High birth weight, rapid weight gain and having an overweight mother who smokes can all increase the risk of a baby becoming obese later in childhood, research by experts at The University of Nottingham has found. The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, also discovered that children who were breastfed and were introduced to solid food later had a slightly reduced chance of becoming overweight. The findings come following a systematic review and analysis of data from around 30 previous studies looking at the impact ...

In an open letter to company director, Professor Sir John Bell, she says: "Billions of pounds of public money have been spent on [Tamiflu] and yet the evidence on its effectiveness and safety remains hidden from appropriate and necessary independent scrutiny." The letter is published on the BMJ's website (bmj.com/tamiflu ) alongside correspondence by the Cochrane team with Roche, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), as part of an open data campaign aimed at persuading Roche to give doctors and patients access to the full data ...

BOSTON, MA—Achieving mindfulness through meditation has helped people maintain a healthy mind by quelling negative emotions and thoughts, such as desire, anger and anxiety, and encouraging more positive dispositions such as compassion, empathy and forgiveness. Those who have reaped the benefits of mindfulness know that it works. But how exactly does it work? Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have proposed a new model that shifts how we think about mindfulness. Rather than describing mindfulness as a single dimension of cognition, the researchers demonstrate ...

PHILADELPHIA — Survivors of many common cancers enjoy a mental and physical health-related quality of life equal to that of adults who have not had cancer, but survivors of other cancers are in poorer health, according to results published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "We did not have a good sense of how cancer survivors across the United States were faring after their cancer diagnosis and immediate treatment," said Kathryn E. Weaver, Ph.D., M.P.H., assistant professor at Wake Forest Baptist ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Would you take part in a weight-loss program in which you were explicitly asked not to lose any weight for the first eight weeks? Although the approach sounds counterintuitive, a study from researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that women who spent eight weeks mastering weight-maintenance skills before embarking on a weight-loss program shed the same number of pounds as women who started a weight-loss program immediately. More importantly, the study showed that the "maintenance-first" women had regained only 3 pounds on average ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Oct. 30, 2012 – Beating cancer is just the first step. More than one third of the 12.6 million cancer survivors in the United States have physical or mental problems that put their overall health in jeopardy, according to researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Their study, published in the October issue of the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, found that 25 percent of cancer survivors reported poor physical health and 10 percent reported poor mental health as compared to 10 percent and 6 percent, respectively, of adults ...

In the largest prospective study to date of children with early and later manifestation of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to children without ASD, researchers found two distinct patterns of language, social and motor development in the children with ASD. Published in the journal Child Development, the study found that early in development, children who display early signs of ASD show greater initial delay across multiple aspects of development compared to children whose ASD symptoms emerge later. However at 36 months of age, the early differences between these ...

No matter what the economy is doing at any given time, goods must be transported to consumers. These factors may be a good reason to take a look at the Transportation Industry. The book Good Economy and Bad Economy, The Right Career, demonstrates that transportation professionals can leverage their experience to enter many fields in the industry. Milton Collier, the author is the President of TranZcenter, LLC (http://www.TranZcenter.com) retired military veteran with over 25 years or experience in the Transportation Industry. The book is current sold on Amazon at (https://www.createspace.com/3792235) ...

Health care expenditures are projected to reach almost 20 percent of the United States' GDP by 2020. Many economists consider this spending rate unsustainable. Up to 30 percent, or $765 billion, of health care costs were identified as potentially avoidable -- with many of these costs attributed to inappropriate or unnecessary services. Evidence-based performance measures for low-value tests and treatments can be one of the ways to help physicians to provide high value care to their patients, according to the American College of Physicians (ACP) in a new policy paper published ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Children with migraine are more likely to have below average school performance than kids who do not have headaches, according to new research published in the October 30, 2012, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study of 5,671 Brazilian children ages 5 to 12 found that those with migraine were 30 percent more likely to have below average school performance than those with no headaches. "Studies have looked at the burden of migraine for adolescents, but less work has been done to determine the effect ...

A study published in today's [Monday, Oct. 29] Archives of Internal Medicine finds that per capita Medicare spending on the elderly has grown nearly three times faster in the United States than in Canada since 1980. (Canada's program, which covers all Canadians, not just the elderly, is also called Medicare.) Cost grew more slowly in Canada despite a 1984 law banning co-payments and deductibles. In the first study of its kind, Dr. David U. Himmelstein and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professors at the City University of New York's School of Public Health, analyzed decades ...

SAN DIEGO — Disparities in survival after breast cancer persisted across racial/ethnic groups even after researchers adjusted for multiple demographics, such as patients' education and the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood in which they lived, according to data presented at the Fifth AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities, held here Oct. 27-30, 2012. "We learned that the effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status differed by racial/ethnic group. When simultaneously accounting for race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, we found persistent ...

SAN DIEGO — Cancer survivors who self-identified as being lesbian, gay or bisexual were more than twice as likely as heterosexual cancer survivors to have participated in cancer clinical trials, according to data from a small study presented at the Fifth AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities, held here Oct. 27-30, 2012. "The data from which our findings were derived were incredibly limited. We have to interpret these data cautiously," said Jennifer M. Jabson, M.P.H., Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of community health sciences ...

SAN DIEGO — Racial and ethnic disparities in breast tumor aggressiveness might be explained by social factors that influence the developing tumor and place those in disadvantaged groups at higher risk for aggressive breast cancer, according to data presented at the Fifth AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities, held here Oct. 27-30, 2012. "There is a disparity in the biological aggressiveness of breast cancer," said Garth H. Rauscher, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We tend to think about biological ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A team of Duke Medicine researchers has engineered cartilage from induced pluripotent stem cells that were successfully grown and sorted for use in tissue repair and studies into cartilage injury and osteoarthritis. The finding is reported online Oct. 29, 2012, in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and suggests that induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, may be a viable source of patient-specific articular cartilage tissue. "This technique of creating induced pluripotent stem cells – an achievement honored with this year's ...

Smoke-free legislation was associated with substantially fewer hospitalizations and deaths from heart and respiratory diseases, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. Researchers reviewed 45 studies covering 33 smoke-free laws at the local and state levels around the United States and from countries as varied as Uruguay, New Zealand and Germany and found: Comprehensive smoke-free laws were associated with a rapid 15 percent decrease in heart attack hospitalizations and 16 percent decrease in stroke hospitalizations. Smoke-free ...

The study, which used computer modelling to provide a detailed picture of how and when opsins evolved, sheds light on the origin of sight in animals, including humans. The evolutionary origins of vision remain hotly debated, partly due to inconsistent reports of phylogenetic relationships among the earliest opsin-possessing animals. Dr Davide Pisani of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences and colleagues at NUI Maynooth performed a computational analysis to test every hypothesis of opsin evolution proposed to date. The analysis incorporated all available genomic information ...

The Cretaceous Period of Earth history ended with a mass extinction that wiped out numerous species, most famously the dinosaurs. A new study now finds that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Researchers at the University of Chicago, the California Academy of Sciences and the Field Museum of Natural History will publish their findings Oct. 29 online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The mountain-sized asteroid that left the now-buried Chicxulub impact crater on the coast of Mexico's Yucatan ...

BOSTON, MA—Commercial medical tapes on the market today are great at keeping medical devices attached to the skin, but often can do damage—such as skin tissue tearing—once it's time to remove them. A research team from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has invented a quick-release tape that has the strong adhesion properties of commercial medical tape, but without the ouch factor upon removal. The team was led by Jeffrey Karp, PhD, BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Medicine, senior study author in collaboration with The Institute for Pediatric ...

CHICAGO – Being overweight and obese during adolescence appears related to an increased risk of all-cause treated end-stage renal disease (ESRD) during a 25-year period, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Children and adolescents with high body mass index (BMI) often become obese adults, and obese adults are at risk for chronic conditions such as diabetes, which can mean future risk of chronic kidney disease and ESRD, according to the study background. Asaf Vivante, M.D., of the Israeli Defense ...

CHICAGO – A decline in the incidence of myocardial infarction (MI, heart attack) in one Minnesota county appears to be associated with the implementation of smoke-free workplace laws, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) is associated with coronary heart disease (CHD) in nonsmokers, and research suggests that the cardiovascular effects of SHS are nearly as large as those with active smoking, according to the study background. Elimination of smoking in public places, ...

The dangers of smoking on smokers and their children are widely known but new research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine demonstrates that nicotine exposure also causes asthma in the smoker's grandchildren. Asthma is a major public health problem. It is the most common chronic disease of childhood. While there are many factors which contribute to asthma maternal smoking during pregnancy is a well known, and avoidable, risk. During pregnancy nicotine can affect a developing foetus' lungs, predisposing the infant to childhood asthma. Researchers ...

[Family-based association study of ADHD and genes increasing the risk for smoking behaviours Online First doi 10.1136/archdischild-2012-301882] [Shared biological risks that influence brain and behaviour Online First doi 10.1136/archdischild-2012-302461] A variation of a particular gene may link the behaviours typical of childhood attention hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD for short, and those associated with smoking, suggests research published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. Childhood ADHD and subsequent smoking in adulthood frequently go hand in hand, ...

[Systematic review and meta-analyses of risk factors for childhood overweight identifiable during infancy Online First doi 10.1136/archdischild-2012-302263] Mums who carry too much weight and/or who smoke during pregnancy increase the risk of having overweight kids, indicates a systematic analysis of the available evidence published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. A high birth weight and rapid weight gain during the first year of life also increase the risk, indicates the study. The authors base their findings on a comprehensive review of the available ...

A team of researchers under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Teckman in the Department of Pediatrics at St. Louis University, have demonstrated that oxidative stress occurs in a genetic model of alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency. This is the most common genetic liver disorder in children and can lead to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma in adults. Some cases may require liver transplantation. The report, published in the October 2012 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, suggests that treatment with antioxidants might be of therapeutic benefit for some individuals. ...