BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Millions of adults have atrial fibrillation — an irregular beating of the upper chambers of the heart that yields increased risk of heart failure, stroke and death. Many genetic mutations in the developing fetus can lead to adult atrial fibrillation, including mutations that shorten the massive protein titin in cardiac muscle cells. Now, in a study in zebrafish and human heart muscle cells, researchers show that a tiny deletion in the A-band of titin — the loss of just nine amino acids out of more than 27,000 to 35,000 amino acids of an intact titin protein — causes a developmental ...

Prescribing non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to people at high risk of harm from them is estimated to cost the NHS in England around £31 million and cause more than 6,000 lost years of good health over 10 years, finds a study published by The BMJ today. NSAIDs continue to be a source of avoidable harm and healthcare costs, and more needs to be done to address this, especially in high risk groups, say the researchers. NSAIDs are used for pain and inflammation and are one of the most widely prescribed groups of medicines in the world, But they are known to increase the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, heart attacks, stroke, and kidney damage. Yet ...

Wearing a surgical face mask in public spaces reduces the risk of self-reported respiratory symptoms, finds a trial of adults in Norway published by The BMJ today.  The effect was moderate - a 3.2% reduction in symptoms, equivalent to around 3,300 fewer infections per 100,000 people - but the researchers say these results support the claim that face masks may be an effective measure to reduce the rate of self-reported symptoms consistent with respiratory tract infections. Observational studies suggest that face masks reduce the risk of respiratory tract infections, but findings from randomised ...

Some private UK biobanks may be misleading expectant parents about the value of storing umbilical cord blood to treat life-threatening diseases that may arise in their child in the future, reveals an investigation by The BMJ, published today. Over the past decade growing numbers of parents have chosen to store blood from the umbilical cord, which contains stem cells, in case their infant develops a condition that could be treated with stem cell therapy. Parents must use a private biobank which charges around £550 ...

A new study brings researchers closer to better understanding the pathology of the fatty liver disease MASH, which stands for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis. MASH is a consequence of poor diet and obesity and results in severe damage to the liver. In MASH, the liver becomes filled with active and rapidly multiplying T cells, which are a type of immune cell. In today’s study, published in Hepatology, researchers examine what these T cells look like and how they work in people with liver cirrhosis (a late stage of liver disease) and in an animal ...

A new study shows that a native potato species was brought to southern Utah by Indigenous people in the distant past, adding to an ever-growing list of culturally significant plant species that pre-contact cultures domesticated in the Southwestern U.S.  The team of researchers, led by Red Butte Garden and the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) at the University of Utah, used genetic analysis to reveal how and where tubers of the Four Corners potato (Solanum jamesii) had been collected, transported and traded throughout the Colorado Plateau. The findings support the assertion that the tuber is a “lost sister,” joining maize, beans and squash—commonly ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 24, 2024, 3:20 P.M. MDT CONTACT: Camille Jewell cjewell@vancomm.com or 202-248-5460   COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The evolution of retinoblastoma treatment over the past 15 years has resulted in a higher likelihood of vision preservation without compromising survival, according to research released today at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery’s (SNIS) 21st Annual Meeting.   Retinoblastoma, a rare eye cancer that affects young children, carries a risk of impaired vision and removal ...

Using a wearable device, such as a smart watch, to track health data and symptoms, is supposed to help people monitor their health and address symptoms as quickly as possible to spur positive health outcomes. But for people with atrial fibrillation, also known as Afib, using a wearable device to monitor the heart rate and to alert wearers of an irregular heartbeat might not be as helpful as wearers think. A new study in the Journal of the American Heart Association, led by Lindsay Rosman, PhD, assistant professor of medicine in the ...

Dr. Olga Denysiuk, MD, PhD, is a highly skilled eye surgeon in Ukraine who now finds herself at the frontlines of ophthalmic trauma care caused by war. “Every day, I am fighting my war in the operating room,” says Denysiuk. “Cases of eye trauma are mounting and it’s critical that we have surgeons trained to delicately manage eyelid and orbital injuries.” Denysiuk is one of two ocular specialists selected for a unique humanitarian fellowship at the University of Calgary’s ...

A research team at Rice University led by James Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science and nanoengineering, is tackling the environmental issue of efficiently recycling lithium ion batteries amid their increasing use. The team has pioneered a new method to extract purified active materials from battery waste as detailed in the journal Nature Communications on July 24. Their findings have the potential to facilitate the effective separation and recycling of valuable battery materials ...

Self-driving cars occasionally crash because their visual systems can’t always process static or slow-moving objects in 3D space. In that regard, they’re like the monocular vision of many insects, whose compound eyes provide great motion-tracking and a wide field of view but poor depth perception. Except for the praying mantis. A praying mantis’ field of view also overlaps between its left and right eyes, creating binocular vision with depth perception in 3D space. Combining this insight with some nifty optoelectrical engineering and innovative “edge” ...

New research led by UCLA Health has found that specific genes may be related to the trajectory of recovery for stroke survivors, providing doctors insights useful for developing targeted therapies.  Published in the journal Stroke this month, the findings were part of an exploratory study that sought to find if candidate genes could predict a higher likelihood of stroke outcomes related to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and cognitive decline.   Dr. Steven C. Cramer, MD, the study’s lead author and a professor of neurology at UCLA, said while there are some ...

HOUSTON – (July 24, 2024) – When picturing next-generation wearables and robotics, the foam filling in your couch cushions is likely not the first thing that comes to mind. However, Rice University engineers have shown that something as simple as the flow of air through the airy, meshlike structure of open-cell foam can be used to perform digital computation, analog sensing and combined digital-analog control in soft textile-based wearable systems. “In this work, we integrated material intelligence — the ability of materials to sense and respond to their environment ...

A team of scientists from Montana State University has provided the first experimental evidence that two new groups of microbes thriving in thermal features in Yellowstone National Park produce methane – a discovery that could one day contribute to the development of methods to mitigate climate change and provide insight into potential life elsewhere in our solar system. The journal Nature this week published the findings from the laboratory of Roland Hatzenpichler, associate professor in MSU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College ...

In humans and other animals, signals from a central circadian clock in the brain generate the seasonal and daily rhythms of life. They help the body to prepare for expected changes in the environment and also optimize when to sleep, eat and do other daily activities. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are working out the particulars of how our internal biological clocks keep time. Their new research, published July 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps answer longstanding questions about how circadian rhythms are generated and maintained. In all mammals, the signals for circadian rhythms come from a small part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic ...

A significant survival improvement for adults with newly diagnosed BCR::ABL1-negative B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia is published today by the New England Journal of Medicine. The practice-changing finding is from the randomized phase 3 study E1910 (NCT02003222), which evaluated blinatumomab immunotherapy in patients who were in remission and tested negative for measurable residual disease (MRD) after an initial round of chemotherapy. At 3 years of follow-up, 85% of the patients who went on to receive additional standard consolidation chemotherapy plus experimental blinatumomab were alive, compared to 68% of those who received chemotherapy only. Blinatumomab (Blincyto, ...

More than 82% of Americans age 50 to 80 take one or more kinds of prescription medication, and 80% of them say they’d be open to stopping one or more of those drugs if their health care provider gave the green light, a new University of Michigan study shows. But it’s not as simple as that, the researchers say. They call for prescribers and pharmacists to talk with older adults about their personal situation and figure out if any kind of “deprescribing” is right for them. The study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, uses data from U-M’s National Poll on Healthy Aging, and builds on a poll report issued in April 2023.   It ...

Irvine, Calif., July 24, 2024 – Government agencies, insurance companies and disaster planners rely on national flood risk models from the private sector that aren’t reliable at smaller levels such as neighborhoods and individual properties, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine.   In a paper published recently in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future, experts in UC Irvine’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering caution that relatively new, nation-scale flood data provides an inadequate representation of local topography and infrastructure, factors known to control the spread of floods ...

MINNEAPOLIS – People with high levels of body fat stored in their belly or arms may be more likely to develop diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s than people with low levels of fat in these areas, according to a study published in the July 24, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study also found that people with a high level of muscle strength were less likely to develop these diseases than people with low muscle strength.   “These neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect over 60 million people worldwide, and that number is expected ...

Polypropylene is a common type of plastic found in many essential products used today, such as food containers and medical devices. Because polypropylene is so popular, demand is surging for a chemical used to make it. That chemical, propylene, can be produced from propane. Propane is a natural gas commonly used in barbeque grills. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Ames National Laboratory report a faster, more energy-efficient way to manufacture propylene than the process currently used. Converting propane into propylene ...

Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is a type of preinvasive tumor that sometimes progresses to a highly deadly form of breast cancer. It accounts for about 25 percent of all breast cancer diagnoses. Because it is difficult for clinicians to determine the type and stage of DCIS, patients with DCIS are often overtreated. To address this, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich developed an AI model that can identify the different stages of DCIS from a cheap and easy-to-obtain breast tissue image. Their model shows that both the state and arrangement ...

Mice don’t get Alzheimer’s—and while that’s good news for mice, it’s a big problem for biomedical researchers seeking to understand the disease and test new treatments. Now, researchers at The Jackson Laboratory are working to create the first strain of mice that’s genetically susceptible to late-onset Alzheimer’s, with potentially transformative implications for dementia research.  In humans, two of the defining traits of Alzheimer’s disease are amyloid plaques between brain cells, and tangles of tau proteins within neurons. In mice, however, intercellular ...

From studying the human genome, to analyzing the way proteins are encoded, or monitoring RNA expression, researchers are rapidly gaining a far richer understanding of the complex genetic and cellular mechanisms that underpin dementia. But there’s a catch: While new technologies are revealing myriad avenues for Alzheimer’s research, it’s impossible to know in advance which research pathways will lead to effective treatments. “We have countless potential targets, but we don’t know which ones to aim at,” said Greg Carter, the Bernard and Lusia Milch Endowed Chair at the ...

Hens fluff their head feathers and blush to express different emotions and levels of excitement, according to a study publishing July 24, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Cécile Arnould and colleagues from INRAE and CNRS, France. Facial expressions are an important part of human communication that allow us to convey our emotions. Scientists have found similar signals of emotion in other mammals such as dogs, pigs and mice. Although birds can produce facial expressions by moving their head feathers and flushing their skin, it is unclear whether they express emotions in this way. To investigate, researchers filmed ...

An analysis of comments on Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo reveals trends in the public response to measures implemented to support China’s three-child policy, highlighting concerns about women’s rights and employment. Lijuan Peng of Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, China, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 24, 2024. For decades, China’s one-child policy restricted most families to having just one child. In 2021, to combat a falling birthrate, China introduced its three-child policy, allowing couples to have up to three children. To help encourage childbirth, ...