Chevy Chase, MD––Researchers claim to have calculated for the first time, the upper safe limit of vitamin D levels, above which the associated risk for cardiovascular events or death raises significantly, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). There is increasing evidence that vitamin D plays a pivotal role in human physiology. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to cardiovascular events and mortality, but previous studies have found supplementation fails to decrease mortality ...

WHAT: NIH-supported scientists used lab-grown human lung cells to study the cells' response to infection by a novel human coronavirus (called nCoV) and compiled information about which genes are significantly disrupted in early and late stages of infection. The information about host response to nCoV allowed the researchers to predict drugs that might be used to inhibit either the virus itself or the deleterious responses that host cells make in reaction to infection. Since nCoV was recognized in 2012, 17 confirmed cases and 11 deaths have been reported—a high fatality ...

Two-thirds of all forest inventory plots in the Northeast and Midwestern United States contain at least one non-native plant species, a new U.S. Forest Service study found. The study across two dozen states from North Dakota to Maine can help land managers pinpoint areas on the landscape where invasive plants might take root. "We found two-thirds of more than 1,300 plots from our annual forest inventory had at least one introduced species, but this also means that one-third of the plots had no introduced species," said Beth Schulz, a research ecologist at the Pacific ...

In one of the largest observational studies of its kind, researchers report that a combination of chemotherapy and radiation followed by surgery in patients with stage 3 non-small cell lung cancer improves survival. Patients who had chemoradiation therapy followed by surgery had twice the five-year survival rate of those who had only chemoradiation, says Dr. Matthew Koshy, a radiation oncologist at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and lead author of the study. The study, published online in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, looked at various ...

WASHINGTON —Most children with isolated skull fractures may not need to stay in the hospital, which finding has the potential to save the health care system millions of dollars a year ("Isolated Skull Fractures: Trends in Management in U.S. Pediatric Emergency Departments"). In addition, a new device more accurately estimates children's weights, leading to more precise drug dosing in the ER ("Evaluation of the Mercy TAPE: Performance Against the Standard for Pediatric Weight Estimation"). Two studies published online this month in Annals of Emergency Medicine showcase ...

HOUSTON – (April 30, 2013) – Women engineers are underpaid for their contributions to technical activities, due to cultural ideologies in the engineering profession, according to Rice University research. "Cultural ideologies within professions may seem benign and have little salience outside of a profession's boundaries, but may play an important role in wage inequality," said Rice Assistant Professor of Sociology Erin Cech. To study the engineering profession, Cech used National Science Foundation survey data to demonstrate that patterns of sex segregation and unequal ...

Anyone who has flown in an airplane knows about turbulence, or when the flow of a fluid — in this case, the flow of air over the wings — becomes chaotic and unstable. For more than a century, the field of fluid mechanics has posited that turbulence scales with inertia, and so massive things, like planes, have an easier time causing it. Now, research led by engineers at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that this transition to turbulence can occur without inertia at all. The study was conducted by associate professor Paulo E. Arratia and graduate student Lichao ...

Washington, DC, April 30, 2013 – Testing patients with just three risk factors upon hospital admission has potential to identify nearly three out of four asymptomatic carriers of C. difficile, according to a new study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). Researchers from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, analyzed stool samples from 320 patients showing no symptoms of C. difficile at hospital admission using a real-time polymerase ...

TORONTO, April 30, 2013—Patients with acute kidney injury who see a nephrologist within 90 days of being discharged from a hospital have a 24 per cent lower risk of dying than those who do not see a kidney specialist, a new study has found. The benefit of seeing a nephrologist was most pronounced in individuals who had not previously seen a nephrologist, and likely had new onset kidney disease, according to the study by Dr. Ziv Harel of St. Michael's Hospital. The study appears in the May issue of the journal Kidney International. Acute kidney injury (acute renal failure ...

A life-threatening condition that often requires transplantation and accounts for half of all acute liver failures, autoimmune hepatitis is often precipitated by certain anesthetics and antibiotics. Researchers say these drugs contain tiny molecules called haptens that ever so slightly change normal liver proteins, causing the body to mistake its own liver cells for foreign invaders and to attack them. The phenomenon disproportionately occurs in women, even when they take the same drugs at the same doses as men. Results of the new study, described in the April issue of ...

This press release is available in Spanish. The team led by José Manuel Zarzuelo,Professor of Applied Economics, has applied the co-operative Game Theory to calculating motorway toll charges. The results of the study have been published in the specialised journal European Journal of Operational Research. In this study, the authors propose that sophisticated mathematical methods could be used in traffic management. "Yes, it can be done," explains Jose Manuel Zarzuelo. "In the United States it's been done on public highways; yet in the case of Spain most of the motorways ...

NEW YORK (April 30, 2013) -- Cancer spread or metastasis can strike unprecedented fear in the minds of cancer patients. The "seed and the soil" hypothesis proposed by Stephen Paget in 1889 is now widely accepted to explain how cancer cells (seeds) are able to generate fertile soil (the microenvironment) in distant organs that promotes cancer's spread. However, this concept does not explain why some tumors do not spread or metastasize. Scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College have now solved this mystery by showing that metastatic incompetent cancers actually poison ...

A University of Eastern Finland study showed that low serum vitamin D levels are a risk factor for pneumonia. The risk of contracting pneumonia was more than 2.5 times greater in subjects with the lowest vitamin D levels than in subjects with high vitamin D levels. The results were published in Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The follow-up study carried out by the UEF Institute of Public Health investigated the link between serum vitamin D3 and the risk of contracting pneumonia. The study involved 1,421 subjects living in the Kuopio region in Eastern Finland. ...

Simply sending children with asthma a text message each day asking about their symptoms and providing knowledge about their condition can lead to improved health outcomes. In a study by the Georgia Institute of Technology, pediatric patients who were asked questions about their symptoms and provided information about asthma via SMS text messages showed improved pulmonary function and a better understanding of their condition within four months, compared to other groups. "It appears that text messages acted as an implicit reminder for patients to take their medicine ...

A pile of dirty dishes looms in the kitchen. It's your spouse's night to wash, but you know he or she has had a long day so you grab a sponge and step up to the plate. It's just one of the minor daily sacrifices you make in the name of love. But what if you had a long, stressful day, too? A new study from the University of Arizona, forthcoming in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, published by SAGE, suggests that while making sacrifices in a romantic relationship is generally a positive thing, doing so on days when you are feeling especially stressed may ...

Experiencing connections, regularities, and coherence in their environment may lead people to feel a greater sense of meaning in life, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, conducted by graduate student Samantha Heintzelman of the University of Missouri, along with advisor Laura King and fellow graduate student Jason Trent, suggests that meaning in life has an important adaptive function, connecting people to the world that surrounds them and, thereby, boosting their chances of ...

Infrared data indicates temperatures of cloud tops and the surface of the sea beneath tropical cyclones, and NASA's AIRS instrument captured an infrared look at low pressure area System 92P in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean that hinted it was rapidly developing into Tropical Cyclone Zane. Zane is expected to make landfall in northeastern Queensland on May 1 at cyclone strength. The infrared image of System 92P was taken from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite on April 29 at 1505 UTC (11:05 a.m. EDT). The AIRS data showed that ...

Even as the snow begins to retreat in the eastern part of Russia, fires are being set to clear the land for planting. This Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image from the Aqua satellite was captured on April 29, 2013. MODIS shows the fires as red dots on this image and also visible are smoke plumes rising from the fires which are most likely the result of growing-season activities for farmer in the region. Fire is still used in many parts of the world fire as a resource management tool, clearing land for planting, renewing pastures, and returning ...

In Western Australia, the wet season occurs between December and March and the dry season between May and October. The reversals of prevailing winds in the two season drives the shift from wet to dry and back. In April and May, fires usually burn themselves out within a few days due to the fact that even though there are dry spots that may catch fire, the wet area around them will keep the fires from burning out of control. The worst time for fire is late in the dry season, when vegetation has dried to tinder and blazes tend to be uncontrollable, intense, and dangerous. The ...

Uncertainty issues are paramount in the assessment of risks posed by natural hazards and in developing strategies to alleviate their consequences. In a paper published last month in the SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, the father-son team of Jerome and Seth Stein describe a model that estimates the balance between costs and benefits of mitigation—efforts to reduce losses by taking action now to reduce consequences later— following natural disasters, as well as rebuilding defenses in their aftermath. Using the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan as an example, ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- A protein produced by mast cells in the immune system may predict which people infected with dengue virus will develop life-threatening complications, according to researchers at Duke Medicine and Duke-National University of Singapore (Duke-NUS). Their study also found that in experiments in mice, a class of drugs commonly used to treat asthma by targeting the mast cells could help treat vascular symptoms associated with dengue infections. The findings were published in the online journal eLife on April 30, 2013. Dengue virus is spread by mosquitoes ...

Many of the genes regulating the inflammation and immune response of the body are also associated with low HDL-cholesterol levels in the circulation, tells the recent study conducted at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The research also discovered that the quality of HDL particle can vary considerably. Cholesterol is a major risk factor for heart disease. Elevated LDL-cholesterol, commonly known as the 'bad cholesterol,' is associated with increased risk of heart disease while HDL-cholesterol, the 'good cholesterol', is associated with decreased risk. During ...

COLLEGE STATION – According to the Centers for Disease Control, about one in six Americans gets food poisoning each year. Additionally, virus infection risks from consumption of raw oysters in the U.S. are estimated to cost around $200 million a year. To address the issue of health risk from eating raw oysters, Texas A&M University graduate student Chandni Praveen, along with Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist Dr. Suresh Pillai and a team of researchers from other agencies and institutions, studied how electron-beam pasteurization of raw oysters may reduce the possibility ...

A properly functioning immune system is a lesson in balance, providing protection against disease without attacking healthy tissue. Work led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists and published recently in Nature Immunology has identified a mechanism that helps T cells find that sweet spot where the strength of the immune response matches the threat. The finding offers important insight into the immune response. The work also lays the foundation for advancing understanding and treatment of problems that arise when the system malfunctions, including autoimmune ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Federal funding for health care coverage of children with diabetes varies significantly from state to state across the United States, according to new research from the University of Michigan. The new research, published earlier this year in the Journal of Pediatrics, examines a public program for children with chronic diseases called the Children with Special Health Care Needs program, which is funded through Title V of the Social Security Act of 1935, and provides federal support and serves as a safety net for children with chronic diseases. In ...