Washington, D.C. — Two powerful brain chemical systems work together to paralyze skeletal muscles during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, according to new research in the July 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The finding may help scientists better understand and treat sleep disorders, including narcolepsy, tooth grinding, and REM sleep behavior disorder. During REM sleep — the deep sleep where most recalled dreams occur — muscles that move the eyes and those involved in breathing continue to move, but the most of the body’s other muscles are stopped, potentially ...

A community-based nursing program delivered in collaboration with existing health care services is more effective in reducing the number of older people dying from chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, than usual care according to a study by US researchers published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The authors led by Kenneth Coburn from Health Quality Partners in Pennsylvania in the US, randomized 1736 eligible patients (aged 65 years and over with heart failure, coronary heart disease, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and/or hyperlipidemia who received ...

A new study published today in PLoS Medicine re-evaluates the role of public reporting of hospital-acquired infection data. The study, conducted by Nick Daneman and colleagues, used data from all 180 acute care hospitals in Ontario, Canada. The investigators compared the rates of infection of Clostridium difficile colitis prior to, and after, the introduction of public reporting of hospital performance; public reporting was associated with a 26% reduction in C. difficile cases. The authors comment "This longitudinal population-based cohort study has confirmed an immense ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Joseph Tucker from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA and colleagues lay out a social entrepreneurship for sexual health (SESH) approach that focuses on decentralized community delivery, multisectoral networks, and horizontal collaboration (business, technology, and academia). They argue that while SESH approaches have yet to be widely implemented, they show great promise: "Social marketing and sales of point-of-care, community-based tests for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, conditional cash transfers ...

A increasingly used type of HIV study which involves switching patients on one type of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to another, to see whether the new drug is as good as the at preventing replication of the HIV virus, may be unethical, according to a new Essay published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The studies, termed non-inferiority trials, are only ethical if participants can meaningfully benefit from the treatment change and are more likely to benefit than suffer harm, according to Andrew Carr from the HIV unit in St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia, Jennifer ...

High consumption of vitamin E either from diet or vitamin supplements may lower the risk of liver cancer, according to a study published July 17 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Liver cancer is the third most common cause of cancer mortality in the world, the fifth most common cancer found in men and the seventh most common in women. Approximately 85% of liver cancers occur in developing nations, with 54% in China alone. Some epidemiological studies have been done to examine the relationship between vitamin E intake and liver cancer; however, the results ...

As part of the Affordable Care Act, hospitals and medical centers are required to report their quality-of-care and risk-standardized outcomes for stroke and other common medical conditions. But reporting models for mortality that don't consider stroke severity may unfairly skew these results. Now, A UCLA-led national study has found that when reporting on 30-day mortality rates for Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized with acute stroke, using a model that adjusts for stroke severity completely alters performance outcomes and rankings for many hospitals. The new findings, ...

CHICAGO – Adding stroke severity to a hospital 30-day mortality model based on claims data for Medicare beneficiaries with acute ischemic stroke was associated with improvement in predicting the risk of death at 30 days and changes in performance ranking regarding mortality for a considerable proportion of hospitals, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA. "Increasing attention has been given to defining the quality and value of health care through reporting of process and outcome measures. National quality profiling efforts have begun to report hospital-level ...

CHICAGO – Use of the botanical product silymarin, an extract of milk thistle that is commonly used by some patients with chronic liver disease, did not provide greater benefit than placebo for patients with treatment-resistant chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA. Chronic hepatitis C virus infection affects almost 3 percent of the global population and may lead to cirrhosis, liver failure, and liver cancer. A large proportion of patients do not respond to certain treatments for this infection, and many others cannot ...

Stress can promote breast cancer cell colonization of bone, Vanderbilt Center for Bone Biology investigators have discovered. The studies, reported July 17 in PLoS Biology, demonstrate in mice that activation of the sympathetic nervous system – the "fight-or-flight" response to stress – primes the bone environment for breast cancer cell metastasis. The researchers were able to prevent breast cancer cell lesions in bone using propranolol, a cardiovascular medicine that inhibits sympathetic nervous system signals. Metastasis – the spread of cancer cells to distant organs, ...

CHICAGO – Physicians tend to share patients with colleagues who have similar personal traits and practice styles, and there is substantial variation in physician network characteristics across geographic areas, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA. Physicians are embedded in informal networks that result from their sharing of patients, information, and behaviors. "These informal information-sharing networks of physicians differ from formal organizational structures (such as a physician group associated with a health plan, hospital, or independent practice ...

CHICAGO – Among patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (MS), treatment with the widely-prescribed drug to treat MS, interferon beta, was not associated with less progression of disability, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA. "A key feature of MS is clinical progression of the disease over time manifested by the accumulation of disability. Interferon beta drugs are the most widely prescribed disease-modifying drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of relapsing-onset MS, the most common MS disease course," ...

Fewer people died or needed expensive long-term care when their physicians focused on the top risk factors for stroke and dementia, according to research reported in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA). dementia The primary care doctors in the German study focused on high blood pressure, smoking, high cholesterol, diabetes, irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) and depression. The researchers found that during a five-year period, the need for long-term care was cut 10 percent in women and 9.6 percent in men. Based on data collected in a comparison ...

Breast cancer mortality statistics in Sweden are consistent with studies that have reported that screening has limited or no impact on breast cancer mortality among women aged 40-69, according to a study published July 17 in the Journal of The National Cancer Institute. Since 1974, Swedish women aged 40-69 have increasingly been offered mammography screening, with nationwide coverage peaking in 1997. Researchers set out to determine if mortality trends would be reflected accordingly. In order to determine this, Philippe Autier, M.D., of the International Prevention ...

VANCOUVER – Diagnostic tests are increasingly capable of identifying plaques and tangles present in Alzheimer's disease, yet the disease remains untreatable. Questions remain about how these tests can be used in research studies examining potential interventions to treat and prevent Alzheimer's disease. Experts from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania will today participate in a panel at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference 2012 (AAIC 2012) discussing ways to ethically disclose and provide information about test results to asymptomatic ...

Even when its clot-dissolving powers are removed, the stroke drug tPA can still protect brain cells from the loss of oxygen and glucose induced by a stroke, researchers have discovered. The finding suggests that a modified version of tPA could provide benefits to patients who have experienced a stroke, without increasing the risk of bleeding. The results will be published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "We may have been giving the right medication, for the wrong reason," says senior author Manuel Yepes, MD, associate professor of neurology at Emory University School ...

Radiation from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster may eventually cause anywhere from 15 to 1,300 deaths and from 24 to 2,500 cases of cancer, mostly in Japan, Stanford researchers have calculated. The estimates have large uncertainty ranges, but contrast with previous claims that the radioactive release would likely cause no severe health effects. The numbers are in addition to the roughly 600 deaths caused by the evacuation of the area surrounding the nuclear plant directly after the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and meltdown. Recent PhD graduate John Ten ...

BOSTON – A new way of mapping how physicians share patients provides opportunities for improving the quality of medical care and organizing the nature of care delivery, according to researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. In a study published in the July 18 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers suggest this new way of systematically looking at how physicians are organized into patient-sharing networks can shed light on practice variation, aid in the spread of innovation and help form natural groups ...

More children are surviving cancer in Britain than ever before according to new research published in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Wednesday). The improvement in survival has been driven by the increasing numbers taking part in clinical trials since 1977 when the UK Children's Cancer Study Group (UKCCSG) [2] was established. The UKCCSG's principal aim was to set up a comprehensive portfolio of national and international trials for the majority of children's cancers. As result, between 1978 and 2005 two-thirds of children diagnosed with cancer in Britain ...

It is a cellular component so scarce, some scientists even doubted its existence, and many others gave up searching for its molecular structure. Now a team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins has defined the protein structural composition of mitoKATP, a potassium channel in the mitochondria of the heart and other organs that is known to protect against tissue damage due to a heart attack or stroke. Importantly, the newly found channel strongly improves heart cell survival, demonstrating an essential life-saving role. In a report to be published in the journal Circulation ...

Johns Hopkins researchers say they have discovered a cause-and-effect relationship between two well-established biological risk factors for schizophrenia previously believed to be independent of one another. The findings could eventually lead researchers to develop better drugs to treat the cognitive dysfunction associated with schizophrenia and possibly other mental illnesses. Researchers have long studied the role played in the brain's neurons by the Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) gene, a mutation with one of the strongest links to an increased risk of developing ...

A detailed study of heart muscle function in mice has uncovered evidence to explain why exercise is beneficial for heart function in type 2 diabetes. The research team, led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, found that greater amounts of fatty acids used by the heart during stressful conditions like exercise can counteract the detrimental effects of excess glucose and improve the diabetic heart's pumping ability in several ways. The findings also shed light on the complex chain of events that lead to diabetic cardiomyopathy, a form of heart ...

July 17, 2012, Shenzhen, China – BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, announced today that it has successfully developed a new filtering tool, PDXomics, which performs accurate and specific classification of the mixed reads derived from the host and tumor xenografts. Through the full utilization of this robust tool, researchers could develop the specific patient-derived xenografts (PDX) and advance the oncology drug discovery, biomarker development and their future applications. Xenograft models serve as an important tool for many areas of biomedical research, ...

Finding renewable and economic sources of energy are one of the most important concerns for the continuation of the human species. New research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biotechnology for Biofuels, has produced a novel strain of yeast with improved xylose tolerance and metabolism, and consequently improved ethanol production. Bioethanol is considered one of cleanest renewable replacements for fossil fuel. However using glucose from crops, such as sugar cane or starch crops, uses up resources which could otherwise be used to produce food. Xylose ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Silymarin or "milk thistle," a popular herbal dietary supplement that many people take for liver ailments, works no better than placebo in patients with chronic hepatitis C infection. That's the conclusion of a multicenter clinical trial published in the July 18, 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Patients ask me about milk thistle all the time," said Michael W. Fried, MD, lead author of the study, a professor in the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and director of the UNC Liver Center. "Now I can tell ...