MINNEAPOLIS – The number of people with Alzheimer's disease is expected to triple in the next 40 years, according to a new study published in the February 6, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "This increase is due to an aging baby boom generation. It will place a huge burden on society, disabling more people who develop the disease, challenging their caregivers, and straining medical and social safety nets," said co-author Jennifer Weuve, MPH, ScD, assistant professor of medicine, Rush Institute for Healthy Aging ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Wearing a nerve stimulator for 20 minutes a day may be a new option for migraine sufferers, according to new research published in the February 6, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The stimulator is placed on the forehead, and it delivers electrical stimulation to the supraorbital nerve. For the study, 67 people who had an average of four migraine attacks per month were followed for one month with no treatment. Then they received either the stimulation 20 minutes a day for three months or sham ...

Women who are more aware of their bodies from within are less likely to think of their bodies principally as objects, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Vivien Ainley and Manos Tsakiris from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. The authors asked healthy female student volunteers aged between 19 – 26 to concentrate and count their own heartbeats, simply by "listening" to their bodies. Their accuracy in this heartbeat perception test was compared with their degree of self-objectification, based ...

Reading text on digital devices like tablet computers requires less effort from older adults than reading on paper, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Matthias Schlesewsky and colleagues from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues from Georg August University Göttingen and the University of Marburg, Germany. In the past, surveys have shown that people prefer to read paper books rather than on e-readers or tablet computers. Here, the authors evaluated the origins of this preference in ...

A fragment of human lower jaw recovered from a Serbian cave is the oldest human ancestor found in this part of Europe, who probably evolved under different conditions than populations that inhabited more western parts of the continent at the same time, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by William Jack Rink of McMaster University, Canada, and the international team under the direction of Dušan Mihailović, University of Belgrade, Serbia, and Mirjana Roksandic, University of Winnipeg, Canada. The fossil was found to be ...

Fort Detrick, Md. – An international collaboration of researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), Tunisia and France has demonstrated a high cure rate and remarkably few side effects in treating patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) with an investigational antibiotic cream. CL is a parasitic disease that causes disfiguring lesions, with 350 million people at risk worldwide and 1.5 million new cases annually, including U.S. military personnel serving abroad and the socio-economically disadvantaged in the developing world, especially ...

Tropical rainforests are often called the "lungs of the planet" because they generally draw in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. But the amount of carbon dioxide that rainforests absorb, or produce, varies hugely with year-to-year variations in the climate. In a paper published online this week (Feb 6 2013) by the journal Nature, a team of climate scientists from the University of Exeter, the Met Office-Hadley Centre and the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, has shown that these variations reveal how vulnerable the rainforest is to climate change. Lead author ...

Researchers from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway university asked healthy female student volunteers aged between 19 – 26, to concentrate hard and count their own heartbeats, simply by "listening" to their bodies. Their accuracy in this heartbeat perception test was compared with their perception of their bodies as objects, measured by scores on the Self-Objectification Questionnaire. According to the results, the more accurate the women were in detecting their heartbeats, the less they tended to think of their bodies as objects. These findings have important ...

A new study made available online today in 'Addiction' shows that, between 2002 and 2009, the percentage of deaths caused by alcohol in British Columbia, Canada dropped more than expected when minimum alcohol price was increased, while alcohol-related deaths increased when more private alcohol stores were opened. The paper has significant implications for international alcohol policy. The study was carried out by researchers from British Columbia, the westernmost province in Canada, using three categories of death associated with alcohol – wholly alcohol attributable ...

"You don't know what you've got 'til it's collapsed." That's how University of Guelph integrative biologists might recast a line from an iconic folk tune for their new research paper warning about the perils of ecosystem breakdown. Their research, published today as the cover story in Nature, suggests farmers and resource managers should not rely on seemingly stable but vulnerable single-crop monocultures. Instead they should encourage more kinds of plants in fields and woods as a buffer against sudden ecosystem disturbance. Based on a 10-year study, their paper also ...

Researchers have found a genetic variant that doubles the likelihood that people will have calcium deposits on their aortic valve. Such calcification, if it becomes severe, can cause narrowing or a blockage of the aortic valve, a condition called aortic stenosis. The study is the first large-scale, genome-wide association study to uncover a genetic link to aortic valve calcification. An article detailing the findings is published in the February 7, 2013 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study's lead investigators — from Johns Hopkins, Harvard University, ...

LA JOLLA, CA – February 6, 2013 – We take it for granted that our chromosomes won't stick together, yet this kind of cellular disaster would happen constantly were it not for a protein called TRF2. Now, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered key details of how TRF2 performs this crucial chromosome-protecting function. The finding represents a significant advance in cell biology and also has implications for our understanding of cancer and the aging process. "Cells tend to interpret their chromosome ends as sites of DNA damage, and without ...

Montreal, February 7th, 2013 – Researchers have discovered a gene associated with a form of cholesterol that increases the risk of developing aortic stenosis, the most common form of heart valve disease, by more than half. This international study, involving the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), is the first of its kind to uncover a genetic link with aortic valve disease – a condition that affects more than 5 million people in North America. The results of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, point to the first ...

Older bikers are up to three times as likely to be seriously injured in a crash as younger motor bike enthusiasts, indicates US research published online in Injury Prevention. The findings are a cause for concern, because of the increasing popularity of motor bike ownership among older adults, and their increasing tendency to be involved in a crash, warn the authors. In the US, the percentage of bikers over the age of 50 has more than doubled from just over 1 in 10 in 1990 to 1 in 4 in 2003, while the average age of those involved in a motorbike crash has been steadily ...

One in every 20 cases of the serious condition of pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, may be linked to increased levels of the air pollutant ozone during the first three months, suggests a large study published in the online journal BMJ Open. Mothers with asthma may be more vulnerable, the findings indicate. Pre-eclampsia is characterised by raised blood pressure and the presence of protein in the urine during pregnancy. It can cause serious complications, if left untreated. The authors base their findings on almost 121,000 singleton births in Greater Stockholm, Sweden, between ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Recently, large studies have identified some of the genetic basis for important common diseases such as heart disease and diabetes, but most of the genetic contribution to them remains undiscovered. Now researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led by biostatistician Andrea Foulkes have applied sophisticated statistical tools to existing large databases to reveal substantial new information about genes that cause such conditions as high cholesterol linked to heart disease. Foulkes says, "This new approach to data analysis provides opportunities ...

A team led by Vanderbilt University investigators has discovered two new genes – both coding for the signaling protein calmodulin – associated with severe early-onset disorders of heart rhythm. The findings, reported online Feb. 6 in the journal Circulation, expand the list of culprits that can cause sudden cardiac death and may point to new therapeutic approaches. Nearly two decades of research have identified more than 25 genes in which mutations can increase risk for life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, said Alfred George, Jr., M.D., chief of the Division of Genetic ...

MINNEAPOLIS/SAINT PAUL (February 6, 2013) – Researchers at the University of Minnesota have uncovered a human enzyme responsible for causing DNA mutations found in the majority of breast cancers. The discovery of this enzyme – called APOBEC3B – may change the way breast cancer is diagnosed and treated. The findings from a team of researchers led by Reuben Harris, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and biophysics and also a researcher at the Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota, are published in the latest edition of Nature. "We ...

WASHINGTON, DC – Despite dire predictions in the wake of the economic crisis, donations to health projects in developing countries appear to be holding steady, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. After reaching a historic high of $28.2 billion in 2010, development assistance for health dropped in 2011 and recovered in 2012. The strong growth in spending from the GAVI Alliance and UNICEF counterbalanced declines in health spending among other donors. The new findings are being announced ...

An automated supernova hunt is shedding new light on the death sequence of massive stars—specifically, the kind that self-destruct in Type IIn supernova explosions. Digging through the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) data archive housed at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), astronomers have found the first causal evidence that these massive stars shed huge amounts of material in a "penultimate outburst" before final detonation as supernovae. A focused search ...

The climate is getting warmer, and sea levels are rising – a threat to island nations. As a group of researchers lead by colleagues from the University of Bonn found out, at the same time, tiny single-cell organisms are spreading rapidly through the world's oceans, where they might be able to mitigate the consequences of climate change. Foraminifera of the variety Amphistegina are stabilizing coastlines and reefs with their calcareous shells. The study's results have now appeared in the international online journal "PLOS ONE." Countless billions of tiny, microscopic ...

Pasadena, CA—Type II supernovae are formed when massive stars collapse, initiating giant explosions. It is thought that stars emit a burst of mass as a precursor to the supernova explosion. If this process were better understood, it could be used to predict and study supernova events in their earliest stages. New observations from a team of astronomers including Carnegie's Mansi Kasliwal show a remarkable mass-loss event about a month before the explosion of a type IIn supernova. Their work is published on February 7 in Nature. Several models for the supernova-creation ...

TORONTO, Feb. 6, 2013—A popular class of drugs commonly used to treat sleep and mood symptoms continues to be frequently prescribed despite being known to have potentially life-threatening side effects. Previous studies have linked benzodiazepines – a medication class that may be used in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to treat symptoms of insomnia, depression, anxiety and shortness of breath – with adverse outcomes, but until now there has been little information on how frequently it's prescribed or who is using it. COPD, also known as emphysema or chronic ...

LIBREVILLE, GABON (February 6, 2013): The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today that a national park, once home to Africa's largest forest elephant population, has lost a staggering 11,100 individuals due to poaching for the ivory trade. The shocking figures come from Gabon's Minkebe Park, where recent surveys of areas within the park revealed that two thirds of its elephants have vanished since 2004. The majority of these losses have probably taken place in the last five years. Gabon contains over half of Africa's forest elephants, with a population estimated ...

Until a child's bones have fully matured (in girls, typically by age 14; in boys, age 16), an injury to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)—the primary, stabilizing ligament of the knee joint—requires special consideration, treatment and care to ensure appropriate healing and to prevent long-term complications. According to a review article in the February 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS), ACL injuries once were considered rare in children and adolescents. However, the number of ACL injuries in young athletes is on the ...