SEATTLE – By the end of 2011, most of the 255 Washington residents who received a prescription for lethal medication to end their lives under the state's Death with Dignity Act had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Of those, 40 were patients at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, part of the Pacific Northwest's only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. Because several states are considering similar Death with Dignity laws, and because such legislation disproportionately affects cancer patients and their families, SCCA conducted a study to describe ...

A new broad range antibiotic, developed jointly by scientists at The Rockefeller University and Astex Pharmaceuticals, has been found to kill a wide range of bacteria, including drug-resistant Staphylococcus (MRSA) bacteria that do not respond to traditional drugs, in mice. The antibiotic, Epimerox, targets weaknesses in bacteria that have long been exploited by viruses that attack them, known as phage, and has even been shown to protect animals from fatal infection by Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax. Target selection is critical for the development ...

HOUSTON -- (April 10, 2013) – Some breast tumor circulating cells in the bloodstream are marked by a constellation of biomarkers that identify them as those destined to seed the brain with a deadly spread of cancer, said researchers led by those at Baylor College of Medicine in a report that appears online in the journal Science Translational Medicine. "What prompted us to initiate this study was our desire to understand the characteristics of these cells," said Dr. Dario Marchetti, professor of pathology at BCM, director of the CTC (circulating tumor cell) Core Facility ...

People buy larger amounts of soda when purchasing packs of smaller drinks than when offered single servings of different sized drinks, according to research published April 10 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Brent M. Wilson and colleagues from the University of California, San Diego. The researchers tested the effects of limiting sugary drink sizes on people's soda consumption by offering them three kinds of menus. One menu offered 16 , 24 or 32 ounce sized individual drinks, a second gave them the choices of a 16 oz. drink, or bundles of two 12 ounce drinks or ...

The great age of the embryos is unusual because almost all known dinosaur embryos are from the Cretaceous Period. The Cretaceous ended some 125 million years after the bones at the Lufeng site were buried and fossilized. Led by University of Toronto Mississauga paleontologist Robert Reisz, an international team of scientists from Canada, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, Australia, and Germany excavated and analyzed over 200 bones from individuals at different stages of embryonic development. "We are opening a new window into the lives of dinosaurs," says Reisz. ...

A significant breakthrough has been made by scientists at The University of Manchester towards developing an effective treatment for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Researchers at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology have detailed how an enzyme in the brain interacts with an exciting drug-like lead compound for Huntington's Disease to inhibit its activity. Their findings demonstrate that it can be developed as an effective treatment for neurodegenerative diseases. The research is published in the journal Nature. Working ...

A new study suggests that surgery for appendicitis that uses a pinhole incision through the navel may be a feasible alternative to traditional appendectomies. Published early online in the British Journal of Surgery, the findings indicate that larger studies to test the potential of the procedure are warranted. An experimental, minimally invasive, and scarless surgical procedure for appendicitis called transgastric appendicectomy avoids the use of external incisions and causes less pain than traditional appendectomies. Through the insertion of a needle, an endoscope is ...

VIDEO: CLARITY provided this 3D view showing a thick slice of a mouse brain's memory hub, or hippocampus. It reveals a few different types of cells: Projecting neurons (green), connecting interneurons... Click here for more information. Slicing optional. Scientists can now study the brain's finer workings, while preserving its 3-D structure and integrity of its circuitry and other biological machinery. A breakthrough method, called CLARITY, developed by National Institutes ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Combining neuroscience and chemical engineering, researchers at Stanford University have developed a process that renders a mouse brain transparent. The postmortem brain remains whole — not sliced or sectioned in any way — with its three-dimensional complexity of fine wiring and molecular structures completely intact and able to be measured and probed at will with visible light and chemicals. The process, called CLARITY, ushers in an entirely new era of whole-organ imaging that stands to fundamentally change our scientific understanding of the most-important-but-least-understood ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Do the brains of different people listening to the same piece of music actually respond in the same way? An imaging study by Stanford University School of Medicine scientists says the answer is yes, which may in part explain why music plays such a big role in our social existence. The investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify a distributed network of several brain structures whose activity levels waxed and waned in a strikingly similar pattern among study participants as they listened to classical music they'd never heard ...

Hunter-gatherers living in glacial conditions produced pots for cooking fish, according to the findings of a pioneering new study led by the University of York which reports the earliest direct evidence for the use of ceramic vessels. Scientists from the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan carried out chemical analysis of food residues in pottery up to 15,000 years old from the late glacial period, the oldest pottery so far investigated. It is the first study to directly address the often posed question "why humans made pots?" The research is published in Nature. The ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Mining the records of routine interactions between patients and their care providers can detect drug side effects a couple of years before an official alert from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a Stanford University School of Medicine study has found. The study, led by Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, will be published online April 10 in Nature Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. This approach is a step forward in mining patient-based information, as opposed to coded insurance reports or drug-specific databases, to ...

Half of all formal patient complaints made in Australia to health ombudsmen concern just 3% of the country's doctors, with 1% accounting for a quarter of all complaints, finds research published online in BMJ Quality & Safety. Doctors complained about more than three times are highly likely to be the subject of a further complaint - and often within a couple of years - the findings show. The problem is unlikely to be confined to Australia, warn commentators, who point out that while regulators often know about these problem doctors, patients usually don't. The researchers ...

Rates of surgery to correct childhood squint in England have tumbled over the past 50 years, finds research published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. But there's still a fivefold difference between the areas with the lowest and highest rates of the procedure, similar to the wide variations in tonsil removal, and it's not clear why, say the authors. Squint (strabismus) is one of the most common eye problems in children, with a prevalence of between 2% and 5%. Risk factors include family history, low birthweight, premature birth, being born to an older ...

A research team of Inserm, CNRS and MDC lead by Michael Sieweke of the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille Luminy (CNRS, INSERM, Aix Marseille Université) and Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine, Berlin-Buch, today revealed an unexpected role for hematopoietic stem cells: they do not merely ensure the continuous renewal of our blood cells; in emergencies they are capable of producing white blood cells "on demand" that help the body deal with inflammation or infection. This property could be used to protect against infections in patients undergoing bone marrow transplants, ...

For the first time, scientists have been able to predict how much pain people are feeling by looking at images of their brains, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, may lead to the development of reliable methods doctors can use to objectively quantify a patient's pain. Currently, pain intensity can only be measured based on a patient's own description, which often includes rating the pain on a scale of one to 10. Objective measures of pain could confirm these pain reports ...

The study will be presented today (11 April 2013) at the Sleep and Breathing Conference in Berlin, organised by the European Respiratory Society and the European Sleep Research Society. Previous research has demonstrated that people with sleep apnoea are less productive at work, usually due to excessive daytime sleepiness. This study aimed to assess whether continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) improved productivity at work. The researchers used the Endicott Work Productivity Scale, a questionnaire designed to assess productivity at work, and the Epworth Sleepiness ...

MIAMI –April 9, 2013 – Many terrestrial animals are frequently observed scavenging on other animals– whether it is a hyena stealing a lion kill in the Serengeti or a buzzard swooping down on a dead animal. However, documenting this sort of activity in the oceans is especially difficult, and often overlooked in marine food web studies. In a new study published in PLOS ONE titled, "White sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) scavenging on whales and its potential role in further shaping the ecology of an apex predator," Captain Chris Fallows from Apex Expeditions collaborated ...

A 2011 record-breaking algae bloom in Lake Erie was triggered by long-term agricultural practices coupled with extreme precipitation, followed by weak lake circulation and warm temperatures, scientists have discovered. The researchers also predict that, unless agricultural policies change, the lake will continue to experience extreme blooms. "The factors that led to this explosion of algal blooms are all related to humans and our interaction with the environment," says Bruce Hamilton, program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the research ...

Chicago (April 10, 2013)—A major challenge facing today's health care community is to find ways to lower costs without compromising clinical quality. Taking that challenge to task, researchers at Medstar Health and Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington DC, report success in using a concept called "value-based analysis," which simultaneously measures quality and cost and addresses inefficiencies in care. The researchers applied a value-based analysis approach to implementing a single best practice for preventing deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in surgical patients ...

Proteins are vital parts of living organisms, performing a variety of essential functions such as DNA replication, catabolizing reactions, and responding to stimuli. The complete set of proteins expressed in an organism at a given time, under defined conditions, is known as the proteome. While the genome of an organism remains relatively stable, the proteome is remarkably dynamic, varying from cell to cell and even within a single cell and changing rapidly in response to developmental and environmental cues. Proteomics is a powerful technique for examining the structure ...

Your brain knows it's time to cook when the stove is on, and the food and pots are out. When you rush away to calm a crying child, though, cooking is over and it's time to be a parent. Your brain processes and responds to these occurrences as distinct, unrelated events. But it remains unclear exactly how the brain breaks such experiences into "events," or the related groups that help us mentally organize the day's many situations. A dominant concept of event-perception known as prediction error says that our brain draws a line between the end of one event and the start ...

Humans could learn a thing or two from turtles, and scientists who have just sequenced the first turtle genome uncovered clues about how people can benefit from the shelled creatures' remarkable longevity and ability to survive for months without breathing. Understanding the natural mechanisms turtles use to protect their heart and brain from oxygen deprivation may one day improve treatments for heart attack and stroke, the researchers said. UCLA conservation biologist and lead author Brad Shaffer collaborated with the Genome Institute at Washington University in ...

ANN ARBOR—Researchers at the University of Michigan have identified a new potential therapeutic target for lowering cholesterol that could be an alternative or complementary therapy to statins. Scientists in the lab of David Ginsburg at the Life Sciences Institute inhibited the action of a gene responsible for transporting a protein that interferes with the ability of the liver to remove cholesterol from the blood in mice. Trapping the destructive protein where it couldn't harm receptors responsible for removing cholesterol preserved the liver cells' capacity to clear ...

Think of a stereotypical salesperson and you're likely to conjure up someone who's extraverted, gregarious, and assertive. But a new study reveals that "ambiverts," people who are neither introverted nor extraverted but who fall somewhere in between, tend to be the most effective salespeople. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researcher Adam Grant of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was driven to explore the relationship between sales and personality traits after realizing there ...