Down syndrome, more commonly known as "trisomy 21" is very often accompanied by pathologies found in the general population: Alzheimer's disease, leukemia, or cardiac deficiency. In a study conducted by Professor Stylianos Antonarakis' group from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva (UNIGE), researchers have identified the genomic variations associated with trisomy 21, determining the risk of congenital heart disease in people with Down syndrome. The targeted and specific study of chromosome 21 revealed two genomic variations, which, in combination, are the ...

For the first time, researchers have restored significant bladder function through nerve regeneration in rats with the most severe spinal cord injuries (SCI). The breakthrough paired a traditional nerve bridge graft with a novel combination of scar degrading and growth factor treatments to grow new nerve cells from the thoracic level to the lower spinal cord region. Details of the discovery appear in the June 26 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Neuroscientists from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Cleveland Clinic built a regeneration bridge ...

We constantly grow new skin and slough off the old. Until now, scientists have never agreed on exactly how this works, but new research from the University of Sheffield may provide the answer. Engineers and biologists at the University of Sheffield have shown how a recent theory-- that skin has 'sleeping' stem cells which can be woken up when required-- best explains how our skin constantly regrows. The research-- conducted in collaboration with The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G), makers of Olay, and published in Nature Scientific Reports-- has implications for combating ...

Being in good physical shape at 18 years of age can be linked with a reduced risk of attempted suicide later in life. So says a study of over one million Swedish men conducted by researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. A new, extensive report from the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare on child and adolescent health shows that teenagers and young adults in Sweden have worse mental health than their age cohorts in other western countries. Another report that is part of a new social welfare study shows that the number of serious ...

The knees are the body part that is injured the most by dinghy sailors. The injuries are primarily due to overstrain and most often occur during physical training. This was shown in a study at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. "Studies have been made on the risk of injury for many sports, but not for dinghy sailing. With more knowledge, we can create recommendations that will prevent sailors from getting injured," says Lena Bøymo-Having, who conducted the study at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg. During the study, researchers followed ...

Having a job helps women with HIV manage their illnesses, according to researchers from Case Western Reserve University and the University of California at San Francisco. The routine of a work schedule, plus the job-related money and benefits, provides extra emotional support for these women, said Allison Webel, assistant professor of nursing at Case Western Reserve University's Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and the study's lead author. Findings in the National Institutes of Health-supported study were published this month in Social Science & Medicine. The ...

Bullfinches learn from human teachers to sing melodies accurately, according to a new study by the late Nicolai Jürgen and researchers from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. Their analysis of human melody singing in bullfinches gives insights into the songbirds' brain processes. The work is published online in Springer's journal Animal Cognition. Music performance is considered to be one of the most complex and demanding cognitive challenges that the human mind can undertake. Melody singing requires precise timing of several organized actions as well as accurate ...

New research from the University of Guelph, published Tuesday in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, says that allowing industrial extraction in a northern Ontario old-growth red pine forest – the largest remaining in the world – would significantly threaten biodiversity in Canada. The study says that Wolf Lake Forest Reserve is a "scientifically irreplaceable system." "Wolf Lake Forest deserves intensive study, monitoring and full protection from future development," said Guelph environmental sciences professor Madhur Anand, the study's lead author. Old-growth ...

Patients in moderate to severe pain in emergency rooms across the U.S. are less likely to receive opioid pain medications if they are black, Hispanic, poor, or have less education, compared to more affluent patients, according to a University of Rochester Medical Center study reported in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The study took place against the backdrop of a national epidemic of narcotics abuse, combined with a need to satisfy patients' legitimate complaints of pain. Racial and ethnic disparities are already well-documented in the scientific literature, ...

Bethesda, MD (June 26, 2013) — More people are being affected by drug-induced liver injury (DILI) than ever before, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. This type of liver injury results from the use of certain prescription and over-the-counter medications, as well as dietary supplements, and is among the more challenging forms of liver disease due to its difficulty to predict, diagnose and manage. Investigators conducted a population-based study in Iceland uncovering 19.1 cases of drug-induced ...

Contrary to popular belief, crabgrass does not thrive in lawns, gardens and farm fields by simply crowding out other plants. A new study in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has found that the much-despised weed actually produces its own herbicides that kill nearby plants. Chui-Hua Kong and colleagues point out that crabgrass is not only a headache for lawns and home gardens, but also a major cause of crop loss on farms. Scientists long suspected, but had a hard time proving, that the weed thrived by allelopathy. From the Greek "allelo-," meaning "other," ...

Distal radius fractures (often simply termed wrist or Colles' fractures) are the second most common fractures in the elderly. Beyond the immediate impact on the patient, wrist fractures in older adults often indicate underlying osteoporosis and high risk of subsequent fragility fractures. Despite their clinical significance, evidence-based practice and clinical research on wrist fractures are hampered by the lack of standardized methods of outcome measurement. A new publication* by the Distal Radius Working Group of the International Society for Fracture Repair (ISFR) ...

Scientists are reporting progress in the search for the first broad-spectrum drugs to combat human rhinoviruses (HRVs), which cause humanity's most common infectious diseases. Their study on these potential drugs for infections that include the common cold appears in the journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters. Angus MacLeod and colleagues note that although many HRV infections cause mild disease, they can lead to dangerous complications for millions of people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Previous potential drugs for HRV either didn't work or ...

Energy conservation in a small number of households could go a long way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, scientists are reporting. Their study, which measured differences in energy demands at the household level, appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. Dominik Saner and colleagues point out that the energy people use to power their homes and to satisfy their mobility needs accounts for more than 70 percent of emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas involved in global climate change. To cope with that problem, policymakers and environmentalists ...

While the iPad® is being used for intraoperative procedure guidance, percutaneous procedure planning, and mobile interpretation of some imaging examinations, the majority of radiology residents are using it primarily as an educational tool, according to a study published online in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. "Some sectors of the medical community consider the iPad to be a revolutionary tool in health care delivery, with many use scenarios focused on medical imaging. The purpose of our study was to assess residents' use patterns and opinions of the ...

Someone finds that piece of chewing gum you pitched today, uses the saliva to sequence your DNA and surreptitiously reads your book of life — including genetic secrets like your susceptibility to diseases. If that scenario, posed in an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, causes a little discomfort, consider this: That stranger also uses the DNA to reconstruct a copy of y-o-u. Linda Wang, a senior editor of C&EN, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, focuses on an unusual art exhibition ...

BOSTON (June 26, 2013)-- Community wide interventions hold promise as an effective approach to reducing childhood obesity rates according to new research from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and Tufts University School of Medicine. An analysis of data from the first two school years (20 calendar months) of the Shape Up Somerville: Eat Smart Play Hard™ intervention showed that schoolchildren in Somerville, Massachusetts gained less weight and were less likely to be obese or overweight than schoolchildren in two similar control communities. ...

UC Berkeley researchers have found that a lack of sleep, which is common in anxiety disorders, may play a key role in ramping up the brain regions that contribute to excessive worrying. Neuroscientists have found that sleep deprivation amplifies anticipatory anxiety by firing up the brain's amygdala and insular cortex, regions associated with emotional processing. The resulting pattern mimics the abnormal neural activity seen in anxiety disorders. Furthermore, their research suggests that innate worriers – those who are naturally more anxious and therefore more likely ...

Across sub-Saharan Africa, women and children play major roles as pedestrian load-transporters, in the widespread absence of basic sanitation services, electricity and affordable/reliable motorised transport. Professor Kim Buton of the University of Huddersfield, has coauthored an international study to look at the health impacts that this practice can have. The majority of loads, including water and firewood for domestic purposes, are carried on the head. Load-carrying has implications not only for school attendance and performance, women's time budgets and gender ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., and MARINA DEL REY, Calif., June 26, 2013 — Los Alamos National Laboratory and Tribogenics, the pioneer of innovative X-ray solutions, have partnered to create a unique, lightweight, compact, low-cost X-ray system that uses the MiniMAX (Miniature, Mobile, Agile, X-ray) camera to provide real-time inspection of sealed containers and facilities. The innovative technology will be featured at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) International Conference on Nuclear Security: Enhancing Global Efforts, July 1-5, in Vienna, Austria. "Cost and portability ...

Gliomas are malignant brain tumors that arise from glial cells called astrocytes, found in the central nervous system. "In treating malignant gliomas, we currently combine radiotherapy with the anticancer drug temozolomide. However, in some patients, tumors rapidly become resistant to both treatment methods," says neurooncologist Professor Dr. Michael Platten, who leads a cooperation unit of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) and the Department of Neurooncology of Heidelberg University Hospital. "We therefore urgently need new methods ...

NEW YORK-- A newly transferred associate from the Shanghai office nails his presentation to Mr. Smith from Chicago but stumbles in his pitch to Mr. Chen from San Francisco. A visiting professor from Taiwan lectures fluently about a slide of a Grecian urn, but falters and struggles to recall the word "translucent" when discussing a Ming vase. What is it about seeing a Chinese face or even a Chinese vase that can disrupt a Chinese immigrant's fluency in English? Research on how cultural knowledge operates in the mind increasingly focuses on the dynamics through which ...

In 2011 and 2012, research from China's Nanjing University made international headlines with reports that after mice ate, bits of genetic material from the plants they'd ingested could make it into their bloodstreams intact and turn the animals' own genes off. The surprising results from Chen-Yu Zhang's group led to speculation that genetic illness might one day be treated with medicinal food, but also to worry that genetically modified foods might in turn modify consumers in unanticipated ways. Now, though, a research team at Johns Hopkins reports that Zhang's results ...

DETROIT — A Wayne State University researcher has found that sleep apnea severity is higher among African-American men in certain age ranges, even after controlling for body mass index (BMI). A study by James A. Rowley, M.D., professor of internal medicine in WSU's School of Medicine, showed that being an African-American man younger than 40 years old increased the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) by 3.21 breathing pauses per hour of sleep compared to a white man in the same age range with the same BMI. Obstructive sleep apnea affects at least 4 percent of men and 2 percent ...

June 26, 2013—One in five adolescents surveyed in Ontario, Canada said they have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that left them unconscious for five minutes or required them to be hospitalized overnight, a statistic researchers in Toronto say is much higher than previously thought. Sports such as ice hockey and soccer accounted for more than half the injuries, said Dr. Gabreila Ilie, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral fellow at St. Michael's Hospital. Traumatic brain injuries, such as concussions, were reported more often by males than females, by ...