Given the importance of early childhood development on subsequent health, there may be knock-on effects across the life course, suggest the authors. The authors looked at whether bedtimes in early childhood were related to brain power in more than 11,000 seven year olds, all of whom were part of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). MCS is a nationally representative long term study of UK children born between September 2000 and January 2002, and the research drew on regular surveys and home visits made when the children were 3, 5, and 7, to find out about family routines, ...

While the results may not be representative of the UK as a whole, nevertheless, excess drinking and drug taking in pregnancy is a pairing that is likely to be more common than generally thought, say the authors. It is known that women prescribed maintenance methadone use other illicit drugs, but the extent to which they do this has never been quantified in the UK, nor are there any figures on the prevalence of drug and alcohol use during pregnancy for this group of women, they add. They interviewed 56 mums who were on methadone maintenance during their pregnancy and ...

Buyers want larger size animals to obtain the maximum meat yield, so go for thoroughbreds and riding horses, the study indicates. The researchers looked at the animals put up for sale at seven randomly selected auction markets in Britain in August and September 2011, and the type preferred by dealers buying on behalf of abattoirs. The auctions were in North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Wales (Powys), Berkshire and Cheshire and traded equines only, but of all types, breed and age. Their study was prompted by public concerns about the possible dispatch to slaughter of ...

Researchers from the University of Liverpool and University of the West of England, (UWE Bristol), have built a device that can read odours in urine to help diagnose patients with early signs of bladder cancer. There are currently no reliable biomarkers to screen patients for bladder cancer in the same way that there are for breast and cervical cancers. Previous research has suggested that a particular odour in the urine could be detected by dogs trained to recognise the scent, indicating that methods of diagnoses could be based on the smell of certain gases. The team ...

Carbon capture and storage has been heralded as a new technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In an effort to help slow climate change, human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) is captured at point-source emitters like power stations and sequestered in underground rocks. In porous rocks like sandstone, the CO2 is trapped in tiny spaces or pores, which act like a sponge and soak up the injected fluid. In 2000, one of the first commercial examples of this technology was conducted in Weyburn, Saskatchewan Province, Canada where approximately 3 megatonnes of CO2 (the ...

Persons who live to an older age are the more likely to be disabled near the end of life and require the assistance of a caregiver to complete the activities of daily living, and disability was more common in women than men two years before death, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. The population of U.S. adults older than 85 years is expected to triple from 5.4 million to 19 million between 2008 and 2050. While many people do live into their eighth and ninth decades independently and free of disability, the end-of-life ...

Patients who search on free health-related websites for information related to a medical condition may have the health information they provide leaked to third party tracking entities through code on those websites, according to a research letter by Marco D. Huesch, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Between December 2012 and January 2013, using a sample of 20 popular health-related websites, Huesch used freely available privacy tools to detect third parties. Commercial interception software also was used to intercept hidden traffic ...

Both an early and late first exposure to solid food for infants appears to be associated with the development of type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. T1DM is increasing around the world with some of the most rapid increase among children younger than 5 years of age. The infant diet has been of particular interest in the origin of the disease, according to the study background. Brittni Frederiksen, M.P.H., Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado, Aurora, and colleagues examined ...

Patients with epilepsy who had amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) or Alzheimer disease (AD) presented earlier with cognitive decline than patients who did not have epilepsy, according to a report published by JAMA Neurology, a JAMA Network publication. AD increases a patient's risk of risk of seizures, and patients with AD and seizure disorders have greater cognitive impairment, more rapid progression of symptoms and more severe neuronal loss at autopsy than those without seizures, according to the study background. "Epileptic activity associated with Alzheimer ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly and intractable forms of cancer, with a 5-year survival rate of only 6%. Novel therapies are urgently needed, as conventional and targeted approaches have not been successful and drug resistance is an increasing problem. Previously it had been thought that poor penetration of the drugs into pancreas tumors was the main reason for treatment failure. But now a team of scientists led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor David Tuveson M.D., Ph.D., shows there are other factors at work, too. In ...

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have discovered that hydrogen sulfide — the pungent-smelling gas produced by rotten eggs — is a key player in colon cancer metabolism, and a potential target for therapies for the disease. In a paper appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the UTMB scientists describe cell-culture and mouse experiments demonstrating that colon cancer cells produce large amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and depend on the compound for survival and growth. "They love it and they need it," ...

Scientists have found that key metabolites in blood – chemical 'fingerprints' left behind as a result of early molecular changes before birth or in infancy – could provide clues to a person's long-term overall health and rate of ageing in later life. Published today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, the international study of twins led by King's College London highlights how a technique called metabolomic profiling has revealed a collection of 22 metabolites linked to ageing. One of these, linked to ageing traits such as lung function and bone mineral density, ...

Boston – As the population gets older, and the baby boomers begin to enter their 60's and 70's, one might assume that the number of trips to the emergency department will also increase. This is contradicted by new research from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), which shows that population aging will not cause the number of emergency department (ED) visits to increase between now and 2050. However, visits will become longer and hospitalizations will become more frequent. This research will appear in the July issue of Health Affairs. "With US emergency care characterized ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A high level of air pollution, in the form of particulates produced by burning coal, significantly shortens the lives of people exposed to it, according to a unique new study of China co-authored by an MIT economist. The research is based on long-term data compiled for the first time, and projects that the 500 million Chinese who live north of the Huai River are set to lose an aggregate 2.5 billion years of life expectancy due to the extensive use of coal to power boilers for heating throughout the region. Using a quasi-experimental method, the researchers ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that CPAP therapy reduces nightmares in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Results show that the mean number of nightmares per week fell significantly with CPAP use, and reduced nightmare frequency after starting CPAP was best predicted by CPAP compliance. "Patients with PTSD get more motivated to use CPAP once they get restful sleep without frequent nightmares, and their compliance improves" said principal investigator Sadeka Tamanna, MD, MPH, medical director of the Sleep Disorders ...

(Santa Barbara, California) –– The North Pole isn't the only place on Earth affected by slight increases in temperature. Until recently, scientific thinking used to posit that tropical forests, which already exist in warm climates, may not be impacted much by climate change. But a new study conducted by UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) shows that to be erroneous. In fact, the results indicate that tropical forests are producing more flowers in response to only slight increases in temperature. The findings were published online ...

MENLO PARK, Calif.—July 8, 2013—A hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's is that by the time symptoms appear, significant brain damage has already occurred—and currently there are no treatments that can reverse it. A team of SRI International researchers has demonstrated that measurements of electrical activity in the brains of mouse models of Huntington's disease could indicate the presence of disease before the onset of major symptoms. The findings, "Longitudinal Analysis of the Electroencephalogram and Sleep Phenotype ...

Defying 30 mph gusts and temperatures down to minus 22 F, NASA's new polar rover recently demonstrated in Greenland that it could operate completely autonomously in one of Earth's harshest environments. The robot known as GROVER, which stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, was designed by teams of students attending engineering boot camps at Goddard in the summers of 2010 and 2011. Built to carry a ground-penetrating radar to analyze layers of snow and ice, the rover was later transferred to Boise State University ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - The tyrosine kinase MerTK plays a prominent role in the body's immune response. MerTK signaling helps "calm" the body's first line of immunity, the macrophage, while it performs the routine duties - clearing cells that die and healing damaged tissue. New evidence by a University of North Carolina-led team published online on July 8 by the Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that MerTK macrophage action in the microenvironment that surrounds cancer cells blunts the immune response, allowing the tumor cell to grow and metastasize. The study, led ...

Corals may let certain bacteria get under its skin, according to a new study by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and soon to be published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The study offers the first direct evidence that Stylophora pistillata, a species of reef-building coral found throughout the Indian and west Pacific Oceans, harbors bacterial denizens deep within its tissues. "We have evidence that other species of coral also host these bacteria, and that they ...

URBANA, Ill. – After a recent University of Illinois study showed that injection of the soy peptide lunasin dramatically reduced colon cancer metastasis in mice, the researchers were eager to see how making lunasin part of the animals' daily diet would affect the spread of the disease. "In this new study, we find that giving lunasin orally at 20 mg/kg of body weight reduced the number of metastatic tumors by 94 percent—we went from 18 tumors to only one. And that was done using lunasin alone; no other type of therapy was used," said Elvira de Mejia, a U of I professor ...

Facing a nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, some states in recent years have eased up on regulations that create barriers for nurse practitioners who want to work as primary care providers. That easing of rules has had the intended effect. According to a new study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, those states with the fewest restrictions on nurse practitioners' scope of practice had two-and-a-half times more patients receiving primary care from nurse practitioners than did the most restrictive states. "We wanted to look ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Max Scherzer leads Major League Baseball in wins. As a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, he hasn't lost a game this season. His 6-foot, 3-inch frame is a telling example of constructal-law theory, said Duke University engineer Adrian Bejan. The theory predicts that elite pitchers will continue to be taller and thus throw faster and seems also to apply to athletes who compete in golf, hockey and boxing. Studying athletes -- since most sports are meticulous in keeping statistics -- provides an insight into the biological evolution of human design in nature, ...

NEW YORK, July 8, 2013 – Increased concerns about the perceived risk of vaccination, inconvenience, or religious tenets are leading more U.S. parents to opt-out of vaccinating their children. Parents are increasingly able to do so in states that have relatively simple procedures for immunization exemption, report researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center in the July issue of Health Affairs. Some states, fearing a public health crisis, have responded by putting in place more burdensome procedures for parents of school-aged children to opt-out. All this adds up to an ethical ...

Ocean acidification may create an impact similar to extinction on marine ecosystems, according to a study released today by the University of California, Davis. The study, published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that ocean acidification can degrade not only individual species, as past studies have shown, but entire ecosystems. This results in a homogenized marine community, dominated by fewer plants and animals. "The background, low-grade stress caused by ocean acidification can cause a whole shift in the ecosystem ...