A clinical study led by National Institutes of Health investigators has identified an antibody that compromises the immune systems of HIV-negative people, making them susceptible to infections with opportunistic microbes such as nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). In this study conducted at hospitals in Thailand and Taiwan, the researchers found that the majority of study participants with opportunistic infections made an antibody against interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma), a cell-signaling molecule thought to play a major role in clearing harmful infections. The study findings ...

Ancient Greek philosophers considered the ability to "know thyself" as the pinnacle of humanity. Now, thousands of years later, neuroscientists are trying to decipher precisely how the human brain constructs our sense of self. Self-awareness is defined as being aware of oneself, including one's traits, feelings, and behaviors. Neuroscientists have believed that three brain regions are critical for self-awareness: the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. However, a research team led by the University of Iowa has challenged this ...

Ethical challenges are central to persistent "critical weaknesses" in the national system for ensuring drug safety, according to a commentary by former Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee members published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. With a caution against "reactive policymaking," committee co-chairs Ruth Faden, Ph.D., M.P.H., and Steven Goodman, M.D., M.H.S., Ph.D., with fellow committee member Michelle Mello, J.D., Ph.D., revisit the controversy over the antidiabetic drug Avandia that led to the formation of their IOM committee on monitoring drug ...

For six months last year, a deadly outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria kept infection-control specialists at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Clinical Center in a state of high alert. A New York City patient carrying a multi-drug resistant strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a microbe frequently associated with hospital-borne infections, introduced the dangerous bacteria into the 243-bed research hospital while participating in a clinical study in the summer of 2011. Despite enhanced infection-control practices, including patient isolation, the K. pneumoniae ...

NEW YORK, August 22, 2012 – Researchers at NYU School of Medicine have made a novel discovery that could have widespread clinical implications, potentially affecting everything from nutrient metabolism to obesity in children. Since the 1950's, low dose antibiotics have been widely used as growth promoters in the agricultural industry. For decades, livestock growers have employed subtherapeutic antibiotic therapy (STAT), not to fight infection or disease, but to increase weight gain in cattle, swine, sheep, chickens and turkey, among other farm animals. First author ...

Irvine, Calif. – Increased capture of natural gas from oil fields probably accounts for up to 70 percent of the dramatic leveling off seen in atmospheric methane at the end of the 20th century, according to new UC Irvine research being published Thursday, Aug. 23, in the journal Nature. "We can now say with confidence that, based on our data, the trend is largely a result of changes in fossil fuel use," said chemistry professor Donald Blake, senior author on the paper. Methane has 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, although CO2 is filling the ...

A low dose of the sedative clonazepam alleviated autistic-like behavior in mice with a mutation that causes Dravet syndrome in humans, University of Washington researchers have shown. Dravet syndrome is an infant seizure disorder accompanied by developmental delays and behavioral symptoms that include autistic features. It usually originates spontaneously from a gene mutation in an affected child not found in either parent. Studies of mice with a similar gene mutation are revealing the overly excited brain circuits behind the autistic traits and cognitive impairments ...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that the worm which causes River Blindness survives by using a bacterium to provide energy, as well as help 'trick' the body's immune system into thinking it is fighting a different kind of infection. River Blindness affects 37 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, causing intense itching of the skin, visual impairment and in severe cases, irreversible blindness. It is caused by a parasitic worm that is transmitted by blood-feeding blackflies, which breed in fast-flowing rivers. The team at Liverpool investigated ...

Results published this week by a team of polar scientists from Britain, Australia and France adds a new dimension to our understanding of Antarctic Peninsula climate change and the likely causes of the break-up of its ice shelves. The first comprehensive reconstruction of a 15,000 year climate history from an ice core collected from James Ross Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region is reported this week in the journal Nature. The scientists reveal that the rapid warming of this region over the last 100 -years has been unprecedented and came on top of a slower natural ...

A new class of organic materials developed at Northwestern University boasts a very attractive but elusive property: ferroelectricity. The crystalline materials also have a great memory, which could be very useful in computer and cellphone memory applications, including cloud computing. A team of organic chemists discovered they could create very long crystals with desirable properties using just two small organic molecules that are extremely attracted to each other. The attraction between the two molecules causes them to self assemble into an ordered network -- order ...

Female sea slugs mate more frequently than required to produce offspring, despite the highly traumatic and biologically costly nature of their copulation, as reported Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Rolanda Lange of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, investigated the mating behavior of a simultaneously hermaphroditic species of sea slug that mates via an extravagant ritual that involves a syringe-like penile appendage that stabs the partner to inject prostate fluids and sperm. Surprisingly, the researchers found that ...

Managers and non-managers show distinctly different brain activation patterns when making decisions, according to research published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Svenja Caspers of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Research Centre Jülich in Germany, used functional MR imaging to track the decision making process for managers and non-managers. Subjects were required to perform equally repetitive decisions, one form of decision making occurring in every-day work life. The authors found that manager and non-managers ...

Approximately one in five prescriptions to elderly people is inappropriate, according to a study published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Dedan Opondo of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, conducted a systematic review of English-language studies of medication use in the elderly and found that the median rate of inappropriate prescriptions was 20.5%. Some of the medications with the highest rates of inappropriate use were the antihistamine diphenhydramine, the antidepressant amitriptyline, and the pain reliever propoxyphene. INFORMATION: Citation: ...

Two parasitic wasp species show similar memory consolidation patterns in response to rewards of different quality, providing evidence that the reward value affects the type of memory that is consolidated. The full results are reported Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The researchers, led by Marjolein Kruidhof of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, tested how wasps store scents associated with situations of low reward (egg-laying into a inferior-quality host species that lays single eggs) versus high reward (egg-laying into a superior-quality host species ...

Patients with anorexia have trouble accurately judging their own body size, but not others', according to research published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. In the study, led by Dewi Guardia of the University Hospital of Lille in France, 25 patients with anorexia and 25 controls were shown a door-like aperture and asked to judge whether or not it was wide enough for them to pass through, or for another person present in the room to pass through. In previous similar experiments, anorexic patients felt they could not pass through the door even when it was easily ...

KANSAS CITY, MO—The first step in gene expression is the exact copying of a segment of DNA by the enzyme known as RNA polymerase II, or pol II, into a mirror image RNA. Scientists recognize that pol II does not transcribe RNA via a smooth glide down the DNA highway but instead encounters an obstacle course of DNA tightly wound around barrier proteins called histones. Those proteins must be shoved aside for pol II to trundle through. Previous work from the lab of Jerry Workman, Ph.D., an investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, showed how a protein ...

A study from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, published August 22 online by PLoS ONE, reports that muscle problems reported by patients taking statins were related to the strength or potency of the given cholesterol-lowering drugs. Adverse effects such as muscle pain and weakness, reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were related to a statin's potency, or the degree by which it typically lowers cholesterol at commonly prescribed doses. "These findings underscore that stronger statins bear higher risk – and should be used ...

Having healthy gut bacteria could have as much to do with a strategy that insurance companies use to uncover risk as with eating the right foods, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Findings published today in Ecology Letters show how researchers applied a strategy used by insurance companies to understand how animals and plants recruit beneficial bacteria. The breakthrough brings scientists closer to understanding the human body's relationship with bacteria, which account for nine cells out of every 10 in our bodies. The research has ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A recent study of residential landscape types and native bird communities in Phoenix, Ariz., led by a University of Massachusetts Amherst urban ecologist suggests that yards mimicking native vegetation and wildlands offer birds "mini refuges," helping to offset the loss of biodiversity in cities and supporting birds better than traditional grass lawns and non-native plantings. The study, led by Susannah Lerman with her advisor Paige Warren at UMass Amherst, and Hilary Gan and Eyal Shochat at Arizona State University, is one of the first to use quantitative ...

Friends are equally important to men and women, but family matters more for men's wellbeing Online First doi 10.1136/jech-2012-201113 The midlife wellbeing of both men and women seems to depend on having a wide circle of friends whom they see regularly, finds research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. A network of relatives is also important—but only for men—shows the study of more than 6500 Britons born in 1958. The authors base their findings on information collected from the participants, all of whom were part of the National ...

A global assessment of the oesophageal adenocarcinoma epidemic Online First doi 10.1136/gutjnl-2012-302412 The global "epidemic" of one type of gullet cancer (adenocarcinoma) seems to have started in the UK during the 1950s, sparked by some as yet unknown, but common, factor, suggests research published online in Gut. There are two distinct types of gullet (oesophageal) cancer—squamous and adenocarcinoma, the latter typically affecting the lower third of the oesophagus. It was first realised that diagnoses of adenocarcinoma were increasing rapidly in several regions ...

Boston, Mass., August 23, 2012 – Substantial racial and ethnic disparities were found for a broad set of harmful health-related issues in a new study of 5th graders from various regions of the U.S. conducted by Boston Children's Hospital and a consortium of research institutions. Black and Latino children were more likely than white children to report everything from witnessing violence to engaging in less exercise to riding in cars without wearing seatbelts. At the same time, the study found that children of all races and ethnicities did better on these health indicators ...

New born human infants have the largest brains among primates, but also the highest proportion of body fat. Before birth, if the supply of nutrients from the mother through the placenta is limited or unbalanced, the developing baby faces a dilemma: should resources be allocated to brain growth, or to fat deposition for use as an energy reserve during the early months after birth? Scientists at the University of Southampton have shown that this decision could have an effect on how fat we are as children. In new research, published in the journal PLoS ONE today (22 August ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – A collaborative research effort by scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Duke University, and University College of London in the UK, sheds new light on alcohol-related birth defects. The project, led by Kathleen K. Sulik, PhD, a professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at UNC, could help enhance how doctors diagnose birth defects caused by alcohol exposure in the womb. The findings also illustrate how the precise timing of that exposure could determine the ...

A mother's emotional health and education level during her child's earliest years influence oral health at age 14, according to a new study from Case Western Reserve University's School of Dental Medicine. Researchers started with the oral health of the teens and worked backwards to age 3 to find out what factors in their past influenced their oral health outcomes. While mothers were interviewed, lead investigator Suchitra Nelson, professor in the dental school, believes it can apply to whoever is the child's primary caregiver. Nelson's team examined the teeth of 224 ...