Chevy Chase, MD––Children who did not receive enough iodine in the womb performed worse on literacy tests as 9-year-olds than their peers, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Iodine is absorbed from food and plays a key role in brain development. Even mild deficiency during pregnancy can harm the baby's neurological development. "Our research found children may continue to experience the effects of insufficient iodine for years after birth," said the study's lead author, ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have discovered a protein that is overly active in every human sample of kidney cancer they examined. They also found that an experimental drug designed to block the protein's activity significantly reduced tumor growth in animals when used alone. Combining it with another drug already used to treat the cancer improved the effectiveness of both. The findings, reported in the April 30 online issue of Clinical Cancer Research, offer a much-needed potential new direction for the treatment of clear cell ...

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) significantly improves muscle function – down to the muscle fibre level – in postmenopausal women, a new study published today [1 May] in The Journal of Physiology shows. Some studies published over the last decade have led to negative publicity around HRT, a treatment used to relieve symptoms of menopause, resulting in many women being reluctant to use it. However this new study offers a positive outcome from the treatment. Previous studies, monitoring walking speed and jumping height, have suggested that HRT reduces the impacts of ...

The authors stress that these findings should be interpreted with caution as some studies did not adjust for other potential confounding factors. They call for further investigations into the long term health effects of breast implants. Cosmetic breast implants have become increasingly popular, but some studies have suggested that implants can make it more difficult to detect breast cancer at an early stage because they create shadows on mammograms that can obscure some breast tissue. A team of researchers based in Canada wanted to find out whether the stage at which ...

Subfertile women who conceive through assisted reproduction are more likely to experience a greater traumatic impact following early pregnancy loss compared with women who conceive naturally, suggests a new study published today (1 May) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy affecting 20% of all clinically recognised pregnancies. This study, conducted at Queen Mary Hospital, The University of Hong Kong, aimed to identify the psychological impact following a first trimester miscarriage ...

CHICAGO --- A small group of elusive neurons in the brain's cortex play a big role in ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), a swift and fatal neurodegenerative disease that paralyzes its victims. But the neurons have always been difficult to study because there are so few of them and they look so similar to other neurons in the cortex. In a new preclinical study, a Northwestern Medicine® scientist has isolated the motor neurons in the brain that die in ALS and, for the first time, dressed them in a green fluorescent jacket. Now they're impossible to miss and easy to ...

Only within the past 12 years have marine biologists come to learn about the eye-opening characteristics of mystifying sea worms that live and thrive on the bones of whale carcasses. With each new study, scientists have developed a better grasp on the biology of Osedax, a genus of mouthless and gutless "bone worms" that make a living on skeletons lying on the seafloor. In the latest finding, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego describe how the wispy worms are able to carry out their bone-drilling activities. As published in the May 1 online ...

Philadelphia, April 30, 2013 — Researchers from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at The University of Pennsylvania, along with colleagues at the Botswana-Baylor Children's Clinical Centre of Excellence, conducted the first large-scale comparison of first-line treatments for HIV-positive children, finding that initial treatment with efavirenz was more effective than nevirapine in suppressing the virus in children ages 3 to 16. However, the less effective nevirapine is currently used much more often in countries with a high prevalence ...

In this month's issue of Physics World, an international group of researchers propose a new technology that could divert vibrations away from load-bearing elements of bridges to avoid catastrophic collapses. Michele Brun, Alexander Movchan, Ian Jones and Ross McPhedran describe a "wave bypass" technique that has many similarities to those being used by researchers looking to create Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks, which exploit man-made materials known as metamaterials to bend light around objects. Led by Movchan, who is at the University of Liverpool, the researchers ...

The behaviour of seabirds during migration – including patterns of foraging, rest and flight – has been revealed in new detail using novel computational analyses and tracking technologies. Using a new method called 'ethoinformatics', described as the application of computational methods in the investigation of animal behaviour, scientists have been able to analyse three years of migration data gathered from miniature tracking devices attached to the small seabird the Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus). The Manx Shearwater is currently on the 'amber' list of UK Birds ...

A new study is the first to report a significant positive association between long sleep duration and the development of colorectal cancer, especially among individuals who are overweight or snore regularly. The results raise the possibility that obstructive sleep apnea may contribute to cancer risk. "Our current study adds to the very limited literature regarding the relationship between sleep duration and/or sleep quality and colorectal cancer risk," said lead author Xuehong Zhang, MD, ScD, instructor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate ...

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 ...