microscope (that is, cytogenetically normal acute myeloid leukemia, or CN-AML). The study was led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). The researchers found that when microRNA-155 (miR-155) is present at abnormally high levels in CN-AML cells, patients ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- (May 13, 2013) -- Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so. Participants in the study -- native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 –- had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture ...

In a landmark cancer study published online in Nature, researchers at NYU School of Medicine have unraveled a longstanding mystery about how pancreatic tumor cells feed themselves, opening up new therapeutic possibilities for a notoriously lethal disease with few treatment options. Pancreatic cancer kills nearly 38,000 Americans annually, making it a leading cause of cancer death. The life expectancy for most people diagnosed with it is less than a year. Now new research reveals a possible chink in the armor of this recalcitrant disease. Many cancers, including pancreatic, ...

NEW YORK (May 13, 2013) -- A soon-to-be-tested class of drug inhibitors were predicted to help a limited number of patients with B-cell lymphomas with mutations affecting the EZH2 protein. However, a research team, led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College, now report that these agents may, in fact, help a much broader cross section of lymphoma patients. The study, reported in Cancer Cell, found that the EZH2 protein the drug agents inhibited is a powerful regulatory molecule in B-cells, and a key driver of cancer in these immune cells. The study's lead ...

VIDEO: Salk scientists have developed a drug that slows Alzheimer's in mice. Click here for more information. LA JOLLA, CA---A drug developed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, known as J147, reverses memory deficits and slows Alzheimer's disease in aged mice following short-term treatment. The findings, published May 14 in the journal Alzheimer's Research and Therapy, may pave the way to a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease in humans. "J147 ...

The fin whale is the second-largest animal ever to live on Earth. It is also, paradoxically, one of the least understood. The animal's huge size and global range make its movements and behavior hard to study. A carcass that washed up on a Seattle-area beach this spring provided a reminder that sleek fin whales, nicknamed "greyhounds of the sea," are vulnerable to collision when they strike fast-moving ships. Knowing their swimming behaviors could help vessels avoid the animals. Understanding where and what they eat could also help support the fin whale's slowly rebounding ...

Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity. "We are looking for very subtle effects. We needed high quality measurements of stellar brightnesses, accurate to a few ...

CHICAGO (May 13, 2013) – New research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that as many as 200,000 central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) have been prevented among patients in intensive care units (ICUs) since 1990. The study, published in the June issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, suggests that this progress is likely related to prevention strategies now common in hospitals across the United States. CLABSIs are caused when bacteria or ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – May 13, 2013 – New research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center finds that suicide, while strongly associated with psychiatric conditions, also correlates with environmental pollution. Lead researcher John G. Spangler, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of family medicine at Wake Forest Baptist, looked specifically at the relationship between air pollution and emissions from coal-fired electricity plants. "This study raises interesting questions about suicide rates in counties where coal-fired electrical plants operate and suggests that the quality ...