The Canadian government's proposed Bill C-31 to change the country's immigration act could have serious negative impacts on the mental health of refugees, states a commentary in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Under the proposed Bill C-31, the Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, which targets refugee claimants, children under age 16 will be separated from their parents or held informally in a detention centre with their mothers. Family reunification for recognized refugees will be delayed until five years and detention reviews will not occur for ...

A new study finds that the use of drug-eluting stents after angioplasty bears little relationship to patients' predicted risk of restenosis (reblockage) of the treated coronary artery, the situation the devices are designed to prevent. In an Archives of Internal Medicine paper receiving early online publication, a multi-institutional research team reports that the devices are used in treating more than 70 percent of patients at low risk of restenosis. Since patients receiving these stents need to take costly anticlotting medications for at least a year – medicines that ...

While HIV programs provide lifesaving care and treatment to millions of people in lower-income countries, there have been concerns that as these programs expand, they divert investments from other health priorities such as maternal health. Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health assessed the effect of HIV programs supported by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) on access to maternal health care in sub-Saharan Africa for women who are not infected with HIV. The findings show that, in fact, PEPFAR-funded, HIV-related projects ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: 3 P.M. (CT), MONDAY, JULY 9, 2012 CHICAGO – Use of cranberry-containing products appears to be associated with prevention of urinary tract infections in some individuals, according to a study that reviewed the available medical literature and was published by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common bacterial infections and adult women are particularly susceptible. Cranberry-containing products have long been used as a "folk remedy" to prevent the condition, according to the study background. Chih-Hung ...

CHICAGO – Better quality of life at the end of life for patients with advanced cancer was associated with avoiding hospitalizations and the intensive care unit, worrying less, praying or meditating, being visited by a pastor in a hospital or clinic, and having a therapeutic alliance with their physician, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. When treatments to cure a patient's cancer are no longer an option, the focus of care often shifts from prolonging life to promoting the quality of life (QOL) at ...

CHICAGO – A study based on more than 1.5 million percutaneous coronary intervention procedures (such as balloon angioplasty or stent placement to open narrowed coronary arteries) suggests that the use of drug-eluting stents varies widely among U.S. physicians, and is only modestly correlated with the patient's risk of coronary artery restenosis (renarrowing), according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Drug-eluting stents (DES) are effective in reducing restenosis and the benefits are greatest in patients ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: 3 P.M. (CT), MONDAY, JULY 9, 2012 CHICAGO – A study of patients with stroke admitted to English National Health Service public hospitals suggests that patients who were hospitalized on weekends were less likely to receive urgent treatments and had worse outcomes, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Neurology, a JAMA Network publication. Studies from other countries have suggested higher mortality in patients who were admitted to the hospital on weekends for a variety of medical conditions, a phenomenon known as "the weekend ...

Using lights to make aircraft more visible to birds could help reduce the risk of bird strikes, new research by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found. The study, which examined how Canada geese responded to different radio-controlled model aircraft, is the first of its kind and is published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology. Aircraft collisions with wildlife – primarily birds – is a serious and growing threat to civil and military aviation, as well as an expensive one: bird strikes cost civil aviation alone more than $1.2 billion ...

Men who are recent immigrants and over qualified for their jobs are more than three times as likely to sustain an injury at work as their appropriately qualified peers who have been in the country for some time, suggests Canadian research published online in Injury Prevention. In Canada, in 2008, one in four employees between the ages of 25 and 54 was overqualified for the job they were doing, figures indicate. The researchers drew on almost 63,500 responses to the representative household Canadian Community Health Surveys of 2003 and 2005 to look at the relationship ...

[Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a cause-deleted life table analysis doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2012-000828] Restricting the amount of time spent seated every day to less than 3 hours might boost the life expectancy of US adults by an extra 2 years, indicates an analysis of published research in the online journal BMJ Open. And cutting down TV viewing to less than 2 hours every day might extend life by almost 1.4 years, the findings suggest. Several previous studies have linked extended periods spent sitting down and/or watching TV to poor health, ...

Nearly a third of adults with the most common type of brain cancer develop recurrent, invasive tumors after being treated with a drug called bevacizumab. The molecular underpinnings behind these detrimental effects have now been published by Cell Press in the July issue of Cancer Cell. The findings reveal a new treatment strategy that could reduce tumor invasiveness and improve survival in these drug-resistant patients. "Understanding how and why these tumors adopt this invasive behavior is critical to being able to prevent this recurrence pattern and maximizing the benefits ...

Investigators reporting in the July issue of the Cell Press journal Cancer Cell have found that blocking a fundamental process deep within cancer cells can selectively kill them and spare normal cells. For more than a century, clinicians have known that abnormalities of the nucleolus—a small, rounded mass within the cell nucleus—can be diagnostic for cancer. The nucleolus is where certain genes are read to form the components of ribosomes, the cellular machines that make proteins. While abnormalities in the nucleolus are known to be diagnostic for cancer, researchers ...

Stem cells that come from a specific part of the developing brain help fuel the growth of brain tumors caused by an inherited condition, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report. Scientists showed in mice that disabling a gene linked to a common pediatric tumor disorder, neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), made stem cells from one part of the brain proliferate rapidly. But the same genetic deficit had no effect on stem cells from another brain region. The results can be explained by differences in the way stem cells from these regions ...

So far it has seemed an irreparable limitation of human perception that we strain to perceive things in the very rapid succession of, say, less than half a second. Psychologists call this deficit "attentional blink." We'll notice that first car spinning out in our path, but maybe not register the one immediately beyond it. It turns out, we can learn to do better after all. In a new study researchers now based at Brown University overcame the blink with just a little bit of training that was never been tried before. "Attention is a very important component of visual perception," ...

NEW YORK, 9 July 2012—Punitive laws and human rights abuses are costing lives, wasting money and stifling the global AIDS response, according to a report by the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, an independent body of global leaders and experts. The Commission report, "HIV and the Law: Risks, Rights and Health," finds evidence that governments in every region of the world have wasted the potential of legal systems in the fight against HIV. The report also concludes that laws based on evidence and human rights strengthen the global AIDS response - these laws exist and ...

A team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Ganesh S Anand and Professor Linda J. Kenney from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Biological Sciences (DBS) and the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) has discovered how bacteria respond to salts in their environment and the ways in which salts can alter the behaviour of specialised salt sensor bacterial proteins. This novel finding sheds light on how microbes detect levels of salts or sugars in their watery environments – a problem in biology that has been studied for more than 30 years. The NUS ...

Rice consumers concerned about reports that rice is linked to diabetes can rest assured that rice can be part of a healthy diet, with scientists finding that the glycemic index (GI) of rice varies a lot from one type of rice to another, with most varieties scoring a low to medium GI. The findings of the research, which analyzed 235 types of rice from around the world, is good news because it not only means rice can be part of a healthy diet for the average consumer, but it also means people with diabetes, or at risk of diabetes, can select the right rice to help maintain ...

Researchers at the RUB and from Berkeley have used metal complexes to modify peptide hormones. In the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they report for the first time on the three-dimensional structure of the resulting metal-peptide compounds. "With this work, we have laid the molecular foundation for the development of better medicines" says Prof. Raphael Stoll from the Faculty of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Ruhr-University. The team examined hormones that influence the sensation of pain and tumour growth. Peptide hormones have many functions in the body Hormones ...

Photographs of faces may not be adequate proof of a person's identity and this could have serious implications for the accuracy of passport photographs in determining identity. Research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) shows that an image of a person may look strikingly different from one image to the next. We are told not to smile in our passport photos as a smile distorts the face; but the opposite may actually be true, and a poker face may be the one which distorts normal facial features. Dr Rob Jenkins and his team at the University of Glasgow ...

Robust evidence exists for some wound care interventions, but there are still gaps in current knowledge requiring international consensus and further high-level clinical evidence, according to a paper published online by BJS, the British Journal of Surgery. Researchers analysed the findings of 44 Cochrane Systematic Reviews (CSRs) published by the Cochrane Wounds and Peripheral Vascular Disease Groups up to June 2011. The reviews covered CSRs on acute wounds and chronic wounds such as venous, pressure, diabetic and arterial ulcers. This enabled them to identify a number ...

An international team that includes scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings. Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past ...

Jena (Germany) It was one of the gifts of the Magi – in addition to myrrh and gold they offered frankincense to the newly born baby Jesus. Since the ancient world the aromatic fragrance of burning Boswellia resin has been part of many religious ceremonies and is still used as a means to indicate special festive atmosphere in the church today. But frankincense can do much more: "The resin from the trunk of Boswellia trees contains anti-inflammatory substances," Professor Dr. Oliver Werz of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) says. The chair of Pharmaceutical ...

Despite having more leisure time overall, stressed-out Americans report having less 'quality time' to enjoy themselves, particularly those with little or no education. This is according to the findings of a new paper entitled Leisure Inequality in the US: 1965-2003, from Queen Mary, University of London, the University of Oxford and the University of Zaragoza. The research offers insights on how leisure inequality across educational groups has evolved in the last four decades in the United States in contrast with the inequality in wages and expenditure over the same ...

Satellite measurements show that nitrogen dioxide in the lower atmosphere over parts of Europe and the US has fallen over the past decade. More than 15 years of atmospheric observations have revealed trends in air quality. As the world's population increases, economies in many countries are also growing and populations are concentrating in large cities. With the use of fossil fuels still on the rise, pollution in large cities is also increasing. Nitrogen dioxide is an important pollutant in the troposphere, the lowest portion of our atmosphere. Satellite observations ...

The northern part of the North Island of New Zealand is marked at approximately 38° S latitude by a distinct ecological boundary known as the "kauri line". This region forms the southern distributional limit of many plants and is the warmest part of New Zealand. A number of endemic plants are found there. Ecologists have recently discovered a new species of wirerush from peatlands north of the "kauri line". Wetlands serve vital ecological functions by providing wildlife habitat, carbon storage, nutrient regulation and water balance. New Zealand has a number of wetland ...