Madrid, Spain, 14 June 2013: New study data presented today at EULAR 2013, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism, demonstrate a high prevalence of NSAID prescriptions in patients at risk of ischaemic heart disease (IHD). Published evidence suggest significant cardiovascular implications of NSAIDs for patients, with an immediate mortality risk demonstrated in patients who had suffered a myocardial infarction (MI, heart attack) even when prescribed treatment duration was less than one week.2 NSAIDs are used to relieve pain and signs of inflammation, ...

Madrid, Spain, 14 June 2013: A new study presented today at EULAR 2013, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism, shows that overweight and obese patients are less likely to achieve successful remission in early rheumatoid arthritis (ERA) compared to those of normal weight. Obese and overweight ERA subjects required 2.4 times more anti-TNF therapy throughout the study than normal weight participants without achieving similar remission outcomes. RA is a chronic, inflammatory autoimmune disease affecting approximately 1 in 100 people worldwide. RA ...

Madrid, Spain, 12 June 2013: Data presented at EULAR 2013, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism, show that novel antibody biomarkers could significantly improve diagnosis in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Four candidate biomarkers – UH-RA.1, UH-RA.9, UH-RA.14 and UH-RA.21 – were investigated; as a group they demonstrated 85% specificity for RA, and were present in both early and seronegative disease, with 36% of early RA and 24% of RF- and ACCP -negative patients testing positive. RA is a chronic autoimmune disease characterised by inflammation ...

This news release is available in German. Locating a car that's blowing its horn in heavy traffic, channel-hopping between football and a thriller on TV without losing the plot, and not forgetting the start of a sentence by the time we have read to the end – we consider all of these to be normal everyday functions. They enable us to react to fast-changing circumstances and to carry out even complex activities correctly. For this to work, the neuron circuits in our brain have to be very flexible. Scientists working under the leadership of neurobiologists Nils Brose ...

Scientists who designed GPS tracking collars to study hunting cheetahs in Botswana have miniaturised them to track 50 domestic cats in a Surrey village for a BBC programme. The BBC also deployed cat-cams which were turned on by the collar's activity sensor when the cat was moving. 'The Secret Life of The Cat' is broadcast on BBC Two Horizon on Thursday June 13th 2013 at 21:00. In a first study of its kind the wanderings of our feline friends were recorded, revealing how far they roamed and what they got up to once they leave their owners behind. The team were concerned ...

If you are healthy and plan to start running for the first time, it is perfectly all right to put on a pair of completely ordinary 'neutral' running shoes without any special support. Even though your feet overpronate when you run – i.e. roll inwards. There appears to be no risk that overpronation or underpronation can lead to running injuries through using neutral shoes for this special group of healthy beginners. This is the result of a study conducted at Aarhus University which has just been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine under the title "Foot ...

Research from the University of Adelaide shows middle-aged women are more likely to suffer depression from a common medical problem that they find too embarrassing to talk about: urinary incontinence. However, help is available for women if they seek medical advice, researchers say. In a study of the experiences of women with urinary incontinence, researcher Jodie Avery found that middle-aged women with incontinence (aged 43-65) were more likely to be depressed than older women (aged 65-89). Speaking in the lead up to World Continence Week (24-30 June), Ms Avery says ...

In a piece of work carried out by the Carbohydrate Metabolism Research Team of the Institute of Agrobiotechnology (a centre jointly owned by the NUP/UPNA-Public University of Navarre, the Spanish National Scientific Research Council-CSIC, and the Government of Navarre), the discovery has been made of the way in which the glgS gene (now renamed as the "surface composition regulator", scoR) acts in bacteria and how the mechanisms involved in bacterial infection can be altered by manipulating this gene, which indirectly affects glycogen production. The finding has been protected ...

A new study shows that small websites, in terms of daily user flux based on number of clicks, have a disproportionally high impact when it comes to traffic generation and influence compared to larger websites. These findings, about to be published in EPJ B, have implications for estimating the value of sites and related advertising revenue. They result from the work of Lingfei Wu from the City University of Hong Kong and Jiang Zhang from the School of Management, at Beijing Normal University, China. Previous studies have analysed hyperlinks, while individual browsing ...

TORONTO, June 14, 2013—Older patients who know they are at risk of fractures will make positive lifestyle changes to avoid them, such as exercising, wearing proper footwear and taking supplements, a new study has found. The findings are important because much previous research in bone health has focused on medications or found that people make negative lifestyle changes such as reducing housework or leisure activities because they are afraid of falling, said Dr. Joanna Sale, a researcher at St. Michael's Hospital and lead author of the study. Half of all women over the ...

The ocean the Titanic sailed through just over 100 years ago was very different from the one we swim in today. Global warming is increasing ocean temperatures and harming marine food webs. Nitrogen run-off from fertilizers is causing coastal dead zones. A McGill-led international research team has now completed the first global study of changes that occurred in a crucial component of ocean chemistry, the nitrogen cycle, at the end of the last ice age. The results of their study confirm that oceans are good at balancing the nitrogen cycle on a global scale. But the data ...

A new study by astronomers at NASA, Johns Hopkins University and Rochester Institute of Technology confirms long-held suspicions about how stellar-mass black holes produce their highest-energy light. "We're accurately representing the real object and calculating the light an astronomer would actually see," says Scott Noble, associate research scientist in RIT's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation. "This is a first-of-a-kind calculation where we actually carry out all the pieces together. We start with the equations we expect the system to follow, and ...

In current health lore, antioxidants are all the rage, as "everybody knows" that reducing the amount of "reactive oxygen species" -- cell-damaging molecules that are byproducts of cellular metabolism -- is critical to staying healthy. What everyone doesn't know is that our bodies already have a complex set of processes built into our cells that handle these harmful byproducts of living and repair the damage they cause. For example, few of us realize that, while our cells' DNA is constantly being damaged by reactive oxygen species (as well as by other forces), there are ...

From skeletons and biopsies, an international team of scientists was successful in reconstructing a dozen medieval and modern genomes of the leprosy-causing bacteria Mycobacterium leprae. Under the direction of Professor Johannes Krause, University of Tübingen, and Professor Stewart Cole, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL), the research group created a genome from archaeological finds for the first time without having to resort to a reference sequence. Professor Almut Nebel and Dr. Ben Krause-Kyora, both of the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology, ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Social phobias affect about 15 million adults in the United States, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and surveys show that public speaking is high on the list of such phobias. For some people, these fears of social situations can be especially acute: For example, individuals with Asperger's syndrome often have difficulty making eye contact and reacting appropriately to social cues. But with appropriate training, such difficulties can often be overcome. Now, new software developed at MIT can be used to help people practice their interpersonal ...

They lie dormant for years, but at the first sign of favorable conditions they awaken. This sounds like the tagline for a science fiction movie, but it describes the amazing life-cycles of microbial organisms that form the biological soil crusts (BSCs) of Earth's deserts. Now a research team with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has reported a unique molecular-level analysis of a BSC cyanobacterium responding to the wetting and drying of its environment. The results hold implications for land management, improved ...

MADISON-— As spring warms up Wisconsin, humans aren't the only ones tending their gardens. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Bacteriology, colonies of leaf-cutter ants cultivate thriving communities of fungi and bacteria using freshly cut plant material. While these fungus gardens are a source of food and shelter for the ants, for researchers, they are potential models for better biofuel production. "We are interested in the whole fungus garden community, because a lot of plant biomass goes in and is converted to energy for the ants," says Frank ...

WORCESTER – Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School have developed a novel transgenic system which allows them to remotely activate individual brain cells in the model organism Drosophila using ambient temperature. This powerful new tool for identifying and characterizing neural circuitry has lead to the identification of a pair of neurons – now called Fdg neurons – in the fruit fly that decide when to eat and initiate the subsequent feeding action. Discovery of these neurons may help neurobiologists better understand how the brain uses memory and stimuli ...

By midcentury, snowfall on Los Angeles–area mountains will be 30 to 40 percent less than it was at the end of the 20th century, according to a UCLA study released today and led by UCLA climate expert Alex Hall. The projected snow loss, a result of climate change, could get even worse by the end of the 21st century, depending on how the world reacts. Sustained action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions could keep annual average snowfall levels steady after mid-century, but if emissions continue unabated, the study predicts that snowfall in Southern California mountains ...

It is a mystery that has stymied astrophysicists for decades: how do black holes produce so many high-power X-rays? In a new study, astrophysicists from The Johns Hopkins University, NASA and the Rochester Institute of Technology bridged the gap between theory and observation by demonstrating that gas spiraling toward a black hole inevitably results in X-ray emissions. The paper states that as gas spirals toward a black hole through a formation called an accretion disk, it heats up to roughly 10 million degrees Celsius. The temperature in the main body of the disk ...

A study published in this week's PLOS Computational Biology reports that menopause is an unintended outcome of natural selection caused by the preference of males for younger female mates. While conventional thinking has held that menopause prevents older women from continuing to reproduce, the researchers, from McMaster's University, concluded that it is the lack of reproduction that has given rise to menopause. The researchers found that, over time, competition among men of all ages for younger mates has left older females with much less chance of reproducing. The pressures ...

Contact: Michael S. Irwig mirwig@mfa.gwu.edu 202-741-2489 The George Washington University Contact: Chuck Zorumski zorumskc@psychiatry.wustl.edu 314-286-1700 Washington University School of Medicine Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research Finasteride, medication for male pattern hair loss, may also decrease drinking Finasteride is a synthetic drug for the treatment of male pattern hair loss and an enlarged prostate. Rodent research has shown that finasteride can reduce alcohol intake. A preliminary study of men with finasteride-related sexual ...

Contact: Stephania A. Cormier scorm1@lsuhsc.edu 504-568-2810 Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Contact: George Leikauf gleikauf@pitt.edu 412-383-5305 University of Pittsburgh Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research Chronic drinking + exposure to particulate matter dramatically decreases lung function Alveolar macrophage (AM) function plays a critical role in protecting the lungs by removing particulates. Chronic drinking causes persistent oxidative stress in the lungs, leading to impaired AM function. A new rodent study shows that ...

Contact: Eva E. Redei e-redei@northwestern.edu 312-908-1791 Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Contact: R. Thomas Zoeller tzoeller@bio.umass.edu 413-545-2088 University of Massachusetts Amherst Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and autism spectrum disorder share common molecular vulnerabilities Both Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders and Autism Spectrum Disorder are neurodevelopmental in origin. A new rodent study has found that these disorders share common molecular vulnerabilities. Findings ...

Contact: Carolyn E. Sartor carolyn.sartor@yale.edu 203-932-5711 ext. 3894 Yale University School of Medicine Contact: Denise Herd tiara@berkeley.edu 510-642-4842 University of California at Berkeley Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research Certain environmental factors impact alcohol problems more for European than African-American women An early age at first drink (AFD) is associated with a greater risk for subsequent alcohol use disorders. A new study looks at the influences of genetics versus the environment on AFD and problem drinking among African ...