A team of scientists and clinicians at UC San Francisco has discovered how to detect abnormal brain rhythms associated with Parkinson's by implanting electrodes within the brains of people with the disease. The work may lead to developing the next generation of brain stimulation devices to alleviate symptoms for people with the disease. Described this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work sheds light on how Parkinson's disease affects the brain, and is the first time anyone has been able to measure a quantitative signal ...

PHILADELPHIA — The mammalian placenta is more than just a filter through which nutrition and oxygen are passed from a mother to her unborn child. According to a new study by a research group from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, if a mother is exposed to stress during pregnancy, her placenta translates that experience to her fetus by altering levels of a protein that affects the developing brains of male and female offspring differently. These findings suggest one way in which maternal-stress exposure may be linked to neurodevelopmental diseases ...

SEATTLE – Alzheimer's disease is the fastest growing threat to health in the US. HIV/AIDS and alcohol are severely eroding the health of Russians. Violence is claiming the lives of young men in large swaths of Latin America, constituting a homicide-driven health crisis. Despite health gains in sub-Saharan Africa, infectious diseases still cause hundreds of thousands of child deaths. These are just some of the new findings from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study (GBD 2010), a systemic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude ...

SEATTLE – Britons are living longer lives and enjoying better health, but they are still grappling with disabling conditions such as back and neck pain and depression, often more than people in most other European countries. Health in the United Kingdom is eroded by preventable causes of death such as smoking, unhealthy diets, and use of alcohol and drugs. As a result, the UK's pace of decline in premature mortality has fallen well behind the average of 14 other original members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Norway, and the United States (EU15+) over the past ...

King Mithridates understood that poison is only as good as the dosage taken. Each day, he ingested small quantities of poison in order to become immunize and escape his court's plotters. Oncologists run up against the same principle when fighting cancer. Sometimes, a small dose of chemotherapy may induce dangerous resistance mechanisms in malignant cells, resulting in relapse. Now, EPFL research published in the journal PLOS ONE reports a tool that could simply and accurately determine the right dose for individual patients. Dosage, a vital issue This novel tool, developed ...

The pharmaceutical industry has pulled back on marketing to physicians and consumers, yet some enduring patterns persist. According to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, advertising peaked in 2004, with industry promotion to physicians declining nearly 25 percent by 2010, to $27.7 billion or 9 percent of sales. Similar declines were seen in direct-to-consumer advertising, which remains concentrated among a small number of products. The number of products promoted to providers peaked at over 3,000 in 2004, and declined ...

Humidity measurements in the atmosphere are of essential importance, since water vapour, as the most important natural greenhouse gas, has a strong influence on the Earth's atmospheric radiation balance and, thus, decisively influences our climate. In addition, water is responsible for meteorological phenomena such as the formation of clouds and precipitation. Hence, the atmospheric water content is an essential measurand in all climate models, but also when it comes to forecasting the weather; this measurand has to be determined with great accuracy if reliable predictions ...

Public reporting of how physicians and hospitals perform in quality of care measures leads to improved care for patients. A collaborative team of researchers led by Geoffrey C. Lamb, M.D., professor of internal medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, published their findings in the March 2013 edition of Health Affairs. The researchers analyzed 14 publicly reported quality of care measures from 2004 to 2009 for the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality, a voluntary consortium of physician groups, and found that physician groups in the collaborative improved ...

In this News Digest: Summary of a study being published online March 4, 2013 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, reporting that in certain children with retinoblastoma, adjuvant chemotherapy can be avoided, without risking disease worsening or relapse. The findings will help decision-making about adjuvant treatment and therapy selection for patients with low- , intermediate-, and high-risk retinoblastoma affecting only one eye Quote for attribution to ZoAnn Eckert Dreyer, MD, American Society of Clinical Oncology Cancer Communications Committee member and pediatric ...

The brain adds new cells during puberty to help navigate the complex social world of adulthood, two Michigan State University neuroscientists report in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists used to think the brain cells you're born with are all you get. After studies revealed the birth of new brain cells in adults, conventional wisdom held that such growth was limited to two brain regions associated with memory and smell. But in the past few years, researchers in MSU's neuroscience program have shown that mammalian brains ...

A study led by University of Massachusetts Medical School professor and immunologist Katherine Luzuriaga, MD, and Johns Hopkins Children's Center virologist Deborah Persaud, MD, highlights the long-term benefits of early antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiated in infants. The study, presented on March 4 at the 20th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta, shows that ART administered in early infancy can help curtail the formation of hard-to-treat viral sanctuaries — reservoirs of "sleeper" cells responsible for reigniting infection ...

Oxidative stress turns a protein that normally protects healthy cells into their executioner, according to a study released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Alvaro Estevez, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida's College of Medicine, led the multi-university team that made the discovery, which could eventually help scientists develop new therapies to combat a host of conditions from stroke to Lou Gehrig's disease Researchers have long known that oxidative stress damages cells and results in neurodegeneration, ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (March 04, 2013) - A contact lens technique called overnight orthokeratology (OK) brings rapid improvement in vision for nearsighted patients. Now a new study shows that OK treatment works mainly by flattening the front of the cornea, reports a recent study, "Posterior Corneal Shape Changes in Myopic Overnight Orthokeratology", appearing in the March issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. "This study appears ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Physicists at UC Santa Barbara are manipulating light on superconducting chips, and forging new pathways to building the quantum devices of the future –– including super-fast and powerful quantum computers. The science behind tomorrow's quantum computing and communications devices is being conducted today at UCSB in what some physicists consider to be one of the world's top laboratories in the study of quantum physics. A team in the lab of John Martinis, UCSB professor of physics, has made a discovery that provides new understanding in the quantum ...

NEW YORK (EMBARGOED UNTIL March 4, 2013, 5 PM U.S. Eastern Time) — African forest elephants are being poached out of existence. A study just published in the online journal PLOS ONE shows that across their range in central Africa, a staggering 62 percent of all forest elephants have been killed for their ivory over the past decade. "The analysis confirms what conservationists have feared: the rapid trend towards extinction – potentially within the next decade – of the forest elephant," says Dr. Samantha Strindberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), one of the ...

VIDEO: In FES cycling, small electrical pulses are applied to the paralyzed muscles of an individual, stimulating the muscles to cycle on a stationary recumbent bicycle. The repetitive activity simulates movement... Click here for more information. (Baltimore, MD) – A new study by Kennedy Krieger Institute's International Center for Spinal Cord Injury (Epub ahead of print) finds that long-term lower extremity functional electrical stimulation (FES) cycling, as part of a rehabilitation ...

Three antiretroviral-based strategies intended to prevent HIV infection among women did not prove effective in a major clinical trial in Africa. For reasons that are unclear, a majority of study participants—particularly young, single women—were unable to use their assigned approaches daily as directed, according to findings presented today by one of the study's co-leaders at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta. The Vaginal and Oral Interventions to Control the Epidemic (VOICE) study, or MTN 003, was designed to evaluate the ...

New York, NY, March 4, 2013 – In a new phase III trial mirabegron, a β3-adrenoceptor agonist, given once daily for 12 weeks, reduced the frequency of incontinence episodes and number of daily urinations, and improved urgency and nocturia in adults with overactive bladder (OAB) compared to those in a placebo group. The incidence of common adverse events (hypertension, urinary tract infection, headache, nasopharyngitis) was similar in the mirabegron and placebo groups in this study. Rates of dry mouth and constipation were similar in the drug and placebo groups. The ...

A new study shows that although certain bumble bees are at risk, other bee species in the northeastern United States persisted across a 140-year period despite expanding human populations and changing land use. Led by Rutgers University and based extensively on historical specimens from the American Museum of Natural History and nine other bee collections, the study informs conservation efforts aimed at protecting native bee species and the important pollinator services they provide. The results are published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Eighty-seven ...

Reducing fear and stress following a traumatic event could be as simple as providing a protein synthesis blocker to the brain, report a team of researchers from McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, McGill University, and Massachusetts General Hospital in a paper published in the March 4 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This is an important basic neuroscience finding that has the potential to have clinical implications for the way individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder are treated," said Vadim Bolshakov, PhD, director of the Cellular ...

Women who receive strong social support from their families during pregnancy appear to be protected from sharp increases in a particular stress hormone, making them less likely to develop postpartum depression, according to a new study published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Now we have some clue as to how support might 'get under the skin' in pregnancy, dampening down a mother's stress hormone, and thereby helping to reduce her risk for postpartum depression," said Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, a UCLA National Institute ...

New research from the University of Adelaide has discovered a high prevalence of vitamin B12 deficiency among refugees, prompting calls for refugees to be routinely screened for the problem soon after they arrive. Vitamin B12 deficiency is a sign of severe malnourishment and can result in permanent damage to the nervous system. For women of child-bearing age, vitamin B12 deficiency can lead to developmental defects in their unborn children. If left untreated, the deficiency could be fatal. In the first study of its kind in the world, researchers from the University ...

Dining on field grasses would be ruinous to human teeth, but mammals such as horses, rhinos and gazelles evolved long, strong teeth that are up to the task. New research led by the University of Washington challenges the 140-year-old assumption that finding fossilized remains of prehistoric animals with such teeth meant the animals were living in grasslands and savannas. Instead it appears certain South American mammals evolved the teeth in response to the gritty dust and volcanic ash they encountered while feeding in an ancient tropical forest. The new work was conducted ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Bringing the concept of an "artificial leaf" closer to reality, a team of researchers at MIT has published a detailed analysis of all the factors that could limit the efficiency of such a system. The new analysis lays out a roadmap for a research program to improve the efficiency of these systems, and could quickly lead to the production of a practical, inexpensive and commercially viable prototype. Such a system would use sunlight to produce a storable fuel, such as hydrogen, instead of electricity for immediate use. This fuel could then be used on demand ...

Human activities are not the primary cause of arsenic found in groundwater in Bangladesh. Instead, a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Barnard College, Columbia University, University of Dhaka, Desert Research Institute and University of Tennessee found that the arsenic in groundwater in the region is part of a natural process that predates any recent human interaction, such as intensive pumping. The results appear in the March 4 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Millions of people in Bangladesh and neighboring ...