WASHINGTON -- The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has saved and improved millions of lives worldwide and offered proof that HIV/AIDS services can be effectively delivered on a large scale even in countries with high rates of disease and resource constraints, says a new congressionally mandated evaluation conducted by the Institute of Medicine. Moving forward, PEPFAR needs to intensify efforts to help its partner countries develop the capacity to manage their own programs, sustain the gains that have been made in controlling the HIV epidemic, and improve ...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2013— Digital cameras, medical scanners, and other imaging technologies have advanced considerably during the past decade. Continuing this pace of innovation, an Austrian research team has developed an entirely new way of capturing images based on a flat, flexible, transparent, and potentially disposable polymer sheet. The team describes their new device and its possible applications in a paper published today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optics Express. The new imager, which resembles a flexible plastic film, uses fluorescent ...

New Rochelle, NY, February 20, 2013–Reducing financial barriers to medication access—a strategy known as value-based insurance design (VBID)—can improve medication adherence and management of chronic diseases such as diabetes. The economic and patient-perceived benefits of eliminating co-payments for diabetes-related medications and supplies are described in a trend-setting study published in Population Health Management, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Population Health Management website at http://www.liebertpub.com/pop. In ...

A bright blue pigment used 5,000 years ago is giving modern scientists clues toward the development of new nanomaterials with potential uses in state-of-the-art medical imaging devices, remote controls for televisions, security inks and other technology. That's the conclusion of an article on the pigment, Egyptian blue, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Tina T. Salguero and colleagues point out that Egyptian blue, regarded as humanity's first artificial pigment, was used in paintings on tombs, statues and other objects throughout the ancient Mediterranean ...

It may be the 21st century, with all its technological marvels, but 6 out of every 10 people on Earth still do not have access to flush toilets or other adequate sanitation that protects the user and the surrounding community from harmful health effects, a new study has found. The research, published in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology, says the number of people without access to improved sanitation is almost double the previous estimate. amie Bartram and colleagues explain that the current definition of "improved sanitation" focuses on separating humans ...

Why do straight women and gay men form close relationships with one another? A new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin suggests the glue that cements these unique relationships is honest, unbiased relationship advice. The study, published online in the February issue of Evolutionary Psychology, is the first to provide empirical evidence that the emotional closeness shared by straight women and gay men is rooted in the absence of deceptive mating motivations. "Friendships between straight women and gay men are free of hidden mating agendas," says ...

The research was published early in the January issue of the journal Technology in Cancer Research and Treatment. The article describes experiments using ultrasonic molecular imaging (USMI) and Dynamic Contrast Enhanced-Perfusion Imaging (DCE-PI) to measure response to therapy for pancreatic cancer. Paul Dayton, PhD, senior author says, "What we found is that using two non-invasive technologies, we can detect response to therapy earlier than by relying on tumor volume changes. Having new non-invasive, inexpensive technologies available to measure response to therapy earlier ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 19, 2013 – A new study published online today in the American Journal of Managed Care found that in Medicare Part D, generic drug coverage was cost-saving compared to no coverage in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, while also improving health outcomes. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the Pitt Graduate School of Public Health, and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC note that policymakers and insurers should consider generic-only coverage, rather than no gap coverage, to both conserve health care resources ...

With biomedical scientists struggling to collect and analyze millions of gigabytes of data in their efforts to improve human health, the National Institutes of Health has launched a $700 million project to develop a common data-sharing framework and start training future scientists to tap that gold mine of information. That's the topic of a story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Britt E. Erickson, C&EN senior editor, explains that biomedical researchers ...

The tropics are home to an extraordinary diversity of insect species. How great is it, exactly? We do not know, but today, researchers at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History published a study on tropical beetles that can help us progress towards an answer to this question. The paper was published in the open access, peer-reviewed journal Zookeys. Entomologists Michael Caterino and Alexey Tishechkin have named 138 new species within the genus Operclipygus (the name refers to their clamshell-like rear end), thereby increasing the size of the genus over six times. ...

WASHINGTON -- The potential benefits of successful development of an inertial confinement fusion-based energy technology justify investment in fusion energy research and development as part of the long-term U.S. energy R&D portfolio, says a new report from the National Research Council. Although ignition of the fusion fuel has not yet been achieved, scientific and technological progress in inertial confinement fusion over the past decade has been substantial. Developing inertial fusion energy would require establishment of a national, coordinated, broad-based program, ...

The base pairs that hold together two pieces of RNA, the older cousin of DNA, are some of the most important molecular interactions in living cells. Many scientists believe that these base pairs were part of life from the very beginning and that RNA was one of the first polymers of life. But there is a problem. The RNA bases don't form base pairs in water unless they are connected to a polymer backbone, a trait that has baffled origin-of-life scientists for decades. If the bases don't pair before they are part of polymers, how would the bases have been selected out from ...

Among life's many tragedies, the death of a child is one that is perhaps the greatest for parents. No matter what the age of the child or the cause of death, the irrefutable fact of the loss is one that shatters the normal cycle of life, leaving parents traumatized and often incapacitated by grief. Research on coping with bereavement has focused primarily on the individual, despite the fact that family and married relationships are all profoundly disrupted by the loss. But in the wealth of studies about parental grief, little attention has been paid to precisely how couples ...

DETROIT – Resveratrol, a substance found in red grapes and red wine, may have the potential to protect against hearing and cognitive decline, according to a published laboratory study from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The study shows that healthy rats are less likely to suffer the long-term effects of noise-induced hearing loss when given resveratrol before being exposed to loud noise for a long period of time. "Our latest study focuses on resveratrol and its effect on bioinflammation, the body's response to injury and something that is believed to be the cause of ...

ATLANTA – Children with brain lesions suffered before or around the time of birth are able to use gestures – an important aspect of the language learning process– to convey simple sentences, a Georgia State University researcher has found. Şeyda Özçalışkan, assistant professor of psychology, and fellow researchers at the University of Chicago, looked at children who suffered lesions to one side of the brain to see whether they used gestures similar to typically developing children. She examined gestures such as pointing to a cookie while saying "eat" to ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Two major health reform laws, enacted 25 years apart, both try to meet an ethical standard to provide broad access to basic health care. Neither quite gets there -- but it's not too late for modern health care reform to bring the nation closer to a goal of comprehensive and coordinated care for all. That's the conclusion of a commentary published in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by a team of University of Michigan Health System physicians. The authors – a family physician, an emergency physician and a primary care ...

Professor Hermann Brenner and colleagues analyzed the data of 8.807 individuals aged between 50 and 74 years using data of Saarland citizens. "We were able to show that the risk of smokers for cardiovascular diseases is more than twice that of non-smokers. However, former smokers are affected at almost the same low rate as people of the same age who never smoked," says Brenner. "Moreover, smokers are affected at a significantly younger age than individuals who have never smoked or have stopped smoking." For example, a 60-year-old smoker has the same risk of myocardial infarction ...

The traditional Medicare program allocates only 1 percent of total spending to overhead compared with 6 percent when the privatized portion of Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage, is included, according to a study in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. The 1 percent figure includes all types of non-medical spending by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plus other federal agencies, such as the IRS, that support the Medicare program, and is based on data contained in the latest report of the Medicare trustees. The 6 percent ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- It took only a few years for high-definition televisions to make the transition from high-priced novelty to ubiquitous commodity — and they now seem to be heading for obsolescence just as quickly. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several manufacturers debuted new ultrahigh-definition, or UHD, models (also known as 4K or Quad HD) with four times the resolution of today's HD TVs. In addition to screens with four times the pixels, however, UHD also requires a new video-coding standard, known as high-efficiency video coding, or HEVC. Also ...

This press release is available in French. Diagnosed in toddlers, X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH) is the most common form of heritable rickets, in which soft bones bend and deform, and tooth abscesses develop because infections penetrate soft teeth that are not properly calcified. Researchers at McGill University and the Federal University of Sao Paulo have identified that osteopontin, a major bone and tooth substrate protein, plays a role in XLH. Their discovery may pave the way to effectively treating this rare disease. The findings were made by the laboratories ...

By studying the origins of different isotope ratios among the elements that make up today's smorgasbord of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and interplanetary ice and dust, Mark Thiemens and his colleagues hope to learn how our solar system evolved. Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, has worked on this problem for over three decades. In recent years his team has found the Chemical Dynamics Beamline of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ...

Rockville, Md., February 13, 2013 – With substandard and counterfeit medicines a dangerous and growing problem in the developing world and elsewhere, identifying new technologies to detect such drugs is an urgent matter. In a new study published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, scientists from the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) evaluated a handheld Raman device's potential to detect counterfeit and substandard medicines. The device, called TruScan®, is currently used to test Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) and finished pharmaceutical ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — A natural, nontoxic product called genistein-combined polysaccharide, or GCP, which is commercially available in health stores, could help lengthen the life expectancy of certain prostate cancer patients, UC Davis researchers have found. Paramita GhoshMen with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, known as metastatic cancer, and who have had their testosterone lowered with drug therapy are most likely to benefit. The study, recently published in Endocrine-Related Cancer, was conducted in prostate cancer cells and in mice. Lowering ...

Decision makers who feel powerful and in control of resources are more likely than others to make decisions that will benefit their future selves, according to researchers at the USC Marshall School of Business. Conversely, those who lack feelings of power tend to prefer smaller immediate gains – those that benefit the present self – to potentially greater benefits in the future, according to "Power and Reduced Temporal Discounting," a research paper by Nathanael Fast, an assistant professor of management and organization at and Priyanka Joshi, a doctoral candidate ...

Performing sensitive biological experiments is always a delicate affair. Few researchers, however, contend with the challenges faced by Cheryl Nickerson, whose working laboratory aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is located hundreds of miles above the Earth, traveling at some 17,000 miles per hour. Nickerson, a microbiologist at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, is using the ISS platform to pursue new research into the effects of microgravity on disease-causing organisms. Nickerson presented her research findings and charted the course for ...