This press release is available in German. Even bacteria have a kind of "immune system" they use to defend themselves against unwanted intruders – in their case, viruses. Scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany, were now able to show that this defense system is much more diverse than previously thought and that it comes in multiple versions. Their goal is to use the various newly discovered versions of the CRISPR-Cas gene for the targeted manipulation of genetic information, particularly for medical purposes. The human ...

ANN ARBOR—Cancer cells are wily, well-traveled adversaries, constantly side-stepping treatments to stop their spread. But for the first time, scientists at the University of Michigan have decoded the molecular chatter that ramps certain cancer cells into overdrive and can cause tumors to metastasize throughout the body. Researchers have long known that tumors recruit healing cells, which is a major reason why cancer is so difficult to thwart. This is the first known study to explain the molecular behavior behind the series of changes that happen in the healing cells ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – April 30, 2013 – A new study reports that flexible endoscopic treatment of Zenker's diverticulum by using a diverticuloscope offers a treatment modality with a very low complication rate. Zenker's diverticulum is an abnormal pouch in the upper part of the esophagus that causes difficulty swallowing and is most commonly found in older patients. Clinical remission was achieved over a single session of treatment in the majority of the cases. This study also demonstrated the long-term efficacy of the technique. The study appears in the May issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal ...

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego Department of Pediatrics and Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, a research affiliate of UC San Diego School of Medicine, have found a link between multivitamin use and alcohol consumption before pregnancy, uncovering a need for education about the importance of vitamin supplementation, particularly among women who drink alcohol during their childbearing years. The study was published online this month in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Researchers examined data collected from the Centers For Disease ...

Smoking prevention in schools reduces the number of young people who will later become smokers, according to a new systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. For young people who have never smoked, these programmes appear to be effective at least one year after implementation. Smoking causes five million preventable deaths every year, a number predicted to rise to eight million by 2030. It is thought that around a quarter of young people may smoke by age 13-15. With a history spanning four decades, prevention programmes in schools try to tackle smoking at an ...

Giving prescribers access to education and advice or imposing restrictions on use can curb overuse or inappropriate use of antibiotics in hospitals, according to a new Cochrane systematic review. This is important because unnecessary use of these life-saving drugs is a key source of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Some infections are no longer treatable due to bacterial resistance. Compared to infections caused by treatable bacteria, those caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria lead to more deaths, longer hospital stays and increased healthcare costs. Reducing inappropriate ...

Research into the complementary therapies evening primrose oil and borage oil shows little, if any, benefit for people with eczema compared with placebo, according to a new systematic review. The authors, who published their review in The Cochrane Library, conclude that further studies on the therapies would be difficult to justify. Atopic eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis, is an itchy skin condition with no known cure. Usually emerging in childhood, it affects about 10 to 20% of school age children, who may suffer with tight, red, painful skin, sleepless nights ...

This press release is available in French. Sperm cell release can be triggered by tightening the grip around the delivery organ, according to a team of nano and microsystems engineers and plant biologists at the University of Montreal and Concordia University. Concordia's nanobiotech team devised a microchip that enabled the University of Montreal biologists to observe what happened when pollen tubes – the sperm delivery tools used by plants – tried to negotiate a microscopic obstacle course. The pollen tubes were exposed to a series of narrow, elastic openings resulting ...

Many scientists have thought that dinosaur predecessors missed the race to fill habitats emptied when nine out of 10 species disappeared during the Earth's largest mass extinction, approximately 252 million years ago. The thinking was based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia. It turns out that scientists may have been looking for the starting line in the wrong places. Newly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the mass extinction reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs taking hold in Tanzania and Zambia in ...

A new scientific statement from the American Heart Associations reminds physicians and people with congenital heart disease that regular physical activity is still important and should be promoted. Congenital heart disease (heart structural problems existing since birth) is estimated to affect more than 859,000 children and 850,000 adults in the United States. According to the statement: While some irregular heart beat conditions may require a restriction in physical activity, "for most, physical activity can be unlimited and should be strongly promoted." Most patients ...

VIDEO: This image shows droplets coalescing around particles before jumping off wing. Click here for more information. DURHAM, N.C. – As cicadas on the East Coast begin emerging from their 17-year slumber, a spritz of dew drops is all they need to keep their wings fresh and clean. Researchers at Duke University and James Cook University in Australia have shown that dew drops can be beneficial not only in cleaning cicada wings, but other water-repellant surfaces. On ...

Task Force Says Screen All Adults, Adolescents, and Pregnant Women for HIV New recommendations from the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) urge physicians to screen all adults and adolescents aged 15 - 65 for HIV. In addition, all pregnant women should receive screening, even those who are in labor but have not yet been screened. Rapid screening tests and conventional tests are considered equally accurate for screening. In 2005, the Task Force recommended that doctors offer HIV screening to all adults and adolescents at increased risk for infection ...

Baltimore, MD.—Mammalian females ovulate periodically over their reproductive lifetimes, placing significant demands on their ovaries for egg production. Whether mammals generate new eggs in adulthood using stem cells has been a source of scientific controversy. If true, these "germ-line stem cells" might allow novel treatments for infertility and other diseases. However, new research from Carnegie's Lei Lei and Allan Spradling demonstrates that adult mice do not use stem cells to produce new eggs. Their work is published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Fueled in part by an inclination to speed new treatments to patients, research studies for cancer therapies tend to be smaller and less robust than for other diseases. This raises some questions about how cancer therapies will work in practice, according to researchers at Duke Medicine, who published an analysis of nearly 9,000 oncology clinical research studies online April 29, 2013, in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. The studies they looked at were registered on the ClinicalTrials.gov website from 2007-10. The analysis is part of the Clinical Trials ...

MINNEAPOLIS – The largest study to date finds that eating foods that contain omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish, chicken and salad dressing and avoiding saturated fats, meat and dairy foods may be linked to preserving memory and thinking abilities. However, the same association was not found in people with diabetes. The research is published in the April 30, 2013, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Since there are no definitive treatments for most dementing illnesses, modifiable activities, such as diet, that may delay ...

A study by Jeffrey P. Brosco, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Miami, Florida, and colleagues examines the relationship between medical interventions in early childhood and the increasing prevalence of later intellectual disability (ID). (Online First) Researchers reviewed medical literature and other data from 1950 through 2000 to construct estimates of the condition-specific prevalence of ID over time in the United States and Western Europe in populations of children who received a life-saving intervention within the first 5 years of life and were evaluated for ID ...

A study by Jonathan I. Silverberg, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., of St. Luke's—Roosevelt Hospital Center, New York, and colleagues suggests children living the in the United States but born outside the U.S. have a lower prevalence of allergic disease that increases after residing in the United States for one decade. (Online First) The cross-sectional questionnaire used for the study was distributed to 91,642 children aged 0 to 17 years enrolled in the 2007-2008 National Survey of Children's Health. The main outcomes measured were prevalence of allergic disease, including asthma, ...

A study by Andrew D. Auerbach, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of California, San Francisco, suggests that receiving selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in the perioperative period was associated with a higher risk for adverse events. (Online First) The study included 530,416 patients aged 18 or older who underwent major surgery from January 2006 through December 2008 at 375 U.S. hospitals. The main outcomes researchers studied were in-hospital mortality, length of stay, readmission at 30 days, bleeding events, transfusions and incidence of ventricular arrhythmias. According ...

Researchers from the Germans Trias i Pujol Health Sciences Research Institute Foundation (IGTP), the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), and the Sant Joan de Déu de Martorell Hospital, has identified a new subtype of ataxia, a rare disease without treatment that causes atrophy in the cerebellum and affects around 1.5 million people in the world. The results have been published online on April 29 in the journal JAMA Neurology. The cause of ataxia is a diverse genetic alteration. For this reason it is classified in subtypes. The new subtype identified described ...

Young men who are obese in their early 20s are significantly more likely to develop serious ill health by the time they reach middle age, or not even make it that far, suggests research published in the online journal BMJ Open. It's well known that obesity in adulthood poses a risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease, but it's not been clear whether obesity in early adulthood strengthens that risk. The authors tracked the health of 6500 Danish 22 year old men for 33 years up to the age of 55. All of them had been born in 1955, and had registered with the Military ...

Window blind cords pose a particular risk of accidental strangulation for young children, doctors have warned in Archives of Disease of Childhood. Children between the ages of 16 and 36 months seem particularly vulnerable, they say. The warning comes after they treated a 22 month old boy who was brought into the emergency department. He had been found hanging on the pull chain of a window blind cord. His mother found him blue and not breathing after leaving him with his sister in a bedroom for a few minutes. He had clear strangulation marks on his neck and extensive ...

PITTSBURGH—This past weekend teams from the National Football League used statistics like height, weight and speed to draft the best college players, and in a few weeks, armchair enthusiasts will use similar measures to select players for their own fantasy football teams. Neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon University are taking a similar approach to compile "dream teams" of neurons using a statistics-based method that can evaluate the fitness of individual neurons. After assembling the teams, a computer simulation pitted the groups of neurons against one another in a ...

Tiny 1,900 million-year-old fossils from rocks around Lake Superior, Canada, give the first ever snapshot of organisms eating each other and suggest what the ancient Earth would have smelled like. The fossils, preserved in Gunflint chert, capture ancient microbes in the act of feasting on a cyanobacterium-like fossil called Gunflintia – with the perforated sheaths of Gunflintia being the discarded leftovers of this early meal. A team, led by Dr David Wacey of the University of Western Australia and Bergen University, Norway, and Professor Martin Brasier of Oxford University, ...

Boston, MA – A team of bioengineers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is the first to report creating artificial heart tissue that closely mimics the functions of natural heart tissue through the use of human-based materials. Their work will advance how clinicians treat the damaging effects caused by heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. "Scientists and clinicians alike are eager for new approaches to creating artificial heart tissues that resemble the native tissues as much as possible, in terms of physical properties and function," said ...

Rochester, MN, April 29, 2013 –Unethical behavior among physicians-in-training threatens to erode public trust and confidence in the medical profession, say two academic physicians in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Reacting to CNN reports last year about the widespread use of "recalls" and "airplane notes" by radiology and dermatology residents, Gregory W. Ruhnke, MD, MS, MPH, of the Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, and David J. Doukas, MD, of the Department of Family and Geriatric Medicine, University of Louisville, call on leaders in medical ...