Among patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (a measure of heart function), administration of sildenafil for 24 weeks, compared with placebo, did not result in significant improvement in exercise capacity or clinical status, according to a study published online by JAMA. Some studies have suggested that phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors (a class of drugs that includes sildenafil) may improve cardiovascular function. The study is being released early to coincide with its presentation at the American College of Cardiology's annual Scientific Sessions. Heart ...

Among patients hospitalized for heart failure (HF) with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF; a measure of how well the left ventricle of the heart pumps with each contraction), initiation of the medication aliskiren in addition to standard therapy did not reduce cardiovascular death or HF rehospitalization at 6 or 12 months after discharge, according to a study published online by JAMA. The study is being released early to coincide with its presentation at the American College of Cardiology's annual Scientific Sessions. "Inhibition of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone ...

UK children are being exposed to millions of tobacco images/messages every week on prime time television, indicates research published online in Tobacco Control. Smoking and other tobacco content frequently feature in films marketed to kids, which is known to spark their interest in starting to smoke, say the authors. More stringent curbs on tobacco imagery in the TV programme schedule could help curb uptake among young people, who spend an average of 2.5 hours in front of the box every day, they suggest. The authors analysed the weekly content of all five free to ...

Sleep is disrupted in people who likely have early Alzheimer's disease but do not yet have the memory loss or other cognitive problems characteristic of full-blown disease, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report March 11 in JAMA Neurology. The finding confirms earlier observations by some of the same researchers. Those studies showed a link in mice between sleep loss and brain plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. Early evidence tentatively suggests the connection may work in both directions: Alzheimer's plaques disrupt sleep, ...

Mouthguards and helmets can help ward off other serious head and facial injuries, but there is no good evidence that they can help prevent concussion, and paradoxically, they may even encourage players to take greater risks. But that is precisely why it is so important to recognise and treat concussive symptoms promptly, says the Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The Consensus Statement is the fourth revision of recommendations first developed in 2001 in Vienna, in a bid to offer some practical and evidence ...

ANN ARBOR — Strictly protected areas such as national parks and biological reserves have been more effective at reducing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest than so-called sustainable-use areas that allow for controlled resource extraction, two University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues have found. In addition, protected areas established primarily to safeguard the rights and livelihoods of indigenous people performed especially well in places where deforestation pressures are high. The U-M-led study, which found that all forms of protection successfully ...

New research paves the way for the development of a vaccine for the Tasmanian devil, currently on the brink of extinction because of a contagious cancer. It has been less than two decades since scientists discovered the contagious cancer devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) which causes 100 per cent mortality in the endangered marsupials. The facial cancer, which spreads when the devils bite each other's faces during fighting, kills its victims in a matter of months. As it has already wiped out the majority of the population with sightings of devils reduced by 85 per cent, ...

In 2010, it was shown that melons and cucumbers can be traced back to India. Because of the importance of the region for an understanding of Cucurbitaceae evolution and diversity, a new checklist of the Cucurbitaceae of India was produced to update the information on that family. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys. Vegetables are essential components of a healthy daily diet, not just in India but around the globe. Compared to grains and pulses, however, vegetables are under-investigated taxonomically, and information on their genome is scarce. ...

Policy and practice changes by healthcare institutions, providers and others could greatly improve medical care and improve survival for people who have a sudden cardiac arrest in the hospital, according to an American Heart Association consensus statement in its journal, Circulation. Each year, more than 200,000 adults and 6,000 children have in-hospital cardiac arrests, and survival has remained essentially unchanged for decades, statement authors said. According to the American Heart Association, only 24.2 percent of in-hospital cardiac arrest patients survive to hospital ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A study from the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University Center for Aging Research has found that many older adults are hesitant to halt cancer screenings even when the screenings may no longer be beneficial or may even be potentially harmful. The study is among the first to explore older adults' perceptions of recommendations to halt screenings for breast, prostate, colon and other cancers as they age. "Older Adults and Forgoing Cancer Screening: 'I think it would be strange'" was published Online First by JAMA Internal Medicine. "I think it ...

In this News Digest: Summary of a study being published online March 11, 2013, in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, analyzing self-reported data from 156 outpatient oncology practices participating in the American Society of Clinical Oncology's Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) showing significant improvements in performance on certain measures for quality oncology cancer care over a four-year period. Overall, mean normalized performance scores from participating practices rose from 71 to 85 percent between 2006 and 2010; improvements were especially profound ...

Long-term droughts in the Southwestern North America often mean failure of both summer and winter rains, according to new tree-ring research from a University of Arizona-led team. The finding contradicts the commonly held belief that a dry winter rainy season is generally followed by a wet monsoon season, and vice versa. The new research shows that for the severe, multi-decadal droughts that occurred from 1539 to 2008, generally both winter and summer rains were sparse year after year. "One of the big questions in drought studies is what prompts droughts to go ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Early in the Moon's history an ocean of molten rock covered its entire surface. As that lunar magma ocean cooled over millions of years, it differentiated to form the Moon's crust and mantle. But according to a new analysis by planetary scientists from Brown University, this wasn't the last time the Moon's surface was melted on a massive scale. The research, led by graduate student William Vaughan, shows that the impact event that formed the Orientale basin on the Moon's western edge and far side produced a sea of melted rock 220 ...

It seems counterintuitive that clouds over the Southern Ocean, which circles Antarctica, would cause rain in Zambia or the tropical island of Java. But new research finds that one of the most persistent biases in global climate models – a phantom band of rainfall just south of the equator that does not occur in reality – is caused by poor simulation of the cloud cover thousands of miles farther to the south. University of Washington atmospheric scientists hope their results help explain why global climate models mistakenly duplicate the inter-tropical convergence zone, ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—Vision scientists long have thought that lack of very long chain fatty acids in photoreceptor cells caused blindness in children with Stargardt type 3 retinal degeneration, an incurable eye disease. But researchers at the University of Utah's John A. Moran Eye Center have shown in a new study that lack of these fatty acids does not cause blindness, meaning that the search for the mechanism that robs sight from children with the disease must start anew. Researchers led by David Krizaj, Ph.D., associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A commonly used erectile dysfunction drug, sildenafil, doesn't help patients who have heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, a condition in which the heart's lower chambers are stiff and cannot relax and fill fully between beats. That is the finding of the RELAX study, presented today at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session and simultaneously published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The study's lead author called the results disappointing. Sildenafil, a phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitor, had shown ...

Researchers have conducted a remote reconnaissance of a distant solar system with a new telescope imaging system that sifts through the blinding light of stars. Using a suite of high-tech instrumentation and software called Project 1640, the scientists collected the first chemical fingerprints, or spectra, of this system's four red exoplanets, which orbit a star 128 light years away from Earth. A detailed description of the planets—showing how drastically different they are from the known worlds in the universe—was accepted Friday for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips. The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science, ...

This press release is available in Spanish. Pioneering studies by U. S. Department of Agriculture-funded research molecular geneticist Robert A. Waterland are helping explain how the foods that soon-to-be-moms eat in the days and weeks around the time of conception—or what's known as periconceptional nutrition–may affect the way genes function in her children, and her children's health. In an early study, Waterland and co-investigators examined gene function of 50 healthy children living in rural villages in the West African nation of The Gambia. The study has shaped ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists have delved deeper into the evolutionary history of the fruit fly than ever before to reveal the genetic activity that led to the development of wings – a key to the insect's ability to survive. The wings themselves are common research models for this and other species' appendages. But until now, scientists did not know how the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, first sprouted tiny buds that became flat wings. A cluster of only 20 or so cells present in the fruit fly's first day of larval life was analyzed to connect a gene known to be active ...

A delay in the summer monsoon rains that fall over the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico is expected in the coming decades according to a new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The North American monsoon delivers as much as 70 percent of the region's annual rainfall, watering crops and rangelands for an estimated 20 million people. "We hope this information can be used with other studies to build realistic expectations for water resource availability in the future," said study lead author, Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist with joint appointments ...

SAN FRANCISCO (March 11, 2013) — Patients who underwent heart bypass surgery without a heart- lung machine did as well one year later as patients whose hearts were connected to a pump during surgery in a study presented today at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session. CORONARY, an international, multicenter trial of on-pump (with a heart-lung machine) versus off-pump bypass surgery, enrolled 4,752 patients already scheduled to undergo a bypass procedure. The study is the largest to compare the two approaches. For the primary endpoint of ...

Research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine has revealed key features in proteins needed for life to function on Mars and other extreme environments. The researchers, funded by NASA, studied organisms that survive in the extreme environment of Antarctica. They found subtle but significant differences between the core proteins in ordinary organisms and Haloarchaea, organisms that can tolerate severe conditions such as high salinity, desiccation, and extreme temperatures. The research gives scientists a window into how life could possibly adapt to exist on ...

SAN FRANCISCO (March 11, 2013) — Older patients did as well after undergoing coronary bypass surgery off-pump as they did with the more costly "on-pump" procedure using a heart-lung machine to circulate blood and oxygen through the body during surgery, according to research presented today at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session. This large, multicenter trial—the German Off-Pump Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting in Elderly Patients, called GOPCABE—was the first to evaluate on-pump versus off-pump bypass surgery among patients aged 75 or older. ...

A combination of extreme cold temperatures, man-made chemicals and a stagnant atmosphere were behind what became known as the Arctic ozone hole of 2011, a new NASA study finds. Even when both poles of the planet undergo ozone losses during the winter, the Arctic's ozone depletion tends to be milder and shorter-lived than the Antarctic's. This is because the three key ingredients needed for ozone-destroying chemical reactions —chlorine from man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), frigid temperatures and sunlight— are not usually present in the Arctic at the same time: the ...