Personal View: Medical screening of older drivers is not evidence based Medical screening of older drivers is misguided and typifies a "worrying lack of due diligence" by the medical profession, warns a senior doctor on bmj.com today. Professor Desmond O'Neill, Consultant Physician in Geriatric and Stroke Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, argues that older drivers not only have an enviable crash record, but they also raise traffic safety among other generations: the risk of serious injury to children is halved if driven by grandparents rather than parents. "Yet the ...

By outfitting two British Columbia subspecies of Swainson's thrushes with penny-sized, state-of-the-art geolocators, University of British Columbia researchers have been able to map their wildly divergent migration routes and pinpoint conservation hotspots. "Birds of a feather do not necessarily flock together," says Kira Delmore, a PhD student with UBC's Department of Zoology and lead author of the paper. "Our teams of thrushes took dramatically different routes to get to their wintering grounds, either south along the west coast to Central America, or southeast to Alabama ...

Doctors who experience a gut feeling about serious illness when treating a child in primary care should take action upon this feeling and not ignore it, a study published today on bmj.com suggests. Serious infection can easily be missed in young children and making a diagnosis has been described as "like finding a needle in a haystack". A clinician's intuitive feeling that something is wrong, even after examination that suggests otherwise, appears to have diagnostic value, even greater diagnostic value than most symptoms and signs. Studies have suggested it should be ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 25, 2012) – The human body is proficient at making collagen. And human laboratories are getting better at it all the time. In a development that could lead to better drug design and new treatments for disease, Rice University researchers have made a major step toward synthesizing custom collagen. Rice scientists who have learned how to make collagen – the fibrous protein that binds cells together into organs and tissues – are now digging into its molecular structure to see how it forms and interacts with biological systems. Jeffrey Hartgerink, an associate ...

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over one million seconds of observation, the resulting image revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the Universe ever taken at that time. The new full-colour XDF image is even more sensitive than the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, thanks to the additional observations, and contains about 5500 galaxies, even within ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — UC Davis cancer researchers have discovered significant differences in radiation-therapy response among patients with oropharyngeal cancer depending on whether they carry the human papillomavirus (HPV), a common sexually transmitted virus. The findings, published online today in The Laryngoscope Journal, could lead to more individualized radiation treatment regimens, which for many patients with HPV could be shorter and potentially less toxic. HPV-related cancers of the oropharynx (the region of the throat between the soft palate and the epiglottis, ...

In 2010 breast reconstruction entered the Top Five list of reconstructive procedures in the US, with 93,000 procedures performed, up 8% from 2009, and 18% from 2000. This is among the most common skin flap procedure performed. Skin flaps are typically used to cover areas of tissue loss or defects that arise as a result of traumatic injury, reconstruction after cancer excision and repair of congenital defects. In the case of a mastectomy—the surgical removal of the breast—skin flaps are commonly used to create a new breast. Most commonly these flaps are derived from the ...

As data centres continue to come under scrutiny for the amount of energy they use, researchers at University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) have a suggestion: turn the air conditioning down. "We see our results as strong evidence that most organizations could run their data centers hotter than they currently are without making significant sacrifices in system reliability," says Bianca Schroeder, a UTSC assistant professor of computer science. As data centres have proliferated they have required more energy, accounting now for about 1 percent of global electricity usage. ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. – Women who begin snoring during pregnancy are at strong risk for high blood pressure and preeclampsia, according to research from the University of Michigan. The research, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, showed pregnancy-onset snoring was strongly linked to gestational hypertension and preeclampsia, says lead author Louise O'Brien, Ph.D., associate professor in U-M's Sleep Disorders Center. "We found that frequent snoring was playing a role in high blood pressure problems, even after we had accounted for other known ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Coyotes living in cities don't ever stray from their mates, and stay with each other till death do them part, according to a new study. The finding sheds light on why the North American cousin of the dog and wolf, which is originally native to deserts and plains, is thriving today in urban areas. Scientists with Ohio State University who genetically sampled 236 coyotes in the Chicago area over a six-year period found no evidence of polygamy - of the animals having more than one mate - nor of one mate ever leaving another while the other was still alive. This ...

According to a new study co-authored by Simon Fraser University economics professor Steeve Mongrain, parole board decisions can have a huge impact on whether or not prisoners are motivated to rehabilitate. The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, has just published their study Rehabilitated or Not: An Informational Theory of Parole Decisions online. Mongrain and his colleagues argue that parole boards need to consider the length of prisoners' original sentences, as well as their behaviour in prison, in granting early parole and determining eligibility for parole ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A common type of geographic mapping software offers a new way to study human remains. In a recent issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, researchers describe how they used commercially available mapping software to identify features inside a human foot bone – a new way to study human skeletal variation. David Rose, a Captain in the Ohio State University Police Division and doctoral student in anthropology, began the project to determine whether the patterns of change inside the bones of human remains could reveal how the bones were ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Black urban teenagers from low-income families face a rate of sexually transmitted disease up to 10 times higher than their white counterparts, but recent studies at Oregon State University have identified approaches to prevention programs that might reduce this problem. The research, based on interviews of black adolescents ages 15-17 in San Francisco and Chicago, found that information from parents, teachers and other caring adults is actually listened to, more than the adults might think. And the problem of youth getting "mixed messages" from different ...

WASHINGTON — The aging of the U.S. population will have broad economic consequences for the country, particularly for federal programs that support the elderly, and its long-term effects on all generations will be mediated by how -- and how quickly -- the nation responds, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council. The unprecedented demographic shift in which people over age 65 make up an increasingly large percentage of the population is not a temporary phenomenon associated with the aging of the baby boom generation, but a pervasive ...

BETHESDA, MD, SEPTEMBER 25, 2012---The good news widely reported this morning of positive results from a clinical drug trial at Boston Children's Hospital for the previously "untreatable" rapid aging disorder in children known as progeria has its scientific roots in basic biology discoveries made in recent years. A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reports that the use of farnesyl transferase inhibitors (FTI) significantly slows the progress of progeria, a rare and until now "untreatable" lethal genetic disorder. Also ...

LA JOLLA, CA---- Based on two new studies by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, regeneration of a new limb or organ in a human will be much more difficult than the mad scientist and supervillain, Dr. Curt Connors, made it seem in the Amazing Spider-man comics and films. As those who saw the recent "The Amazing Spiderman" movie will know, Dr. Connors injected himself with a serum made from lizard DNA to successfully regrow his missing lower right arm - that is, before the formula transformed him into a reptilian humanoid. But by studying a real ...

Regular mammography screening can help narrow the breast cancer gap between black and white women, according to a retrospective study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in August. Earlier studies have shown that black women in Chicago are more than twice as likely to die of breast cancer compared to white women. Black women with breast cancer reach the disease's late stages more often than white women, and their tumors are more likely to be larger and more biologically aggressive. But according to the study, when women of both races received regular ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Asian Americans likely to vote in November strongly prefer Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, but a large portion of voters – nearly one-third – remain undecided and could play a crucial role in battleground states, according to two reports released today by the National Asian American Survey. Drawn from a nationally representative sample of more than 3,300 interviews, the reports offer the most comprehensive portrait of Asian American political views. Among the fastest growing groups in America, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders exceeded the 5 percent ...

We've heard it time and time again: exercise is good for us. And it's not just good for physical health – research shows that daily physical activity can also boost our mental health. But what actually accounts for the association between exercise and mental health? A new article in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explores whether certain psychosocial factors may help to explain the benefits of daily physical activity for adolescents' mental health. Karin Monshouwer of the Trimbos Institute in the Netherlands and ...

Designing or modifying buildings and communities to facilitate physical activity must include strategies to maximize safety. A new report released today, Active Design Supplement: Promoting Safety, by the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy, New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene's Built Environment and Healthy Housing Program, and the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) provides explicit guidelines for urban planners, architects, public health advocates, and others to consider when promoting active designs. Experts from New York City's ...

Two new studies from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Chronic Kidney Disease Prognosis Consortium found that the presence of chronic kidney disease itself can be a strong indicator of the risk of death and end-stage renal disease (ESRD) even in patients without hypertension or diabetes. Both hypertension and diabetes are common conditions with chronic kidney disease with hypertension being the most prevalent. The studies were released online in advance of publication in The Lancet. Chronic kidney disease affects 10 to 16 percent of all adults ...

Philadelphia – September 25, 2012—The current trend to digitize everything is not lost on fine art. Documenting, distributing, conserving, storing and restoring paintings require that digital copies be made. The Google Art Project, which brings art from galleries around the world to online audiences, was launched in early 2011 for precisely these reasons. Google's project has been a complex undertaking, however, carried out under carefully controlled settings using state-of-the-art equipment and requiring rigorous postproduction work. In a paper published this month ...

A recently published editorial in the Journal of the American Society of Hypertension (JASH), "Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring Should Be Included in the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES)," recognizes the importance of this national survey instrument but questions the efficiency of its diagnostic methods in assessing hypertension in the population.* Since the 1960s, CDC has utilized traditional blood pressure screening using a sphygmomanometer to measure the brachial artery pressure (a diagnostic instrument used since 1880). Drs. William ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida researchers studying river turtles in Missouri found populations of the northern map turtle have not recovered from harvesting in the 1970s. Scientists used data collected by Florida Museum of Natural History herpetology curator Max Nickerson in 1969 and 1980 as a baseline, then surveyed the same stretch of river in the Ozarks in 2004 to determine the northern map turtles had not recovered from a previous 50 percent population loss caused by harvesting, likely for food. River turtles help ecosystems function by cycling nutrients ...

Biologists at New York University have uncovered one way that biological clocks control neuronal activity — a discovery that sheds new light on sleep-wake cycles and offers potential new directions for research into therapies to address sleep disorders and jetlag. "The findings answer a significant question — how biological clocks drive the activity of clock neurons, which, in turn, regulate behavioral rhythms," explained Justin Blau, an associate professor in NYU's Department of Biology and the study's senior author. Their findings appear in the Journal of Biological ...