A consortium of Birmingham researchers, clinicians and industry partners has received a second £1.1m award from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) for a three-year study supporting the further development of a novel device that could revolutionise the clinical management of anal fistula.    In this intrusive and embarrassing condition, sufferers experience daily discomfort and smelly discharge from a tunnel between the bowel and skin around the anus. It affects mostly young people and has a significant impact on employment and family life due ...

From today, patients and doctors at Amsterdam UMC's Heart Centre can make use of the app HartWacht (HeartGuard, in English) to supplement their care. Through the use of a small measurement instrument, around the size of a cereal bar, and a mobile app, patients can now have their blood pressure and arrythmias monitored at home. This means that patients need to visit their cardiologist less frequently. For doctors, this means they have more precise measurements and can act quicker where necessary. A ''win-win'' in the eyes of Michiel Winter, cardiologist at Amsterdam UMC and leader of this project.   "HartWacht ...

Cells need energy to function. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg can now explain how energy is guided in the cell by small atomic movements to reach its destination in the protein. Imitating these structural changes of the proteins could lead to more efficient solar cells in the future. The sun’s rays are the basis for all the energy that creates life on Earth. Photosynthesis in plants is a prime example, where solar energy is needed for the plant to grow. Special proteins absorb the sun’s rays, and the energy is transported as electrons inside the protein, in a process called charge transfer. In a new study, researchers show how ...

Body language and the understanding thereof is a crucial part of communication. It is often assumed that humans can innately recognize other’s emotions, but there is growing evidence that the ability to decipher these emotions is not instinctive but shaped by people’s culturally shared understanding of emotions. A team of scientists in the US decided to investigate how cultural upbringing and access to emotion category words, which categorize and facilitate access to a complex set of emotional ideas, experiences, and responses ...

WASHINGTON – A new Environmental Working Group peer-reviewed study has found chlormequat, a little-known pesticide, in four out of five people tested. Because the chemical is linked to reproductive and developmental problems in animal studies, the findings suggest the potential for similar harm to humans. EWG’s research, published February 15 in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, tested the urine of 96 people for the presence of chlormequat, finding it in 77 of them. EWG summarized the findings in an article published on its website. “EWG’s new study on chlormequat ...

Mothers are less likely to take antidepressants if their own parents and parents-in-law are healthy and live close by– a new study finds. On the flip side of the coin, antidepressant use was highest in mothers whose parents and parents-in-law were elderly, in poor health, and lived far away – possibly due to the stress caused by needing to care for and support older grandparents instead of receiving help from them. The findings of this new longitudinal study which tracked 488,000 mothers of young children between 2000-2014 are published today in the peer-reviewed journal Population Studies. “Previous studies have consistently shown that younger grandparents in good ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS The majority of the world’s people live in what are known as “blood deserts,” areas in which the clinical need for blood components cannot be met in at least 75% of cases. A global coalition of experts led by researchers from the Brigham identified urgent steps that can be taken by health systems to improve access to blood until longer term strategies are established Billions of people live in parts of the world that are so remote from the nearest hospital facility with a functioning blood bank that they are termed “blood deserts.” Researchers  from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the ...

Walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training seem to be the most effective exercises to ease depression, either alone or alongside established treatments such as psychotherapy and drugs, suggests an evidence review published by The BMJ today. Even low intensity activities such as walking or yoga are beneficial, but the results suggest that the more vigorous the activity, the greater the benefits are likely to be. The authors stress that confidence in many of the findings remains low ...

Securing suitable childcare for the irregular and long working hours demanded by a medical career is a crippling financial burden and a draining source of stress for doctor parents, reveals an exclusive snapshot survey by The BMJ today. Some doctors have resigned or are considering resigning, others have changed specialities in the hope that it gives them more flexibility, and yet more altered their plans to have children as a result, reports health journalist Erin Dean. The BMJ Childcare Survey ran on bmj.com from 16 to 30 November ...

Feminist health narratives are being co-opted by commercial interests to market new technologies, tests, and treatments that are not backed by evidence, argue researchers in The BMJ today. Dr Tessa Copp at The University of Sydney and colleagues say such marketing behaviour risks harming women through inappropriate medicalisation, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment. They call for greater wariness of simplistic health messages that any knowledge is power, and urge health professionals and governments ...

Processing times for complaints against drug companies suspected of having breached their industry code of practice have more than tripled in a nearly two-decade period, an investigation by The BMJ has found. Data analysis by Shai Mulinari at Lund University and Piotr Ozieranski at the University of Bath show that the average processing time of a complaint more than tripled between 2004-2021, from less than three months to more than 8.5 months. Numerous complaints have taken more than a year ...

School uniform policies could be restricting young people from being active, particularly primary school-aged girls, new research suggests. The University of Cambridge study used data about the physical activity participation of more than a million five-to-17-year-olds internationally. It found that in countries where a majority of schools require students to wear uniforms fewer young people tend to meet the 60 minutes of physical activity per day recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Regardless of uniform policies, across most countries fewer girls than boys reach those ...

In a first of its kind study, researchers have identified significant differences between the diversity of gut bacteria in grey squirrels compared to red squirrels which could hold the key to further understanding the ability of grey squirrels to outcompete red squirrels in the UK. New research, published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology, looked to understand more about the mechanisms by which grey squirrels are able to gain an advantage over red squirrels. Chris Nichols, Conservation Evidence ...

A groundbreaking scientific study published in Nature Cardiovascular Research has unveiled a remarkable discovery that may have far-reaching implications for the treatment of heart disease. The intensive investigations utilizing single-cell genomics and genetic experiments were conducted by a team of renowned scientists in the Cardiomyocyte Renewal Laboratory and McGill Gene Editing Laboratory at The Texas Heart Institute, including James F. Martin Vivian L. Smith Chair in Regenerative Medicine and Vice Chairman and Professor ...

HOUSTON – (Feb. 14, 2024) – Eye contact and body language are critical in social interaction, but exactly how the brain uses this information in order to inform behavior in real time is not well understood. By combining behavioral and wireless eye tracking and neural monitoring, a team of Rice University scientists and collaborators studied how pairs of freely moving macaques interacting in a naturalistic setting use visual cues to guide complex, goal-oriented cooperative behavior. The study published in Nature offers first evidence that the part of the brain that processes visual information ⎯ the visual cortex ⎯ plays an active role in social behavior by providing ...

In the ever-evolving realm of microscopy, recent years have witnessed remarkable strides in both hardware and algorithms, propelling our ability to explore the infinitesimal wonders of life. However, the journey towards three-dimensional structured illumination microscopy (3DSIM) has been hampered by challenges arising from the speed and intricacy of polarization modulation.  Introducing the DMD-3DSIM System Enter the high-speed modulation 3DSIM system “DMD-3DSIM,” combining digital display with super-resolution imaging, allowing scientists to see cellular structures in unprecedented detail. As ...

Two University of Wyoming anthropology professors have discovered one of the earliest circular plazas in Andean South America, showcasing monumental megalithic architecture, which refers to construction that uses large stones placed upright with no mortar. Located at the Callacpuma archaeological site in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru, the plaza is built with large, vertically placed megalithic stones -- a construction method previously unseen in the Andes. Associate Professor Jason Toohey, project lead, and Professor Melissa Murphy have been researching ...

BOSTON – What causes us to age? New “clocks” developed by researchers may help point to the answers. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, unveil a new form of epigenetic clock – a machine learning model designed to predict biological age from DNA structure. The novel model distinguishes between genetic differences that slow and accelerate aging, predicts biological age and evaluates anti-aging ...

“This study uncovered important roles for USP1 in Ewing sarcoma.” BUFFALO, NY- February 14, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Genes & Cancer on February 5, 2024, entitled, “Roles of USP1 in Ewing sarcoma.” Ewing sarcoma is a cancer of bone and soft tissue in children and young adults that is driven by the EWS-ETS fusion transcription factor, most commonly EWS-FLI1. Researchers Panneerselvam Jayabal, Xiuye Ma and Yuzuru Shiio from The University of Texas Health Science Center previously reported that Ewing sarcoma harbors two populations of cells, ...

Maryam Shanechi, Dean’s Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the USC Center for Neurotechnology, and her team have developed a new machine learning method that reveals surprisingly consistent intrinsic brain patterns across different subjects by disentangling these patterns from the effect of visual inputs.The work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). When performing various everyday movement behaviors, such as reaching for a book, our brain has to take in information, often in the form of visual input — for example, seeing where the book is. Our brain then has to process ...

Every year, around 50,000 people in the United States experience cardiogenic shock — a life-threatening condition, usually caused by a severe heart attack, in which the heart can’t pump enough blood for the body’s needs. Many of these patients end up receiving help from a mechanical pump that can temporarily help the heart pump blood until it recovers enough to function on its own. However, in nearly half of these patients, the extra help leads to an imbalance between the left and right ventricles, which can pose danger to the patient. In a ...

Chronic exposure of human skin to ultraviolet light causes premature aging, or photoaging. As the skin undergoes photoaging, type I collagen bundles, which are found in the dermis beneath the top layer of the skin and provide strength and support to skin, become fragmented. This leads to wrinkles, fragility and loss of support and elasticity.   “The best way to prevent damage to type I collagen by sunlight is to wear sunscreen consistently, daily if possible and particularly when spending time outdoors,” said Frank Wang, MD,  the William B. Taylor Endowed Professor of Clinical Dermatology at U-M Medical School.  Experts ...

LOS ANGELES — City of Hope®, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, treated the oldest person to be cured of a blood cancer and then achieve remission for HIV after receiving a blood stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation. Research published in NEJM today demonstrates that older adults with blood cancers who receive reduced intensity chemotherapy before a stem cell transplant with donor cells that are resistant to HIV may be cured of HIV infection. Paul Edmonds, 68, of Desert Springs, California, is the fifth person in the world to achieve remission for acute myelogenous leukemia ...

Los Angeles, CA (February 14, 2024) — A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE explores the weight great fossil sites have on our understanding of evolutionary relationships between fossil groups—the lagerstätten effect—and for the first time, quantified the power these sites have on our understanding of evolutionary history. Surprisingly, the authors discovered that the wind-swept sand deposits of the Late Cretaceous Gobi Desert’s extraordinarily diverse and well-preserved ...

Le Bonheur’s risk-based innovation program Changing High-Risk Asthma in Memphis through Partnership (CHAMP) significantly decreased health care use related to asthma by targeting barriers to asthma care, according to research published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. After one year of enrollment in the program, results analyzing 945 children included a 48% reduction in Emergency Department (ED) visits, 68% reduction in inpatient and observation visits, 42% reduction in urgent care visits and 53% reduction in asthma exacerbations. Asthma exacerbations per patient significantly decreased from 2.97 to 1.4. “Children ...