EUGENE, Ore. -- (Aug. 5, 2013) – Addiction to smoking and other substances involves a particular set of brain areas related to self-control, according to numerous research. For a new study, researchers wondered if a training approach designed to influence this addiction pathway could influence smokers to reduce their tobacco use -- even if smokers did not intend to do so. It worked. The study, published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that smokers trained with a form of mindfulness meditation known as Integrative ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The painful, red skin that comes from too much time in the sun is caused by a molecule abundant in the skin's epidermis, a new study shows. Blocking this molecule, called TRPV4, greatly protects against the painful effects of sunburn. The results were published the week of Aug. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition online. The research, which was conducted in mouse models and human skin samples, could yield a way to combat sunburn and possibly several other causes of pain. "We have uncovered a novel explanation ...

SEATTLE – Older women who take certain types of medication to combat high blood pressure may be putting themselves at greater risk for developing breast cancer, according to a new study by a team of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientists led by Christopher Li, M.D., Ph.D. The study is the first to observe that long-term use of a class of antihypertensive drugs known as calcium-channel blockers in particular are associated with breast cancer risk. The team's findings will be published online Aug. 5 in JAMA Internal Medicine. Antihypertensive drugs are the most ...

Long-term use of a calcium-channel blocker to treat hypertension (high blood pressure) is associated with higher breast cancer risk, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Antihypertensive medications are the most commonly prescribed class of drugs in the United States and in 2010 totaled an estimated 678 million filled prescriptions, Christopher I. Li, M.D., Ph.D., of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, and colleagues write in the study background. "Evidence regarding the relationship between different ...

Among underserved patients whose colorectal cancer (CRC) screening was not up to date, mailed outreach invitations appear to result in higher CRC screening compared with usual care, according to a study by Samir Gupta, M.D., M.S.C.S., of the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, and the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues. A total of 5,970 participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: 1,593 to fecal immunochemical test (FIT) outreach, 479 to colonoscopy outreach, and 3,898 to usual care. Researchers measured for screening participation ...

A study by Valentina Moskvina, Ph.D., of the Cardiff University School of Medicine, Wales, United Kingdom, and colleagues, examined the genetic overlap between Parkinson disease (PD) and Alzheimer disease (AD). Data sets from the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the United States were used to perform a combined genome-wide association analysis (GWA). The GWA study of AD included 3,177 patients with AD and 7,277 control patients, and the GWA analysis for PD included 5,333 patients with PD and 12,298 control patients. The gene-based analyses resulted in no significant ...

Honolulu, HI – Future warming from fossil fuel burning could be more intense and longer-lasting than previously thought. This prediction emerges from a new study by Richard Zeebe at the University of Hawai'i who includes insights from episodes of climate change in the geologic past to inform projections of man-made future climate change. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Humans keep adding large amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, among them carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important man-made greenhouse gas. Over the ...

Consumer satisfaction surveys of nursing home residents and their families track closely with other quality of care measures. These results, which were published today in the journal Health Affairs, indicate that the surveys could be a valuable tool to both inform consumer choice and reward homes for quality of care. "Satisfaction scores are clearly an important indicator of the quality of care in nursing homes," said Yue Li, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Department of Public Health Sciences and lead author of the ...

DALLAS – Aug. 5, 2013 – A study of nearly 6,000 North Texas patients suggests sweeping changes be made to the standard of care strategy for colorectal screenings, finding that participation rates soared depending on the screening method offered and how patient outreach was done. The results also suggest that a noninvasive colorectal screening approach, such as a fecal immunochemical tests (FIT) might be more effective in prompting participation in potentially lifesaving colon cancer screening among underserved populations than a colonoscopy, a more expensive and invasive ...

Improving communication and strengthening teamwork among cardiac surgery teams are among recommendations for reducing preventable mistakes in the cardiac operating room, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association. The statement reviewed evidence-based research focused on communication within and between teams, the physical workspace and the organizational culture of the cardiac operating room and provides recommendations for improving patient safety. It is published in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association. Statement ...

When smoking was banned from casinos in Colorado, ambulance calls to casinos in Gilpin County dropped about 20 percent, according to research reported in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. The drop in calls from casinos was similar to drops in ambulance calls from elsewhere two years earlier when Colorado banned smoking everywhere but casinos. How did the smoking ban lead to a reduction in ambulance calls? Partially by eliminating exposure to secondhand smoke, said Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., the study's lead author. "Inhaling secondhand smoke increases ...

NEW YORK, NY (August 5, 2013) — A team of researchers at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University Medical Center has identified 18 new genes responsible for driving glioblastoma multiforme, the most common—and most aggressive—form of brain cancer in adults. The study was published August 5, 2013, in Nature Genetics. "Cancers rely on driver genes to remain cancers, and driver genes are the best targets for therapy," said Antonio Iavarone, MD, professor of pathology and neurology at Columbia University Medical Center and a principal author ...

NEW YORK, August 5, 2013 – With physicians facing increasing demands on their time, it can be extremely difficult to prioritize which preventive care methods should be used for their patients. Now, two researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have developed a mathematical model that will save time, lead to enhanced care, and potentially save lives. The two researchers, Glen Taksler, PhD and Scott Braithwaite, MD, MSc, have co-authored the lead article in the August 6th issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, entitled "Personalized Estimates of Benefit from Preventive Care ...

An iconic moment in the history of Hollywood movie magic was born in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz when Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale stepped out of the black and white world of Kansas into the rainbow colored world of Oz. An iconic moment in the history of infrared imaging may have been born with the announcement of the first technique to offer full color IR tomography. A collaboration between researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has combined Fourier Transform ...

If history's closest analog is any indication, the look of the oceans will change drastically in the future as the coming greenhouse world alters marine food webs and gives certain species advantages over others. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, paleobiologist Richard Norris and colleagues show that the ancient greenhouse world had few large reefs, a poorly oxygenated ocean, tropical surface waters like a hot tub, and food webs that did not sustain the abundance of large sharks, whales, seabirds, and seals of the modern ocean. Aspects of this greenhouse ...

Researchers from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and from the MPI Dortmund have for the first time successfully reproduced the recycling process of proteins regulating cellular transport in a biophysical experiment. In doing so, they traced in detail the way the central switch protein Rab is being extracted from the lipid membrane. The team of PD Dr Carsten Kötting, Prof Dr Klaus Gerwert (Department of Biophysics, RUB) and Prof Dr Roger S. Goody (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, Dortmund) has published the spectroscopic and dynamic data in the PNAS journal's ...

A combination of brain scans and reading tests has revealed that several regions in the brain are responsible for allowing humans to read. The findings open up the possibility that individuals who have difficulty reading may only need additional training for specific parts of the brain – targeted therapies that could more directly address their individual weaknesses. "Reading is a complex task. No single part of the brain can do all the work," said Qinghua He, postdoctoral research associate at the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and the first author of a study on ...

Conventional wisdom holds that East Africa's Maasai pastoralists hunt lions for two distinct reasons: to retaliate against lions that kill livestock or to engage in a cultural rite of passage. But that view reflects mistranslations of Maasai terms and a simplification of their cultural traditions and their relationship with wildlife, a team of researchers led by a University of Colorado Boulder geographer has concluded. Further, some conservation initiatives including those designed to save lions from being hunted have either failed to work or in some cases appear to ...

The global treaty that headed off destruction of earth's protective ozone layer has also prevented major disruption of global rainfall patterns, even though that was not a motivation for the treaty, according to a new study in the Journal of Climate. The 1987 Montreal Protocol phased out the use of chloroflourocarbons, or CFCs, a class of chemicals that destroy ozone in the stratosphere, allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach earth's surface. Though the treaty aimed to reverse ozone losses, the new research shows that it also protected the hydroclimate. The study ...

Aug. 5, 2013 - For a new study in the Journal of Animal Science, researchers evaluated how different concentrations of lipids affect growth performance in weaned pigs. The researchers also studied how different sources of lipids affect pigs. According to the researchers, it is important to re-evaluate energy density and nutrient absorption because swine genetics have improved over the years. Dr. Olayiwola Adeola, animal science professor at Purdue University, said small pigs have an issue with intestinal capacity to consume enough energy. This means that the intestines ...

Stem cells found in mouth tissue can not only become other types of cells but can also relieve inflammatory disease, according to a new Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC study in the Journal of Dental Research. The cells featured in the study are gingival mesenchymal stem cells (GMSC), which are found in the gingiva, or gum tissue, within the mouth. GMSC, like other stem cells, have the ability to develop into different types of cells as well as affect the immune system. "Gingiva is very unique in our body," says Professor Songtao Shi, the study's senior author. "It ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The colorful restaurant menus that thousands of tourists bring home as souvenirs from Hawaii hold more than happy memories of island vacations. They also contain valuable data that are helping a trio of researchers track long-term changes to important fisheries in the Aloha State. The scientists are using the menus as part of a larger project to fill a 45-year gap in official records of wild fish populations in Hawaii's ocean waters during the mid-20th century. "Market surveys and government statistics are the traditional sources for tracking fisheries. ...

Key factors have been identified that help determine the vulnerability of public-supply wells to contamination. A new USGS report describes these factors, providing insight into which contaminants in an aquifer might reach a well and when, how and at what concentration they might arrive. About one-third of the U.S. population gets their drinking water from public-supply wells. "Improving the understanding of the vulnerability of public-supply wells to contamination is needed to safeguard public health and prevent future contamination," said Suzette Kimball, acting USGS ...

Dartmouth and UC Berkeley researchers have developed new software to detect faked photos, using a geometric algorithm to locate inconsistent shadows that are not obvious to the naked eye. The new method is a significant step in the field of digital forensics, which national security agencies, the media, scientific journals and others use to differentiate between authentic images and computerized forgeries. The study, titled "Exposing Photo Manipulation with Inconsistent Shadows," was presented last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGGRAPH conference ...

Forest Drought Stress in Southwest May Exceed Most Severe Droughts in Last Thousand Years: Severe wildfires and drought-induced tree deaths have increased greatly over the past two decades in the southwestern United States. Historical ecological sources about Southwest fire regimes and forest patterns over the past 10,000 years provide context for recent fire and vegetation trends. Specifically, these sources show that regional forest landscapes are greatly affected by interactive changes among human land management, climate and disturbances. Such linkages are further emphasized ...