WASHINGTON — On average, Americans die sooner and experience higher rates of disease and injury than people in other high-income countries, says a new report from the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. The report finds that this health disadvantage exists at all ages from birth to age 75 and that even advantaged Americans -- those who have health insurance, college educations, higher incomes, and healthy behaviors -- appear to be sicker than their peers in other rich nations. "We were struck by the gravity of these findings," said Steven H. Woolf, professor ...

Two robots equipped with instruments designed to "listen" for the calls of baleen whales detected nine endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of Maine last month. The robots reported the detections to shore-based researchers within hours of hearing the whales (i.e., in real time), demonstrating a new and powerful tool for managing interactions between whales and human activities. The team of researchers, led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists Mark Baumgartner and Dave Fratantoni, reported their sightings to NOAA, the federal agency responsible ...

HOUSTON -- (Jan. 9, 2013) -- Rice University scientists have found that mutations of small effect can turn out to be game changers in the bacterial fight against antibiotic drugs. The discovery came during an exhaustive, three-year effort to create a mathematical model that could accurately predict how specific mutations allow bacteria like E. coli to adapt to antibiotics like minocycline. The findings are detailed in a Dec. 10 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "As biologists, we tend to focus on big effects that result from big changes, ...

SAN DIEGO – New research suggests that drinking sweetened beverages, especially diet drinks, is associated with an increased risk of depression in adults while drinking coffee was tied to a slightly lower risk. The study was released today and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 65th Annual Meeting in San Diego, March 16 to 23, 2013. "Sweetened beverages, coffee and tea are commonly consumed worldwide and have important physical—and may have important mental—health consequences," said study author Honglei Chen, MD, PhD, with the National Institutes ...

Washington, DC — Seniors who have spoken two languages since childhood are faster than single-language speakers at switching from one task to another, according to a study published in the January 9 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Compared to their monolingual peers, lifelong bilinguals also show different patterns of brain activity when making the switch, the study found. The findings suggest the value of regular stimulating mental activity across the lifetime. As people age, cognitive flexibility — the ability to adapt to unfamiliar or unexpected circumstances ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – "Although mortality from many cancers has been steadily falling, particularly those of the blood [i.e., leukemias], the more important statistic may be that so many epithelial cancers (carcinomas) and effectively all mesenchymal cancers (sarcomas) remain largely incurable." With these words as preface, Nobel laureate James D. Watson, Ph.D., in a newly published paper that he regards "among my most important work since the double helix," sets forth a novel hypothesis regarding the role of oxidants and antioxidants in cancers that are currently ...

CHICAGO – In a two year randomized trial, patients with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis who received vitamin D supplementation did not have a significant difference in knee pain or cartilage volume loss compared to patients who received placebo, according to a study appearing in the January 9 issue of JAMA. "Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a common age-related musculoskeletal disorder that has significant functional impact and has considerable societal costs through work loss, early retirement, and arthroplasty. Despite its impact, there are no medical treatments established ...

CHICAGO – In an examination of the effectiveness of cefixime, the only oral cephalosporin antimicrobial recommended for treatment of Neisseria gonorrhoeae (gonorrhea) infections, researchers found a clinical treatment failure rate of nearly 7 percent for patients treated at a clinic in Toronto, according to a preliminary study published in the January 9 issue of JAMA. "Because of Neisseria gonorrhoeae resistance to all prior first-line antimicrobial agents, cephalosporin [antibiotic] therapy with adjuvant azithromycin or doxycycline is recommended for treatment of gonorrhea," ...

CHICAGO – Among infants undergoing major surgery, postoperative use of intermittent intravenous paracetamol (acetaminophen) for the management of pain resulted in a lower cumulative morphine dose over 48 hours, according to a study appearing in the January 9 issue of JAMA. Opioid therapy for the treatment of pain is associated with adverse effects. Researchers are seeking alternative analgesic regimens in neonates and infants, according to background information in the article. Paracetamol has been proposed as an alternative, with one study showing promise. Ilse Ceelie, ...

Patients with non-small-cell lung cancer survive longer if they are taking beta-blockers while receiving radiotherapy, according to a study of 722 patients published in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Wednesday). Researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, USA) reviewed the progress and outcomes of patients who had received radiotherapy as their main or first line of treatment for cancer (known as "definitive radiotherapy" i.e. radiotherapy that is delivered at doses of 60 Gy or more, with the intention of curing the disease). ...

A 'cheater' mutation (chtB) in Dictyostelium discoideum, a free living slime mould able to co-operate as social organism when food is scarce, allows the cheater strain to exploit its social partner, finds a new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. The mutation ensures that when mixed with 'normal' Dictyostelium more than the fair share of cheaters become spores, dispersing to a new environment, and avoiding dying as stalk cells. Dictyostelium have an unusual life style. They generally live as individual amoeboid cells, eating ...

Patients who take a triple combination of blood pressure drugs and common painkillers are at an increased risk of serious kidney problems, especially at the start of treatment, finds a study published on bmj.com today. Although the absolute risk for individuals is low, it is still something doctors and patients should be aware of, say the researchers. Acute kidney injury (also known as kidney failure) is a major public health concern. It occurs in more than 20% of hospital inpatients and is associated with around half of all potentially preventable deaths in hospital. ...

Breast and colorectal cancer screening should be targeted towards patients with a life expectancy greater than 10 years: for any shorter life expectancy the harms are likely to outweigh the benefits, concludes a study published on bmj.com today. The authors stress that their results "should not be used to deny screening for patients with limited life expectancy" but "should inform decision making which aims to account for patient preferences and values while maximising benefits and minimising risks." Guidelines recommend screening healthy older patients because complications ...

A special report published by the BMJ today finds that thousands of melanoma patients around the world are undergoing an expensive and invasive procedure called sentinel node biopsy, despite a lack of clear evidence and concerns that it may do more harm than good. Although not recommended for routine use in England, it has become the standard care for melanoma patients in several countries including the United States, where it was estimated to cost over $686m in 2012. Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in the UK, affecting one in 60 people. In the US it affects ...

Male deaths from all-causes, but particularly cardiovascular and respiratory disease, could be significantly reduced with a decrease in biomass smoke (smoke produced by domestic cooking and heating and woodland fires), a paper published today on bmj.com suggests. The researchers say this could have significant impact on further interventions to reduce pollution from this source. Although a large amount of research has been carried out on the adverse health effects of air pollution, no studies have reported reductions in deaths associated with interventions to reduce ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – An experimental oral drug given to mice after a spinal cord injury was effective at improving limb movement after the injury, a new study shows. The compound efficiently crossed the blood-brain barrier, did not increase pain and showed no toxic effects to the animals. "This is a first to have a drug that can be taken orally to produce functional improvement with no toxicity in a rodent model," said Sung Ok Yoon, associate professor of molecular & cellular biochemistry at Ohio State University and lead author of the study. "So far, in the spinal cord ...

A synthetic "poop" developed at the University of Guelph can cure nasty gastrointestinal infections caused by Clostridium difficile, a toxin-producing bacterium. A study on the artificial stool was published today in the inaugural issue of Microbiome, a new peer-reviewed science journal. The stool – a "super-probiotic" called RePOOPulate – was created by Guelph microbiologist Emma Allen-Vercoe to replace human fecal matter used in stool transplants, a known treatment for C. difficile. She made the super-probiotic from purified intestinal bacterial cultures grown ...

An analysis of the first three years of data from NASA's Kepler mission, which already has discovered thousands of potential exoplanets, contains good news for those searching for habitable worlds outside our solar system. It shows that 17 percent of all sun-like stars have planets one to two times the diameter of Earth orbiting close to their host stars, according to a team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This estimate includes only planets that circle their stars within a distance of about one-quarter ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- The hand-held scanners, or tricorders, of the Star Trek movies and television series are one step closer to reality now that a University of Missouri engineering team has invented a compact source of X-rays and other forms of radiation. The radiation source, which is the size of a stick of gum, could be used to create inexpensive and portable X-ray scanners for use by doctors, as well as to fight terrorism and aid exploration on this planet and others. "Currently, X-ray machines are huge and require tremendous amounts of electricity," said Scott Kovaleski, ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– For decades, consensus among psychologists has held that a group of five personality traits –– or slight variations of these five –– are a universal feature of human psychology. However, a study by anthropologists at UC Santa Barbara raises doubt about the veracity of that five-factor model (FFM) of personality structure as it relates to indigenous populations. Their findings appear in the current issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Studying the Tsimane, an isolated indigenous group ...

Cambridge, Mass. - January 8, 2013 - At a time when communication networks are scrambling for ways to transmit more data over limited bandwidth, a type of twisted light wave is gaining new attention. Called an optical vortex or vortex beam, this complex beam resembles a corkscrew, with waves that rotate as they travel. Now, applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a new device that enables a conventional optical detector (which would normally only measure the light's intensity) to pick up on that rotation. The ...

Testing medicines to prevent lung cancer requires treating many thousands of high-risk individuals and then waiting 5, 10 or 15 years to discover which of them develop cancer and which, if any, experience survival benefit from the treatment. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study recently published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research proposes a possible waypoint on the way to benefit, which if validated, could dramatically reduce the number of patients needed and time required to test drugs for lung cancer prevention. "Chemoprevention is an important approach ...

ROSEMONT, Ill.—Female athletes are three times more likely to suffer from anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures, one of the most common knee injuries, compared to male athletes. The ACL is one of the four main ligaments within the knee that connect the femur (upper leg bone) to the tibia (lower leg bone). Recent research highlights the unique anatomical differences in the female knee that may contribute to higher injury rates, and should be taken into consideration during reconstructive surgery and sports training, according to a review article in the January 2013 issue ...

LA JOLLA, CA – January 8, 2013 - Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found an easier way to perform one of the most fundamental tasks in molecular biology. Their new method allows scientists to add a marker to certain cells, so that these cells may be easily located and/or selected out from a larger cell population. The technique, which is described in a recent issue of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, makes use of the tight binding of two proteins that are cheaply obtainable but are not found in human or other mammalian ...

Foreign invaders such as pythons and lionfish are not the only threats to Florida's natural habitat. The native Carolina Willow is also starting to strangle portions of the St. Johns River. Biologists at the University of Central Florida recently completed a study that shows this slender tree once used by Native Americans for medicinal purposes, may be thriving because of water-management projects initiated in the 1950s. Canals were built to control runoff and provide water for agriculture. The unintended consequence -- stable water levels -- allowed Carolina Willow ...