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 ...

Contact: Shelley Dawicki shelley.dawicki@noaa.gov 504-495-2378 NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center Researchers track singing humpback whales on a Northwest Atlantic feeding ground Male humpback whales sing complex songs in tropical waters during the winter breeding season, but they also sing at higher latitudes at other times of the year. NOAA researchers have provided the first detailed description linking humpback whale movements to acoustic behavior on a feeding ground in the Northwest Atlantic. Findings from the study, published April 10 in the journal ...

North America isn't known as a hotspot for crop plant diversity, yet a new inventory has uncovered nearly 4,600 wild relatives of crop plants in the United States, including close relatives of globally important food crops such as sunflower, bean, sweet potato, and strawberry. The findings, which were published today (Apr. 29) in the journal Crop Science, are good news for plant breeders, who've relied increasingly in recent years on the wild kin of domesticated crops as new sources of disease resistance, drought tolerance, and other traits. The not-so-good news is ...

Researchers at Queen's University's Human Media Lab have developed a new smartphone – called MorePhone – which can morph its shape to give users a silent yet visual cue of an incoming phone call, text message or email. "This is another step in the direction of radically new interaction techniques afforded by smartphones based on thin film, flexible display technologies" says Roel Vertegaal (School of Computing), director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University who developed the flexible PaperPhone and PaperTab. "Users are familiar with hearing their phone ring or ...

The food dye Brilliant Blue FCF (BB FCF) could be a useful tool in the development of treatments for a variety of conditions involving the membrane channel protein Pannexin 1(Panx1), according to a study in The Journal of General Physiology. Panx1, which is involved in signaling events leading to inflammation and cell death, has been implicated in such diverse diseases as Crohn's, AIDS, melanoma, epilepsy, spinal cord injury, and stroke, among others. Thus, there is a demand for the development of pharmacological tools to inhibit Panx1. Researchers from the University ...

As states continue to grapple with aging correctional facilities, overcrowding, underfunded retiree obligations and other constraints, new research from Temple University's Center for Competitive Government finds that privately operated prisons can substantially cut costs – from 12 percent to 58 percent in long-term savings – while performing at equal or better levels than government-run prisons. Temple economics Professors Simon Hakim and Erwin A. Blackstone analyzed government data from nine states that generally have higher numbers of privately held prisoners (Arizona, ...

Alexandria, VA – To what extent is the United States energy independent? In recent years, Americans have heard a lot about the need to be unconstrained from foreign energy sources, but what do the numbers really tell us about our current state of independence? Historically, the United States has relied on a diverse energy mix. From our founding through the final years of World War II, the country was nearly 100 percent energy independent: relying on coal- and oil-fired power plants, as well as a series of massive hydroelectric dams. By the second half of the 20th century, ...

Washington, D.C.—Forecasting volcanic eruptions with success is heavily dependent on recognizing well-established patterns of pre-eruption unrest in the monitoring data. But in order to develop better monitoring procedures, it is also crucial to understand volcanic eruptions that deviate from these patterns. New research from a team led by Carnegie's Diana Roman retrospectively documented and analyzed the period immediately preceding the 2009 eruption of the Redoubt volcano in Alaska, which was characterized by an abnormally long period of pre-eruption seismic activity ...

While all heart attacks have the potential to be deadly, one type is referred to as the "widow maker" because of its high risk of death. A ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is a severe type of heart attack that occurs when a blockage in a coronary artery causes heart muscle to die; without prompt treatment risk of fatality increases dramatically. Coronary angioplasty, or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), is the most common emergency treatment for STEMI. During this procedure, an interventional cardiologist feeds a deflated balloon into the artery ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A Big Data analysis that integrates three large sets of genomic data available through The Cancer Genome Atlas has identified 37 RNA molecules that might predict survival in patients with the most common form of breast cancer. The study by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) initially analyzed messenger RNA (mRNA) and microRNA expression, DNA methylation data and clinical findings for 466 patients with invasive ductal carcinoma, ...

Researchers at New York University and NYU Langone Medical Center have created a novel way to enhance MRI by reducing interference from large macromolecules that can often obscure images generated by current chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) methods. Their work, which appears in the Nature publishing group journal Scientific Reports, has the potential to improve MRI for cartilage as well as for brain tissue. "We have found a way to eliminate signals of certain molecules and thereby clean up the image of parts of the body that could be used by medical professionals ...

When a mouse smells a cat, it instinctively avoids the feline or risks becoming dinner. How? A Northwestern University study involving olfactory receptors, which underlie the sense of smell, provides evidence that a single gene is necessary for the behavior. A research team led by neurobiologist Thomas Bozza has shown that removing one olfactory receptor from mice can have a profound effect on their behavior. The gene, called TAAR4, encodes a receptor that responds to a chemical that is enriched in the urine of carnivores. While normal mice innately avoid the scent marks ...

PHILADELPHIA—The well-studied protein VEGF does not appear to have any prognostic or predictive value for men with locally advanced prostate cancer, researchers from the Department of Radiation Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and other institutions found in a retrospective study published online April 25 in the journal BMC Radiation Oncology. VEGF, or vascular endothelial growth factor, induces blood vessel growth, a process known as angiogenesis, which is a key element in solid tumor growth and metastasis. It is overexpressed, along with its receptors, ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A team of American and Italian neuroscientists has identified a cellular change in the brain that accompanies obesity. The findings could explain the body's tendency to maintain undesirable weight levels, rather than an ideal weight, and identify possible targets for pharmacological efforts to address obesity. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition this week, identify a switch that occurs in neurons within the hypothalamus. The switch involves receptors that trigger or inhibit the release of the ...