In one of the largest studies of its kind, a consortium of investigators from 13 countries led the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the U.S. and the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium in Europe, found that nurses who reported better working conditions in hospitals and less likelihood of leaving also had patients who were more satisfied with their hospital stay and rated their hospitals more highly. The study was released today in the current issue of the prestigious British Medical Journal. The massive study, which in some countries involved every ...

Research at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) has demonstrated the novel expression of an ion channel in Purkinje cells – specialized neurons in the cerebellum, the area of the brain responsible for movement. Ray W. Turner, PhD, Professor in the Department of Cell Biology & Anatomy and PhD student Jordan Engbers and colleagues published this finding in the January edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This research identifies for the first time that an ion channel called KCa3.1 that was not previously ...

Researchers from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) and the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine have discovered a pathway that may contribute to the symptoms related to Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, collectively known as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). This research is a major milestone in developing future drug therapies for those living with these debilitating disorders. The digestive process is complex. To coordinate the many functions involved in digestion, the gut has its own set of nerve cells ...

USC Marshall study finds video capture and other automated systems cut down medical errors and minimize the tendency to operate outside normal procedures. The Conrad Murray case can obfuscate that the vast majority of grave medical errors happen in hospitals—the places we think are most safe—and are often the result of bad systems. Poor transmission of information and unmonitored interventions yield problems in operations, recovery rooms and regular wards. But how can we minimize interpretive and procedural errors that are the root cause of most medical mistakes? Research ...

At some campuses, a fake driver's license is almost a standard accessory for college students. In a small sample of students at a branch of the State University of New York, more than three-fourths of students interviewed admitted that they carry false identification -- mainly to gain entry to bars and to buy alcohol. When surveyed, many students admitted that it was challenging to convince bouncers that they are of legal age. Identification is carefully scrutinized, because bar owners do not want to jeopardize their state alcohol license by violating laws against underage ...

Plants have long been known as the lungs of the earth, but a new finding has found they may also play a role in electrifying the atmosphere. Scientists have long-suspected an association between trees and electricity but researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), in Brisbane, Australia, think they may have finally discovered the link. Dr Rohan Jayaratne and Dr Xuan Ling from QUT's International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH), led by Professor Lidia Morawska, ran experiments in six locations around Brisbane, including the Brisbane Forest ...

Few people think about presidential pardons in racial terms. Even fewer people think about presidential pardons at all. But in a recent two-part article co-published by ProPublica and The Washington Post, an analysis of presidential pardon data seems to suggest that race may be a more important factor in presidential pardons than one might think. Most presidential pardons go unnoticed; those that do not often leave the impression that the process is rife with political maneuvering and backroom favors. Criminals pardoned with presidential pardons are essentially returned ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – A new study suggests that older people may have an increased risk of problems with memory and thinking abilities after being in the hospital, according to research published in the March 21, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Our study is timely as the United States population continues to rapidly age and researchers try to identify factors that could reduce memory and thinking problems in the elderly," said study author Robert S. Wilson, PhD, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "Understanding ...

WASHINGTON — A new finding in basic science should trigger a "change in thinking" about how cancer drugs might be developed and tested for maximum effectiveness, says Louis M. Weiner, M.D., director of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, in a "Clinical Implications of Basic Research" article titled Tumor-Cell Death, Autophagy, and Immunity published in the March 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). An internationally known expert in immunotherapy research, Weiner was invited, along with Michael T. Lotze, M.D. from the University of ...

A Carbondale woman, who charged a Carbondale police officer with unlawfully using his police cruiser to ram the all terrain vehicle (ATV) in which she was riding, has settled her Federal Civil Rights lawsuit against the officer and the City of Carbondale for $105,000. In May 2009, Chelsea Rocuba, 17 years-old at the time, was a passenger in a legally registered and operated ATV when it was rammed by Carbondale Police Officer Timothy Mackrell using a "pit maneuver," a move commonly used by police forces. The pit maneuver involves the law enforcement vehicle ...

Two breakthrough studies may explain why we see distinct patterns of brain damage associated with dementias, such as Alzheimer's disease, and could be useful for predicting future cognitive decline in patients. These independent studies published by Cell Press in the March 22 issue of the journal Neuron, one studying how brain circuits wire up structurally and the other studying their functional connections, converged on a remarkably similar model that predicted the landscape of degeneration in various forms of dementia. This is particularly significant because, until now, ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – What characterizes many people with depression, schizophrenia and some other mental illnesses is anhedonia: an inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences. Exactly why this happens is unclear. But new research led by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine may have literally shined a light on the answer, one that could lead to the discovery of new mental health therapies. A report of the study appears March 22 in the journal Neuron. The study used a combination of genetic engineering ...

In a medical malpractice case, an Ontario appeals court recently affirmed a lower court's award of $8.5 million to the family of a severely brain-damaged woman. Born with cerebral palsy, the woman nearly died at birth due to a nurse's failure to properly monitor her heartbeat during labor. Lawyers for the family said that the nurse didn't measure her heartbeat often enough to detect oxygen deprivation over a period of one to three hours. The woman, now grown, lives in an assisted care facility and depends on her family for care and financial support. Family members said ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that removing a matched set of molecules that typically help to regulate the brain's capacity for forming and eliminating connections between nerve cells could substantially aid recovery from stroke even days after the event. In experiments with mice, the scientists demonstrated that when these molecules are not present, the mice's ability to recover from induced strokes improved significantly. Importantly, these beneficial effects grew over the course of a full week post-stroke, ...

VIDEO: George Cotsarelis, MD, explains that an abnormal amount a protein called Prostaglandin D2 inhibits hair growth in the bald scalp of men, a discovery that may lead directly to new... Click here for more information. PHILADELPHIA - Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have identified an abnormal amount a protein called Prostaglandin D2 in the bald scalp of men with male pattern baldness, a discovery that may lead directly to new ...

Public scrutiny and the threat of government regulation are leading to a decline in industry-sponsored funding of accredited continuing medical education (CME) for physicians, and this decline represents an opportunity to make CME more relevant, cost-effective and less open to bias, wrote a group of physicians from the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco. In a "Perspective" in the March 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors predicted the decline will continue, with a "sea change toward greater restriction" ...

When it next meets, the governing board of the National Basketball Association will consider allowing corporate advertising on players' official game jerseys. According to the Sporting News, the NBA is the last major American sport to have no logos other than the team name on its official game uniforms -- Adidas currently has logos only on NBA warm-ups. Sports such as soccer, NASCAR and even the Women's National Basketball Association have no qualms about giving corporate sponsors prominent placement on vehicles, equipment and jerseys. For example, in 2009 the WNBA's ...

SAN DIEGO (Embargoed until 2 pm (ET), March 21, 2012) – New findings from a landmark research study led by Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) – a collaborative program between Scripps Health and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) – shows a promising new blood test may be useful in helping doctors predict who is at risk for an imminent heart attack. Results of the study titled, "Characterization of Circulating Endothelial Cells in Acute Myocardial Infarction," were published this week in Science Translational Medicine. The study concludes that circulating ...

The physical phenomenon of plasmon resonances in small metal particles has been used for centuries. They are visible in the vibrant hues of the great stained-glass windows of the world. More recently, plasmon resonances have been used by engineers to develop new, light-activated cancer treatments and to enhance light absorption in photovoltaics and photocatalysis. "The stained-glass windows of Notre Dame Cathedral and Stanford Chapel derive their color from metal nanoparticles embedded in the glass. When the windows are illuminated, the nanoparticles scatter specific ...

ESO's VISTA telescope has been trained on the same patch of sky repeatedly to slowly accumulate the very dim light of the most distant galaxies. In total more than six thousand separate exposures with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours, taken through five different coloured filters, have been combined to create this picture. This image from the UltraVISTA survey is the deepest [1] infrared view of the sky of its size ever taken. The VISTA telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile is the world's largest survey telescope and the most powerful infrared survey ...

Workplace safety is a major problem in the United States. Every year, approximately 6,000 workers are killed, and millions more are injured, in on-the-job accidents. Safety is everyone's responsibility. Management, however, often tries to place the burden on workers alone. A new study from the University of Georgia shows that this emphasis might be misplaced. It found that high-level decisions about workplace safety and work-life balance can greatly reduce workplace accident rates. The study examined employees' perceptions of workplace climates across a wide variety ...

Use of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants during pregnancy appears to be linked with increased risk of pregnancy induced high blood pressure ("hypertension"), but a causal link has not been established. Pregnancy hypertension is sometimes linked with pre-eclampsia, a serious condition that can harm pregnant women and their unborn babies. But the authors stress that pregnant women should not stop taking their prescribed medication; instead they should seek a consultation with their doctor if they are concerned. Out of 1,216 women, the overall ...

Both human infants and baboons have a stronger preference for using their right hand to gesture than for a simple grasping task, supporting the hypothesis that language development, which is lateralized in the left part of the human brain, is based on a common gestural communication system. The results are reported in the Mar. 21 issue of the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Helene Meunier of the University of Strasbourg in France, found that hand preference of both infants and baboons for grasping tasks depended on the location of the object, but ...

People born without a sense of smell experience higher social insecurity and increased risk for depression, according to a study published Mar. 21 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Ilona Croy of the University of Dresden Medical School in Germany, investigated 32 individuals born without a sense of smell, known as isolated congenital anosmia. They found that the non-smellers did not have significant deviations from the norm in terms of many daily smell-related functions, such as food preferences and eating behaviors, but they did ...

Fifteen percent of the American active physician workforce was trained in lower income countries, which is beneficial for the United States both clinically and economically but may have negative impacts on the countries of origin that are losing their educational investment, according to a report published in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Maryland, identified 265,851 physicians currently practicing in the United States who completed their medical education in other countries, and determined ...