CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers have discovered how oxidative stress can turn to the dark side a cellular protein that's usually benign, and make it become a powerful, unwanted accomplice in neuronal death. This finding, reported today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could ultimately lead to new therapeutic approaches to many of the world's debilitating or fatal diseases. The research explains how one form of oxidative stress called tyrosine nitration can lead to cell death. Through the common link of inflammation, this may relate to health problems ...

Boston, MA — The public is very supportive of government action aimed at changing lifestyle choices that can lead to obesity, diabetes, and other noncommunicable diseases—but they're less likely to support such interventions if they're viewed as intrusive or coercive, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) study. The study also found that support was higher for interventions that help people make more healthful choices, such as menu labeling requirements, than for interventions that penalize certain choices or health conditions, such as charging higher ...

Flocks of birds, schools of fish, and groups of any other living organisms might have a mathematical function in common. Studying aquatic microorganisms, Andrea Giometto, a researcher EPFL and Eawag, showed that for each species he studied, body sizes were distributed according to the same mathematical expression, where the only unknown is the average size of the species in an ecosystem. His article was published in in PNAS in March 2013. Several observations suggest that the size distribution function could be universal. Giometto made his observations in the lab on ...

A marathon runner approaches the finishing line, but suddenly the sweaty athlete collapses to the ground. Everyone probably assumes that this is because he has expended all energy in his muscles. What few people know is that it might also be a braking mechanism in the brain which swings into effect and makes us too tired to continue. What may be occurring is what is referred to as 'central fatigue'. "Our discovery is helping to shed light on the paradox which has long been the subject of discussion by researchers. We have always known that the neurotransmitter serotonin ...

Boston, Mass. - The underdeveloped immune systems of newborns don't respond to most vaccines, leaving them at high risk for infections like rotavirus, pertussis (whooping cough) and pneumococcus. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have identified a potent compound that activates immune responses in newborns' white blood cells substantially better than anything previously tested, and that could potentially make vaccines effective right at birth. The ability to immunize babies at birth—rather than two months of age, when most current vaccination series begin—would ...

CHICAGO --- A new mother may constantly worry and check to see if her baby is still breathing. Or she may fret about germs, obsessing whether she's properly sterilized the bottles, then wash and rewash them. A new Northwestern Medicine® study found that women who have recently given birth have a much higher rate of obsessive-compulsive symptoms than the general population. The study found 11 percent of women at two weeks and six months postpartum experience significant obsessive-compulsive symptoms compared to 2 to 3 percent in the general population. This is the ...

A study that analyzed data from more than 82,000 veterans suggests that infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was associated with an increased risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI, heart attack) beyond what is explained by recognized risk factors, according to a report published Online First by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Due to the successful antiretroviral therapy (ART), people infected with HIV are living longer and are at risk for heart disease, authors wrote in the study background. Matthew S. Freiberg, M.D., M.Sc., of ...

A team of scientists and clinicians at UC San Francisco has discovered how to detect abnormal brain rhythms associated with Parkinson's by implanting electrodes within the brains of people with the disease. The work may lead to developing the next generation of brain stimulation devices to alleviate symptoms for people with the disease. Described this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work sheds light on how Parkinson's disease affects the brain, and is the first time anyone has been able to measure a quantitative signal ...

PHILADELPHIA — The mammalian placenta is more than just a filter through which nutrition and oxygen are passed from a mother to her unborn child. According to a new study by a research group from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, if a mother is exposed to stress during pregnancy, her placenta translates that experience to her fetus by altering levels of a protein that affects the developing brains of male and female offspring differently. These findings suggest one way in which maternal-stress exposure may be linked to neurodevelopmental diseases ...

SEATTLE – Alzheimer's disease is the fastest growing threat to health in the US. HIV/AIDS and alcohol are severely eroding the health of Russians. Violence is claiming the lives of young men in large swaths of Latin America, constituting a homicide-driven health crisis. Despite health gains in sub-Saharan Africa, infectious diseases still cause hundreds of thousands of child deaths. These are just some of the new findings from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study (GBD 2010), a systemic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude ...

SEATTLE – Britons are living longer lives and enjoying better health, but they are still grappling with disabling conditions such as back and neck pain and depression, often more than people in most other European countries. Health in the United Kingdom is eroded by preventable causes of death such as smoking, unhealthy diets, and use of alcohol and drugs. As a result, the UK's pace of decline in premature mortality has fallen well behind the average of 14 other original members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Norway, and the United States (EU15+) over the past ...

King Mithridates understood that poison is only as good as the dosage taken. Each day, he ingested small quantities of poison in order to become immunize and escape his court's plotters. Oncologists run up against the same principle when fighting cancer. Sometimes, a small dose of chemotherapy may induce dangerous resistance mechanisms in malignant cells, resulting in relapse. Now, EPFL research published in the journal PLOS ONE reports a tool that could simply and accurately determine the right dose for individual patients. Dosage, a vital issue This novel tool, developed ...

The pharmaceutical industry has pulled back on marketing to physicians and consumers, yet some enduring patterns persist. According to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, advertising peaked in 2004, with industry promotion to physicians declining nearly 25 percent by 2010, to $27.7 billion or 9 percent of sales. Similar declines were seen in direct-to-consumer advertising, which remains concentrated among a small number of products. The number of products promoted to providers peaked at over 3,000 in 2004, and declined ...

Humidity measurements in the atmosphere are of essential importance, since water vapour, as the most important natural greenhouse gas, has a strong influence on the Earth's atmospheric radiation balance and, thus, decisively influences our climate. In addition, water is responsible for meteorological phenomena such as the formation of clouds and precipitation. Hence, the atmospheric water content is an essential measurand in all climate models, but also when it comes to forecasting the weather; this measurand has to be determined with great accuracy if reliable predictions ...

Public reporting of how physicians and hospitals perform in quality of care measures leads to improved care for patients. A collaborative team of researchers led by Geoffrey C. Lamb, M.D., professor of internal medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, published their findings in the March 2013 edition of Health Affairs. The researchers analyzed 14 publicly reported quality of care measures from 2004 to 2009 for the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality, a voluntary consortium of physician groups, and found that physician groups in the collaborative improved ...

In this News Digest: Summary of a study being published online March 4, 2013 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, reporting that in certain children with retinoblastoma, adjuvant chemotherapy can be avoided, without risking disease worsening or relapse. The findings will help decision-making about adjuvant treatment and therapy selection for patients with low- , intermediate-, and high-risk retinoblastoma affecting only one eye Quote for attribution to ZoAnn Eckert Dreyer, MD, American Society of Clinical Oncology Cancer Communications Committee member and pediatric ...

The brain adds new cells during puberty to help navigate the complex social world of adulthood, two Michigan State University neuroscientists report in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists used to think the brain cells you're born with are all you get. After studies revealed the birth of new brain cells in adults, conventional wisdom held that such growth was limited to two brain regions associated with memory and smell. But in the past few years, researchers in MSU's neuroscience program have shown that mammalian brains ...

A study led by University of Massachusetts Medical School professor and immunologist Katherine Luzuriaga, MD, and Johns Hopkins Children's Center virologist Deborah Persaud, MD, highlights the long-term benefits of early antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiated in infants. The study, presented on March 4 at the 20th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta, shows that ART administered in early infancy can help curtail the formation of hard-to-treat viral sanctuaries — reservoirs of "sleeper" cells responsible for reigniting infection ...

Oxidative stress turns a protein that normally protects healthy cells into their executioner, according to a study released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Alvaro Estevez, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida's College of Medicine, led the multi-university team that made the discovery, which could eventually help scientists develop new therapies to combat a host of conditions from stroke to Lou Gehrig's disease Researchers have long known that oxidative stress damages cells and results in neurodegeneration, ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (March 04, 2013) - A contact lens technique called overnight orthokeratology (OK) brings rapid improvement in vision for nearsighted patients. Now a new study shows that OK treatment works mainly by flattening the front of the cornea, reports a recent study, "Posterior Corneal Shape Changes in Myopic Overnight Orthokeratology", appearing in the March issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. "This study appears ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Physicists at UC Santa Barbara are manipulating light on superconducting chips, and forging new pathways to building the quantum devices of the future –– including super-fast and powerful quantum computers. The science behind tomorrow's quantum computing and communications devices is being conducted today at UCSB in what some physicists consider to be one of the world's top laboratories in the study of quantum physics. A team in the lab of John Martinis, UCSB professor of physics, has made a discovery that provides new understanding in the quantum ...

NEW YORK (EMBARGOED UNTIL March 4, 2013, 5 PM U.S. Eastern Time) — African forest elephants are being poached out of existence. A study just published in the online journal PLOS ONE shows that across their range in central Africa, a staggering 62 percent of all forest elephants have been killed for their ivory over the past decade. "The analysis confirms what conservationists have feared: the rapid trend towards extinction – potentially within the next decade – of the forest elephant," says Dr. Samantha Strindberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), one of the ...

VIDEO: In FES cycling, small electrical pulses are applied to the paralyzed muscles of an individual, stimulating the muscles to cycle on a stationary recumbent bicycle. The repetitive activity simulates movement... Click here for more information. (Baltimore, MD) – A new study by Kennedy Krieger Institute's International Center for Spinal Cord Injury (Epub ahead of print) finds that long-term lower extremity functional electrical stimulation (FES) cycling, as part of a rehabilitation ...

Three antiretroviral-based strategies intended to prevent HIV infection among women did not prove effective in a major clinical trial in Africa. For reasons that are unclear, a majority of study participants—particularly young, single women—were unable to use their assigned approaches daily as directed, according to findings presented today by one of the study's co-leaders at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta. The Vaginal and Oral Interventions to Control the Epidemic (VOICE) study, or MTN 003, was designed to evaluate the ...

New York, NY, March 4, 2013 – In a new phase III trial mirabegron, a β3-adrenoceptor agonist, given once daily for 12 weeks, reduced the frequency of incontinence episodes and number of daily urinations, and improved urgency and nocturia in adults with overactive bladder (OAB) compared to those in a placebo group. The incidence of common adverse events (hypertension, urinary tract infection, headache, nasopharyngitis) was similar in the mirabegron and placebo groups in this study. Rates of dry mouth and constipation were similar in the drug and placebo groups. The ...