NEW ORLEANS — New insights into the wiring and firing of the "social brain" in humans and primates reveals the brain areas important in altruistic motives and behavior, and the brain regions that respond to the pain of discrimination. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health. The social brain consists of the structures and circuits that help people understand others' intentions, beliefs, and desires, and how to behave appropriately. ...

NEW ORLEANS — Studies released today explore the neurological component of dietary disorders, uncovering evidence that the brain's biological mechanisms may contribute to significant public health challenges — obesity, diabetes, binge eating, and the allure of the high-calorie meal. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health. Scientists are ultimately searching for new ways to treat diet-related disorders while raising awareness that ...

NEW ORLEANS — New findings presented today report the important role sleep plays, and the brain mechanisms at work as sleep shapes memory, learning, and behavior. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health. One in five American adults show signs of chronic sleep deprivation, making the condition a widespread public health problem. Sleeplessness is related to health issues such as obesity, cardiovascular problems, and memory problems. Today's ...

Pain in the lower extremities - feet, ankles, knees and hips - contributes to both poor physical function and a reduced quality of life in obese children, according to a new study by Dr. Sharon Bout-Tabaku and colleagues, from Nationwide Children's Hospital and The Ohio State University in the US. Their work shows that obese children with lower extremity pain have worse physical function and poorer psychological health than obese children without lower extremity pain. Their findings appear online in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research®, published by Springer. Obese ...

A team of researchers at the IRCM, supervised by Dr. Jacques Drouin, reprogrammed the identity of cells in the pituitary gland and identified critical mechanisms of epigenetic cell programming. This important discovery, published yesterday by the scientific journal Genes & Development, could eventually lead to new pharmacological targets for the treatment of Cushing's disease. Dr. Drouin's team studies the pituitary gland, which is the master gland located at the base of the skull that secretes hormones to control all other glands of the endocrine system. Disruption ...

OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA — Routine screening for type 2 diabetes in adults at low and moderate risk is not recommended, although it is recommended for people at high and very high risk of the disease, state new diabetes screening guidelines published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) http://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/15/1687.full. The guidelines suggest using a risk calculator and then screening based on the predicted risk of diabetes. "These new guidelines bring precision and convenience with web-based risk calculators and nonfasting A1C to diabetes screening," ...

Researchers investigating the long-term consequences of child abuse have identified some protective factors that can improve the health of victims during their adulthood. Men and women in their 30s who had been abused or neglected as children reported worse mental and physical health than their non-abused peers. But being married or having graduated from high school buffered the severity of their symptoms. The researchers also found that adults who experienced child abuse reported less happiness and self-esteem, more anger and other psychological damage, indicating ...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16, 2012 — A new episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') popular Prized Science video series features a virtuoso in teaching the next generation of scientists, who must discover tomorrow's life-saving medicines and new fuels and help solve other global challenges. The videos from the world's largest scientific society are available at www.acs.org/PrizedScience and by request on DVD. Titled Prized Science: How the Science Behind American Chemical Society Awards Impacts Your Life, the fourth episode of the 2012 series features the work of Diane ...

PHILADELPHIA (October 16, 2012)— Researchers at Drexel University have identified the physical forces in red blood cells and blood vessels underlying the painful symptoms of sickle cell disease. Their experiment, the first to answer a scientific question about sickle cell disease using microfluidics engineering methods, may help future researchers better determine who is at greatest risk of harm from the disease. They report their findings in Cell Press's Biophysical Journal today. Capillary Blockage Conundrum Like many scientific questions, this discovery began with ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 16, 2012 – Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is considered a precursor lesion for invasive breast cancer if untreated, and is found in approximately 45% of patients with invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC). Patients with DCIS only (not accompanied by invasive disease) have a 5-year-survival of nearly 100%, compared to 89% for all stages of invasive breast cancer (24% for patients with distant metastasis). A new study has found that despite an enormous degree of intercellular heterogeneity in both DCIS and IDC, the evolution from noninvasive to invasive ...

Multinational corporations that choose not to disclose geographic earnings are more likely to engage in income-shifting activities, says a study from UofT's Rotman School. Toronto – Policy makers, lobby groups and citizens should take note—those who understand corporate tax avoidance behavior will be in a better position to deter it. A recent study by Prof. Ole-Kristian Hope, who holds the Deloitte Professorship of Accounting at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, along with Mark (Shuai) Ma and Wayne B. Thomas from the Michael F. Price College ...

The humble fruit fly may have something to teach us about forgoing empty calories for more nutritional ones – especially when we're hungry. While the flies initially prefer food with a sweet flavour, they quickly learn to opt for less sweet food sources that offer more calories and nutritional value, according to new research by University of British Columbia zoologists. The findings, published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, are the first to measure the shift in food preference over time, and the first to find that flies opt for nutritious food more quickly ...

Chapel Hill, NC – Patient-reported outcomes should be a standard part of evaluating the comparative effectiveness of cancer treatments, according to recommendations put forward by a multi-institution research group. In an early release article published this week online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a research group led by Ethan Basch, MD, Director of the Cancer Outcomes Research Program at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, recommends that patient-reported symptoms and health-related quality of life measures should be assessed in comparative effectiveness ...

In many pathologies of the nervous system, there is a common event - cells called microglia are activated from surveillant watchmen into fighters. Microglia are the immune cells of the nervous system, ingesting and destroying pathogens and damaged nerve cells. Until now little was known about the molecular mechanisms of microglia activation despite this being a critical process in the body. Now new research from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro - at McGill University provides the first evidence that mechanisms regulated by the Runx1 gene control ...

Older black patients are three times more likely than older white patients to suffer poorer outcomes after surgery, including death, when cared for by nurses with higher workloads, reports research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. The large-scale study showed higher nurse workloads negatively affected older surgical patients generally and that the rate was more significant in older black individuals. When the patient-to-nurse ratio increased above 5:1, the odds of patient death increased by 3 percent per additional patient among whites and by 10 percent ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – October 16, 2012 – A new study shows that endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) before radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is a safe and effective treatment option for patients with nodular Barrett's esophagus (BE) and advanced neoplasia. The performance of EMR before RFA was not associated with a diminished likelihood of success of therapy or an increased rate of stricture compared with those with advanced neoplasia undergoing RFA alone. The study appears in the October issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the ...

The United States may lose its leadership role in space to other countries unless it makes research and development funding and processes -- especially in nanotechnology -- a renewed and urgent priority, according to a new paper from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The paper, "NASA's Relationship with Nanotechnology: Past, Present and Future Challenges," investigates how NASA has both guided and defunded cutting-edge nanotechnology development since 1996 at its own research facilities and in its collaborations with university scientists and laboratories. ...

Fairbanks, Alaska—University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists have identified what they think is the ancestral trait that allowed for the evolution of air breathing in vertebrates. They will present their research at the 42nd annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience Oct. 17 in New Orleans. "To breathe air with a lung you need more than a lung, you need neural circuitry that is sensitive to carbon dioxide," said Michael Harris, a UAF neuroscientist and lead researcher on a project investigating the mechanisms that generate and control breathing. "It's the neural ...

BOSTON—In what they say is a promising and highly selective treatment strategy, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have safely shut down breast cancer and a form of leukemia in mice by targeting abnormal proteins to which the cancers are "addicted," according to a new study. Even though the investigators genetically silenced the proteins or blocked them with a drug in normal as well as cancerous tissues, the animals remained healthy, they report in the Oct. 16 issue of the journal Cancer Cell. Peter Sicinski, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber is the paper's senior author. The ...

CHICAGO --- A team of Northwestern University scientists will meet with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrators in Washington D.C. Oct. 18 to advocate for important changes in the agency's guidelines for reproductive health research. "The problem is current research assessing the risk of toxins on reproductive health is not being uniformly investigated in both sexes and across the lifespan," said Kate Timmerman, program director of the Oncofertility Consortium of Northwestern University, who will be one of the scientists meeting with the EPA. The reproductive ...

Hailed by some as the "end of race as we know it" and the beginning of a "post-racial" America, the 2008 election of Barack Obama sparked a measurable bump in feelings of political empowerment among black Americans. But those sentiments have faded considerably over the last year or so, according to a new analysis of political survey data, with the sharpest declines in perceived political power coming among blacks who identify themselves as conservatives or "born again" Christians. "The election of a black American to the U.S. presidency did seem to empower African Americans, ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A study by the University at Buffalo shows for the first time that obese males ages 14 to 20 have up to 50 percent less total testosterone than do normal males of the same age, significantly increasing their potential to be impotent and infertile as adults. The paper was published online as an accepted article in Clinical Endocrinology. The authors are the same researchers in the University at Buffalo's School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences who first reported in 2004 the presence of low testosterone levels, known as hypogonadism, in obese, type ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – A common birth control device is effective in treating early-stage endometrial cancer in morbidly obese and high-risk surgery patients, said Georgia Health Sciences University Cancer Center researchers, and could lead to a cost-effective treatment for all women with this cancer type. Endometrial cancer, which starts in the lining of the uterus, is the third most common gynecologic cancer, striking more than 47,000 American women every year, particularly the obese. "Total hysterectomy, sometimes with removal of lymph nodes, is the most common treatment ...

Amsterdam, NL, October 16, 2012 – Little is known about oculomotor function in amblyopia, or "lazy eye," despite the special role of eye movements in vision. A group of scientists has discovered that abnormal visual processing and circuitry in the brain have an impact on fixational saccades (FSs), involuntary eye movements that occur during fixation and are important for the maintenance of vision. The results, which raise the question of whether the alterations in FS are the cause or the effect of amblyopia and have implications for amblyopia treatment, are available ...

PULLMAN, Wash.— Washington State University researchers have found that viruses will join forces to overcome a plant's defenses and cause more severe infections. "These findings have important implications in our ability to control these viruses", says Hanu Pappu, Sam Smith Distinguished Professor of Plant Virology and chair of WSU's Department of Plant Pathology. "Mixed infections are quite common in the field and now we know that viruses in these mixed infections are helping each other at the genetic level to overcome host defenses and possibly lead to the generation ...