Bariatric surgery is a well-documented treatment for obesity that leads to considerable weight loss and health improvement, but is the surgery successful in the long run in reducing costs associated with medical care for obesity? A team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine recently undertook a multi-year analysis of health insurance claims data to examine this question and found that although the procedure's success rate is well documented, it does not have a similar impact on health care costs. The findings were ...

University of California, San Diego bioengineers have demonstrated in a study in pigs that a new injectable hydrogel can repair damage from heart attacks, help the heart grow new tissue and blood vessels, and get the heart moving closer to how a healthy heart should. The results of the study were published Feb. 20 in Science Translational Medicine and clear the way for clinical trials to begin this year in Europe. The gel is injected through a catheter without requiring surgery or general anesthesia -- a less invasive procedure for patients. There are an estimated 785,000 ...

New research by Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine and Yale University School of Medicine finds that cultures commonly used to detect bacterial infections in low birth-weight newborns with early onset sepsis may actually overlook some germs. The research done at Case Western Reserve supports the need for multiple detection methods, such as DNA genomic analyses and other independent culture technologies, to identify bacteria that culturing may miss, said Yiping Han, professor of Periodontics and Reproductive Biology at the Case Western Reserve dental ...

Processing a prescription through an electronic ordering system can halve the likelihood of a drug error, and avert more than 17 million such incidents in US hospitals in one year alone, indicates research published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. And if much more widely adopted than at present, the system has the potential to cut out 50 million drug errors a year, calculate the researchers. The US Institute of Medicine estimates that, on average, at least one mistake will be made with a hospital patient's medication every day. Computerised ...

The widely held belief that the UK supply of innovative new medicines has conspicuously dwindled in recent decades, is not borne out by the evidence, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open. In fact, the reverse may be true, the figures suggest. The prevailing view is that pharmaceutical industry innovation has been in decline, with fewer new drugs launched in recent decades than before—despite more cash being pumped into research and development—prompting a good deal of hand-wringing, say the authors. They wanted to find out whether this view was ...

DURHAM, NC – Bullied children grow into adults who are at increased risk of developing anxiety disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts, according to a study led by researchers at Duke Medicine. The findings, based on more than 20 years of data from a large group of participants initially enrolled as adolescents, are the most definitive to date in establishing the long-term psychological effects of bullying. Published online Feb. 20, 2013, in JAMA Psychiatry, the study belies a common perception that bullying, while hurtful, inflicts a fleeting injury that victims ...

Governments around the world should stop squandering resources fighting an "unwinnable war" against illegal drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. Instead, they should use the cash to curb antibiotic misuse, which poses a far more serious threat to human health, claims a leading ethicist in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Dr Jonny Anomaly, of Duke University, Durham in North Carolina, USA, says that concerted collective action is needed to tackle the excessive and casual prescribing of antibiotics, which has led to a worrying rise in resistance to these medicines. "Government ...

The walls of the human heart are a disorganised jumble of tissue until relatively late in pregnancy despite having the shape of a fully functioning heart, according to a pioneering study. A University of Leeds-led team developing the first comprehensive model of human heart development using observations of living foetal hearts found surprising differences from existing animal models. Although they saw four clearly defined chambers in the foetal heart from the eighth week of pregnancy, they did not find organised muscle tissue until the 20th week, much later than expected. Developing ...

Similar to talking about being fat, talking about being old is an important an indicator of body dissatisfaction, shows research in BioMed Central's open access journal Journal of Eating Disorders. Body dissatisfaction is known to be correlated with, and predictive of, physical and mental health problems including binge eating, emotional eating, stress, low self-esteem, depression, and use of unhealthy weight control behaviours. High levels of talking about weight and being fat, 'fat talk', is known to be a good indicator of body dissatisfaction. In order to see if ...

VIDEO ALERT: Audio and video resources, including excerpts from an interview with Dr. C. Daniel Smith describing the device and procedure, are available on the Mayo Clinic News Network. JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A bracelet-like device with magnetic beads can control the chronic digestive disorder gastroesophageal reflux disease, according to a study published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The device encircles the valve at the junction of the esophagus and stomach and helps it stay closed when a person is not eating or drinking. It eased symptoms ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell bioengineers and physicians have created an artificial ear – using 3-D printing and injectable molds – that looks and acts like a natural ear, giving new hope to thousands of children born with a congenital deformity called microtia. In a study published online Feb. 20 in PLOS ONE, Cornell biomedical engineers and Weill Cornell Medical College physicians described how 3-D printing and injectable gels made of living cells can fashion ears that are practically identical to a human ear. Over a three-month period, these flexible ears grew cartilage ...

Status updates, patient forums, blog comments – among the incredible amount of personal information on the Web is a potential trove of health data. Bioethicists writing in Science Translational Medicine acknowledge the value of this resource but argue that to be ethically acceptable for use in research, traditional models of informed consent must be adapted to suit the dynamic online environment. "Context is crucial to what people reveal about themselves on the Web, and it should be central to how informed consent is obtained," says co-author Jeffrey Kahn, PhD, MPH, the ...

The satisfaction levels among a hospital's staff are closely linked to the quality of healthcare it provides, say a team of doctors from Imperial College London. In the first study of its kind, Dr Richard Pinder and colleagues at Imperial found that hospitals in England with lower mortality rates were more likely to have members of staff satisfied with the quality of care they provide. Despite the researchers' initial assumptions, satisfaction levels among non-clinical staff were found to be as closely tied to a hospital's performance as those of doctors. A stronger ...

A team of researchers at UC San Francisco has uncovered the neurological basis of speech motor control, the complex coordinated activity of tiny brain regions that controls our lips, jaw, tongue and larynx as we speak. Described this week in the journal Nature, the work has potential implications for developing computer-brain interfaces for artificial speech communication and for the treatment of speech disorders. It also sheds light on an ability that is unique to humans among living creatures but poorly understood. "Speaking is so fundamental to who we are as humans ...

A Harvard researcher is pointing toward a new reason to worry about the effects of climate change — national security. A new report co-authored by Michael McElroy, the Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, and D. James Baker, a former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, connects global climate change, extreme weather, and national security. During the next decade, the report concludes, climate change could have wide-reaching effects on everything from food, water, and energy supplies to critical infrastructure and economic ...

AMES, Iowa – An international team of astronomers has used nearly three years of high precision data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft to make the first observations of a planet outside our solar system that's smaller than Mercury, the smallest planet orbiting our sun. The planet is about the size of the Earth's moon. It is one of three planets orbiting a star designated Kepler-37 in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way. The findings are published were published online on Feb. 20 by the journal Nature. The lead authors are Thomas Barclay of the NASA Ames Research Center ...

Philadelphia - According to a new study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, patients with Barrett's esophagus and early or pre-cancerous cells have been shown to significantly benefit from minimally invasive therapy delivered through an endoscope – a medical instrument used to look inside an organ or cavity in the body. Until recently, patients with these conditions were treated by surgery to remove the whole esophagus. Study results show that endoscope-based therapies have a high success rate; all of the damaged cells were ...

SEATTLE – An international research team co-led by cancer prevention researcher Ulrike "Riki" Peters, Ph.D., M.P.H., and biostatistician Hsu Li, Ph.D., at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has identified variations in four genes that are linked to an increased risk of colorectal cancer. Peters and colleagues from 40 institutes throughout the world published their findings online ahead of the April print issue of Gastroenterology. Peters and colleagues for the past four years have been studying the genes linked to colorectal cancer through the Genetics and Epidemiology ...

CHICAGO --- U.S. veterans diagnosed with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) are frequently prescribed doses of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), such as omeprazole (commonly known by brand names such as Prilosec), that are much higher than recommended --- and they are kept on the drug far too long, according to a new Northwestern Medicine® study. PPIs are among the most widely used drugs in the nation, resulting in more than $11 billion in annual direct health care costs in the U.S. PPI overuse has been documented in previous studies, but this is the first study to examine ...

As magnetic fields on the sun rearrange and realign, dark spots known as sunspots can appear on its surface. Over the course of Feb. 19-20, 2013, scientists watched a giant sunspot form in under 48 hours. It has grown to over six Earth diameters across but its full extent is hard to judge since the spot lies on a sphere not a flat disk. The spot quickly evolved into what's called a delta region, in which the lighter areas around the sunspot, the penumbra, exhibit magnetic fields that point in the opposite direction of those fields in the center, dark area. This is a fairly ...

VIDEO: On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced a moderately powerful solar flare and a dazzling magnetic display known as coronal rain. Hot plasma in the... Click here for more information. Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Advances in electronic medical record systems and health information exchange are shifting efforts in public health toward greater use of information systems to automate disease surveillance, but a study from the Regenstrief Institute has found that these technologies' capabilities are underutilized by those on the front lines of preventing and reporting infections. The new study measured the awareness, adoption and use of electronic medical record systems and health information exchange by hospital-based infection preventionists (formerly known as infection ...

VIDEO: The TRMM satellite flew above Haruna on Feb. 20 at 0717 UTC. Some powerful storms Haruna's northern edge showed rainfall over 108 mm (~4.25 inches) per hour and cloud tops... Click here for more information. Cyclone Haruna strengthened into a cyclone and quickly developed an eye that became apparent on visible and infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite. NASA's TRMM satellite analyzed Haruna's heavy rainfall, and NASA and NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a ...

AUDIO: This is an example of a trill song type that tells listeners how big the singer is. Their larger physical size means that bigger male purple-crowned fairy-wrens can sing this... Click here for more information. A male fairy-wren's low pitch song indicates body size, a new international study has shown. The study led by University of Melbourne researcher Dr Michelle Hall, is the first to show that the larger the male fairy wren, the lower the pitch of his song. "This ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A study combining genetic data with brain imaging, designed to identify genes associated with the amyloid plaque deposits found in Alzheimer's disease patients, has not only identified the APOE gene -- long associated with development of Alzheimer's -- but has uncovered an association with a second gene, called BCHE. A national research team, led by scientists at the Indiana University School of Medicine, reported the results of the study in an article in Molecular Psychiatry posted online Tuesday. The study is believed to be the first genome-wide association ...