(Edmonton) Family physicians regularly counsel patients about medical risks associated with heart disease, stroke, diabetes and smoking, and a team from the University of Alberta wants to add cellphone use and driving to the discussion. Talking on a cellphone while driving raises the risk of collision by four to six times—comparable to getting behind the wheel while under the influence, studies show. Addressing the problem requires educating the public about the risks, and a good place to start is in the doctor's office. "The evidence is clear and compelling. Epidemiologic, ...

New research shows a physical characterisation of the interface of the body's proteins with water. Identifying the locations where it is easiest to remove water from the interface of target proteins could constitute a novel drug design strategy. The candidate drugs would need to be engineered to bind at the site of the protein where interfacial water is most easily dislodged. These findings, based on the work of María Belén Sierra from the National University of the South, in Bahia Blanca, Argentina and colleagues, were recently published in EPJ E. The challenge is to ...

Electronic touch pads that cost just a few dollars and solar cells that cost the same as roof shingles are one step closer to reality today. Researchers in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., have overcome technical hurdles in the quest for inexpensive, durable electronics and solar cells made with non-toxic chemicals. The research was published in the most recent issue of Nature Communications, an international online research journal. "Imagine a world where every child in a ...

CINCINNATI -- The combination of the clot-busting drug tPA with an infusion of the antiplatelet drug eptifibatide dissolves blood clots safely and more quickly than tPA alone, a study led by University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers has found. Results from the study, known as the CLEAR-ER Stroke Trial, are published online in the journal Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. UC was the coordinating center for the trial, which included nine medical centers comprising 21 hospitals. Standard treatment for acute ischemic stroke (characterized by an obstruction ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (July 30, 2013) – Breast reduction surgery produces measurable improvements in several important areas of health and quality of life, reports a study in the August issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The study used the BREAST-Q© questionnaire, a well-validated survey instrument, to document the physical and psychosocial health benefits of breast reduction surgery. "The improvement in physical well-being is important for justification of insurance coverage," according ...

WASHINGTON D.C. -- In today's precision manufacturing environment, designers of products as diverse as car airbag sensors, computer microchips, drill bits and paint often need to know the mechanical properties of their materials' down to the nanometer scale. Scientists have now built a machine that sets a new standard of accuracy for testing one of those properties: a material's hardness, which is a measure of its resistance to bumps and scratches. The new machine is called the Precision Nanoindentation Platform, or PNP. It was created in response to the need to test ...

The ionosphere, one of the regions of the upper atmosphere, plays an important role in global communications. Ionized by solar radiation, this electricity-rich region is used for the transmission of long wave communications, such as radio waves. Now Prof. Colin Price of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geophysical, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, working alongside PhD candidate Israel Silber, has discovered that the radio waves reflecting back to Earth from the ionosphere offer valuable news on climate change as well. Their research shows that the strength of ...

URBANA. Ill. – Pork producers need accurate information on the energy value of fat in feed ingredients to ensure that diets are formulated economically and in a way that maximizes pork fat quality. Researchers at the University of Illinois have determined the true ileal and total tract digestibility of fat in four corn co-products, as well as in full fat soybeans and corn oil. Hans H. Stein, a professor of animal sciences at U of I, led the team of researchers in the study in which they looked at four corn co-products: distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), high-protein ...

Every time one of your cells divides, it exposes its most essential component to great danger: its genome, the sum total of all its genetic information, embodied in the double-stranded helix of DNA. Prior to cell division, this DNA splits into two single strands, each bearing sequences of biochemical bases that form templates for the genomes of the daughter cells. These single strands are particularly vulnerable to assaults by reactive oxygen species — toxic byproducts of respiration — that could cause changes in the genetic information they contain. Left unchecked, ...

Washington, D.C.— Hydrogen is deceptively simple. It has only a single electron per atom, but it powers the sun and forms the majority of the observed universe. As such, it is naturally exposed to the entire range of pressures and temperatures available in the whole cosmos. But researchers are still struggling to understand even basic aspects of its various forms under high-pressure conditions. Experimental difficulties contribute to the lack of knowledge about hydrogen's forms. The containment of hydrogen at high pressures and the competition between its many similar ...

HOUSTON (July 29, 3013) – When you sprint, the "fast" muscle fibers give you that winning kick. In a marathon or just day-to-day activity, however, the "slow," or type 1 fibers, keep you going for hours. In people with myotonic dystrophy, the second most common form of muscular dystrophy and the one most likely to occur in adults, these slow or type 1 fibers do not work well, wasting away as the genetic disorder takes its grim toll. In a report that appears online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Thomas A. Cooper, professor of pathology & immunology ...

WASHINGTON – Men who decide to be screened for prostate cancer and those who forgo PSA screening stick with their decisions after receiving materials explaining the risks and benefits of the test. The decision aids greatly increased their knowledge about screening and reduced their conflict about what to do, but did not have an impact on their screening decision when measured a year later. That's the finding of a new study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine that examined both web-based and printed tools aimed at helping men make informed decisions about PSA testing. In ...

College football players, especially linemen, may develop high blood pressure over the course of their first season, according to a small study in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation. Researchers documented higher blood pressure levels among 113 first-year college players. Only one player had already been diagnosed with hypertension before the season and 27 percent had a family history of hypertension. At post-season, researchers noted: 47 percent of players were considered pre-hypertensive, while 14 percent had stage 1 hypertension. While previous ...

Management of back pain appears to be variable, despite numerous published clinical guidelines, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Spinal symptoms are among the most common reasons patients visit a physician and more than 10 percent of visits to primary care physicians relate to back and neck pain, the authors write in the study background. John N. Mafi, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, Boston, and colleagues used nationally representative data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital ...

Patients who received their first kidney transplant at ages 14 to 16 years appear to be at increased risk for transplant failure, with black adolescents having a disproportionately higher risk of graft failure, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Existing medical literature does not adequately describe the risks of graft failure among kidney transplant recipients by age. Organ losses by adolescents are partly due to physiologic or immunologic changes with age but psychological and sociological factors play a role, especially ...

Both web-based and print-based decision aids appear to improve patients' informed decision making about prostate cancer screening up to 13 months later, but does not appear to affect actual screening rates, according to a study by Kathryn L. Taylor, Ph.D., of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and colleagues. A total of 1,893 men participated in the study, with 628 men randomly given a print-decision aid, 625 men used a web-based interactive decision aid, and 626 men received usual care. Researchers measured the participants' prostate cancer knowledge, decisional ...

Breastfeeding longer is associated with better receptive language at 3 years of age and verbal and nonverbal intelligence at age 7 years, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. Evidence supports the relationship between breastfeeding and health benefits in infancy, but the extent to which breastfeeding leads to better cognitive development is less certain, according to the study background. Mandy B. Belfort, M.D., M.P.H., of Boston Children's Hospital, and colleagues examined the relationships of breastfeeding duration and exclusivity ...

Glucose intolerance or insulin resistance do not appear to be associated with pathological features of Alzheimer disease (AD) or detection of the accumulation of the brain protein β-amyloid (Αβ), according to a report published by JAMA Neurology, a JAMA Network publication. Glucose intolerance and diabetes mellitus have been proposed as risk factors for the development of AD, but evidence of this has not been consistent, the study background notes. Madhav Thambisetty, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, and colleagues investigated ...

Healthcare professionals are urged to counsel heart and stroke patients on how to resume a healthy sex life, according to a joint statement published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation and the European Heart Journal. It is the first scientific statement to offer detailed guidance for patients. "Patients are anxious and often afraid sex will trigger another cardiac event – but the topic sometimes gets passed over because of embarrassment or discomfort," said Elaine Steinke, A.P.R.N., Ph.D., lead author of the statement and professor of nursing at Wichita ...

BOSTON – Patient care could be enhanced and the health care system could see significant cost savings if health care professionals followed published clinical guidelines to manage and treat back pain, according to researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and published in the July 29 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. "Back pain treatment is costly and frequently includes overuse of treatments that are not supported by clinical guidelines, and that don't impact outcomes," says lead author John N. Mafi, MD, a fellow in the Division of General Medicine and Primary ...

A team led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health has overcome a major biological hurdle in an effort to find improved treatments for patients with a rare disease called methylmalonic acidemia (MMA). Using genetically engineered mice created for their studies, the team identified a set of biomarkers of kidney damage—a hallmark of the disorder—and demonstrated that antioxidant therapy protected kidney function in the mice. Researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH, validated the same biomarkers in 46 patients with MMA ...

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have created and confirmed the accuracy of a mathematical model that predicts how weight and body fat in children respond to adjustments in diet and physical activity. The results will appear online July 30 in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. While the model may help to set realistic expectations, it has not been tested in a controlled clinical trial to determine if it is an effective tool for weight management. The model evolved from one developed at the NIH in 2011 to predict weight change in adults. The model ...

In 2011, Nature announced that scientists had discovered a single-celled organism that is a primitive farmer. The organism, a social amoeba called Dictyostelium discoideum, picks up edible bacteria, carries them to new locations and harvests them like crops. D. discoideum enjoyed a brief spell in the media spotlight, billed as the world's smallest farmer. Now a collaboration of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University has taken a closer look at one lineage, or clone, of a D. discoideum farmer. This farmer carries not one but two strains ...

In perhaps the most comprehensive and definitive effort to date, scientists have explained the processes that drove male mammals to adopt social monogamy as a breeding strategy. Because male mammals have a much higher potential to produce offspring in a single breeding season than do their female counterparts (who must endure long gestation periods), it would seem that mating with one female per cycle would be limiting. Yet a percentage of mammalian males do this -- and researchers have debated why, seeking to identify selective advantages social monogamy offers, for ...

The chemical components crucial to the start of life on Earth may have primed and protected each other in never-before-realized ways, according to new research led by University of Washington scientists. It could mean a simpler scenario for how that first spark of life came about on the planet, according to Sarah Keller, UW professor of chemistry, and Roy Black, UW affiliate professor of bioengineering, both co-authors of a paper published online July 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have long thought that life started when the right ...