They're ba-ack! But in a new disease-fighting role. Viruses that infect and kill bacteria — used to treat infections in the pre-antibiotic era a century ago and in the former Soviet Union today — may have a new role in preventing formation of the sticky "biofilms" of bacteria responsible for infections on implanted medical devices. That's the topic of a report in the ACS journal Biomacromolecules. Marek Urban and colleagues explain that bacteriophages (literally, "bacteria eaters") were first used to treat bacterial infections in the 19th century. These viruses — more ...

A new "solder" for laser welding of tissue during surgical operations has the potential to produce stronger seals and expand use of this alternative to conventional sutures and stapling in intestinal surgery, scientists are reporting. Their study, which involves use of a gold-based solder, or sealing material, appears in the journal ACS Nano. Kaushal Rege and colleagues explain that laser tissue welding (LTW) is a "stitch-free" surgical method for connecting and sealing blood vessels, cartilage in joints, the liver, the urinary tract and other tissues. LTW involves use ...

Math and reading ability at age 7 may be linked with socioeconomic status several decades later, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The childhood abilities predict socioeconomic status in adulthood over and above associations with intelligence, education, and socioeconomic status in childhood. In light of ongoing debates about the impact that education standards have on children's lives, psychological scientists Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh wanted to investigate ...

Many kinds of cinnamon, cinnamon-flavored foods, beverages and food supplements in the United States use a form of the spice that contains high levels of a natural substance that may cause liver damage in some sensitive people, scientists are reporting. Their study, published in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, found similar results as those published in the European Union. Ikhlas Khan and colleagues explain that cinnamon, which comes from the bark of certain trees, is one of the most important flavoring agents used in foods and beverages. "True," or Ceylon, ...

TORONTO, ON – An estimated 4,837,000 asthmatics with allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) could benefit substantially from antifungal treatment, say researchers from the University of Toronto and Manchester University. Their work, published today in the journal Medical Mycology, has also re-estimated the total number of asthmatics worldwide – to reveal a staggering 193 million sufferers. Twenty-four million asthma sufferers live in the United States, 20 million each in India and China, and seven million in the United Kingdom. Clinical studies have shown that ...

Imagine a TV screen that hangs on the wall like a poster and rolls up like a window shade — or a smartphone that can fold up and fit into a pocket. It may sound like science fiction, but those technological marvels are moving closer to reality, thanks to advances toward development of flexible batteries that could power a new genre of electronics devices. Those polymer, or plastic, batteries are the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – A common nutritional supplement may be part of the magic in improving the survival rates of babies born with heart defects, researchers report. Carnitine, a compound that helps transport fat inside the cell powerhouse where it can be used for energy production, is currently used for purposes ranging from weight loss to chest pain. New research shows it appears to normalize the blood vessel dysfunction that can accompany congenital heart defects and linger even after corrective surgery, said Dr. Stephen M. Black, cell and molecular physiologist at the ...

This news release is available in French. AUDIO: Dr. Beth Foster, pediatric nephrologist at the Montreal Children's Hospital in Montreal explains the importance of her findings. Click here for more information. Montreal, May 8, 2013 – Children on dialysis for severe kidney disease have a dramatically reduced risk of death compared to 20 years ago, a new study shows. The findings, from a study ...

Children with autism see simple movement twice as quickly as other children their age, and this hypersensitivity to motion may provide clues to a fundamental cause of the developmental disorder, according to a new study. Such heightened sensory perception in autism may help explain why some people with the disorder are painfully sensitive to noise and bright lights. It also may be linked to some of the complex social and behavioral deficits associated with autism, says Duje Tadin, one of the lead authors on the study and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive ...

WASHINGTON — Using MRI, neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center found significant differences in brain anatomy when comparing men and women with dyslexia to their non-dyslexic control groups, suggesting that the disorder may have a different brain-based manifestation based on sex. Their study, investigating dyslexia in both males and females, is the first to directly compare brain anatomy of females with and without dyslexia (in children and adults). Their findings were published online in the journal Brain Structure and Function. Because dyslexia is ...

A new article available online in the American Journal of Public Health by two Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health faculty makes a compelling case that end-of-life care issues need to become an integral part of the public health agenda. Dan Morhaim, MD, and Keshia Pollack, PhD, point out that the low rate of completion of advance directives in the minority population can be identified as another health care disparity. Advance directive documents are free, legally binding and readily available, yet too few Americans have completed one. Although end-of-life ...

URBANA – Tomatoes and soy foods may be more effective in preventing prostate cancer when they are eaten together than when either is eaten alone, said a University of Illinois study. "In our study, we used mice that were genetically engineered to develop an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Even so, half the animals that had consumed tomato and soy had no cancerous lesions in the prostate at study's end. All the mice in the control group--no soy, no tomato--developed the disease," said John Erdman, a U of I professor of food science and nutrition. From the time they ...

A carnivorous, cannibalistic tadpole may play a role in understanding the evolution and development of digestive organs, according to research from North Carolina State University. These findings may also shed light on universal rules of organ development that could lead to better diagnosis and prevention of intestinal birth defects. NC State developmental biologist Nanette Nascone-Yoder, graduate student Stephanie Bloom and postdoc Cris Ledon-Rettig looked at Xenopus laevis (African clawed frog) and Lepidobatrachus laevis (Budgett's frog) tadpoles. These frog species ...

SAN DIEGO – Robot-assisted surgery to remove kidney cancers has seen a rapid increase in use, and has both replaced and proven safer than laparoscopic procedures for the same purpose, according to a study by the Vattikuti Urology Institute at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. However, the study also shows that robotic partial nephrectomy (RPN) – while resulting in fewer complications than both open (OPN) and laparoscopic (LPN) removal of cancerous kidney tissue – also involves more "excessive" hospital charges. "Excessive hospital charges were significantly higher with ...

From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent. The study, co-authored by Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, will be published May 7 in the journal PLoS Biology. "What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago," Coop ...

Minneapolis, MN, May 7, 2013 - Inherited ventricular arrhythmias are an important cause of morbidity and sudden cardiac death in children who have structurally normal hearts. Despite conventional medical therapy, some of these children remain symptomatic with recurrent life-threatening arrhythmias, syncope, or frequent discharges from implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs). Video-assisted thoracoscopic left cardiac sympathetic denervation (VATS-LCSD) is a minimally invasive procedure that can help many of these children with refractory cardiac arrhythmias. The results ...

From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are all closely related according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent. The study, conducted by Graham Coop at the University of California, Davis, and Peter Ralph of the University of Southern California, examined relatedness among Europeans up to about 3,000 years ago, comparing genetic sequences from over 2,000 individuals. Their results are published 7 May in the open access journal PLOS Biology. The researchers found that the extent to which two people are related tends to be smaller the farther apart ...

Many adults 45 years and older in Africa have limited functional ability The number of adults living into older age in sub-Saharan Africa is rapidly growing yet many older men and women will have an illness or disability that limits their ability to function, according to a study by researchers from the US and Malawi published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers, led by Collin Payne from the University of Pennsylvania, also show that remaining life spent with severe limitations at age 45 in a sub Saharan African setting (Malawi) is comparable to that of 80-year-olds ...

Not only are women who have experienced violence from their partner (intimate partner violence) at higher risk of becoming depressed, but women who are depressed may also be at increased risk of experiencing intimate partner violence, according to a study by international researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Furthermore, there may also be a link between intimate partner violence and subsequent suicide among women, but little evidence to support a similar finding in men. The researchers led by Karen Devries from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical ...

Heiman Wertheim and Arjun Chandna from Oxford University and colleagues describe the launch and impact of VINARES, an initiative to strengthen antimicrobial stewardship in Viet Nam, which may be instructive for other countries struggling to address the threat of antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial resistance is increasingly recognised as a serious contemporary global health threat (with numerous calls for action from the international community), but while interventions to control antimicrobial resistance are available, implementation is developing countries (where ...

New PLOS Collection assesses the measurement of whether much needed health interventions are reaching women and children across the developing world Measuring coverage of maternal, newborn and child health in low- and middle-income countries is critical to ensuring that health interventions are reaching the women and children who need them most, says a new Collection of articles published by PLOS this week. Accurate measurement of the effectiveness of those interventions for combatting diseases such as pneumonia and malaria, and preventing the transmission of HIV from ...

Programming an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) with a long-detection interval compared with a standard-detection interval resulted in a reduction in anti-tachycardia pacing episodes, ICD shocks delivered, and inappropriate shocks, according to a study in the May 8 issue of JAMA. "Therapy with ICDs is now the standard of care in primary and secondary prevention. As indications for implants have expanded, concern about possible adverse effects of ICD therapies on prognosis and quality of life has arisen. Several authors have reported that ICD therapies, both ...

Two genome-wide association studies and a subsequent meta-analysis have found that certain genetic variations are associated with susceptibility to Helicobacter pylori, a bacteria that is a major cause of gastritis and stomach ulcers and is linked to stomach cancer, findings that may help explain some of the observed variation in individual risk for H pylori infection, according to a study in the May 8 issue of JAMA. "[H pylori] is the major cause of gastritis (80 percent) and gastroduodenal ulcer disease (15 percent-20 percent) and the only bacterial pathogen believed ...

"Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of hospitalization, disability, and death-worldwide, and among older adults, falling is the most common cause of TBI," writes Niina Korhonen, B.M., of the Injury and Osteoporosis Research Center, Tampere, Finland, and colleagues in a Research Letter. The authors previously reported that the number and incidence of adults 80 years of age or older admitted to the hospital due to fall-induced TBI in Finland increased from 1970 through 1999. This analysis is a follow-up of this population through 2011. The study included data ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Vertebrates are predisposed to act to gain rewards, and to lay low to avoid punishment. Try to teach chickens to back away from food in order to obtain it, and you'll fail, as researchers did in 1986. But (some) humans are better thinkers than chickens. In the May 8 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers show that the level of theta brainwave activity in the prefrontal cortex predicts whether people will be able to overcome these ingrained biases when doing so is required to achieve a goal. The study helps explain a distinctly ...