New recommendations on devices, drugs and diagnosis in heart failure were launched at the Heart Failure Congress 2012, 19-22 May, in Belgrade, Serbia, and published in the European Heart Journal. The ESC Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Acute and Chronic Heart Failure 2012 were developed by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in collaboration with the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the ESC. The Congress is the HFA's main annual meeting. An analysis of the most up to date clinical evidence in the field of heart failure by the ESC Guidelines task ...

Preliminary results from an ongoing, large-scale study by Yale School of Medicine researchers shows that oxytocin — a naturally occurring substance produced in the brain and throughout the body— increased brain function in regions that are known to process social information in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A Yale Child Study Center research team that includes postdoctoral fellow Ilanit Gordon and Kevin Pelphrey, the Harris Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, will present the results on Saturday, May 19 at 3 p.m. ...

ATS 2012, SAN FRANCISCO – Patients with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) can be successfully managed in a primary care setting by appropriately trained primary care physicians (PCPs) and community-based nurses, according to Australian researchers. "With the rise in demand and growing waiting lists for sleep physician consultation and laboratory-based sleep services, there has been increasing interest in development of ambulatory strategies for the diagnosis and management of OSA involving home sleep monitoring and auto-titrating continuous positive airway ...

ATS 2012, SAN FRANCISCO – Sleep disordered breathing (SDB), which is associated with an increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events and psychopathological outcomes, is also associated with an increased risk of cancer mortality, according to a new study. "Recent in vitro and animal studies have shown that repeated episodes of hypoxia (an inadequate supply of oxygen) are associated with accelerated cancer progression," said F. Javier Nieto, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. ...

ATS 2012, SAN FRANCISCO – There is a very high prevalence of osteopenia/osteoporosis among male patients with pulmonary disease, according to a new study from researchers in California. "While post-menopausal women are routinely screened for osteoporosis, men are not," said Kathleen Ellstrom, PhD, RN, APRN-BC, Pulmonary Clinical Nurse Specialist and Director of the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program at the Veterans Administration Loma Linda Healthcare System. "The high prevalence of bone disease we found in male patients referred to our pulmonary rehabilitation program ...

ATS 2012, SAN FRANCISCO – A number of specific risk factors are associated with an exacerbation-prone phenotype of severe asthma, according to a new study from researchers in Sweden. The results will be presented at the ATS 2012 International Conference in San Francisco. "Acute exacerbations are a major source of morbidity and mortality in asthma," said lead author Maciek Kupczyk, MD, PhD, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm "In children, the costs of asthma care are three times higher in exacerbators as compared to those patients who did not experience ...

ATS 2012, SAN FRANCISCO – For more than three decades, researchers have warned of the potential health risks associated with exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), especially among children whose parents smoke. Now a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Arizona reports that those health risks persist well beyond childhood, independent of whether or not those individuals end up becoming smokers later in life. The study will be presented at the ATS 2012 International Conference in San Francisco. "This study shows that exposure to parental ...

ATS 2012, SAN FRANCISCO - Treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in children normalizes disturbances in the neuronal network responsible for attention and executive function, according to a new study. "OSA is known to be associated with deficits in attention, cognition, and executive function," said lead author Ann Halbower, MD, Associate Professor at the Children's Hospital Sleep Center and University of Colorado Denver. "Our study is the first to show that treatment of OSA in children can reverse neuronal brain injury, correlated with improvements in attention ...

ATS 2012, SAN FRANCISCO – The link between prenatal exposure to air pollution and childhood lung growth and respiratory ailments has been established by several studies in recent years, and now a new study suggests that these prenatal exposures can be especially serious for children with asthma. The study will be presented at the ATS 2012 International Conference in San Francisco. "In this study, we found that prenatal exposures to airborne particles and the pollutant nitrogen dioxide adversely affect pulmonary function growth among asthmatic children between 6 and ...

SAN DIEGO – On September 12, 2011, a Springfield, Virginia man arrived at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital (MGUH) in the early stages of liver failure. The man had mistakenly eaten poisonous mushrooms, handpicked from his yard. He would be the first of four patients in the course of two weeks to seek treatment at MGUH for mushroom (amanitin) poisoning. Their clinical course, management, and outcomes were presented today at Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in San Diego, the largest international gathering of physicians and researchers in the field of gastroenterology, ...

Statins prevent cancer and reduce death from all causes in heart transplant recipients. The findings were independent of cholesterol levels. The research was presented at the Heart Failure Congress 2012, 19-22 May, in Belgrade, Serbia. The Congress is the main annual meeting of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology. Cancer is the leading cause of death late after heart transplantation. Skin cancer is particularly common, but solid organ cancers including colorectal cancer, prostate cancer and lymphoma also occur. The increased rate of ...

Madison, Wis. and San Francisco — Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), commonly known as sleep apnea, is associated with an increased risk of cancer mortality, according to a new study. While previous studies have associated SDB with increased risks of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, depression, and early death, this is the first human study to link apnea with higher rate of cancer mortality. Lead author Dr. F. Javier Nieto, chair of the department of population health sciences at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, says the study showed a nearly five times ...

A combination of three drugs used worldwide as the standard of care for a serious lung disease puts patients in danger of death or hospitalization, and should not be used together to treat the disease, called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, according to the surprising results of a rigorous independent study. The study, which will appear online May 20 in the New England Journal of Medicine to coincide with a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Thoracic Society, was conducted by IPF Clinical Research Network, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute ...

A team of researchers from UCSF and UC San Diego has identified an approved arthritis drug that is effective against amoebas in lab and animal studies, suggesting it could offer a low-dose, low cost treatment for the amoebic infections that cause human dysentery throughout the world. Based on these results, the team has received Orphan Drug Status for the drug, known as auranofin, from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and has applied for approval to start clinical trials to treat both amebiasis and the parasite Giardia in humans. The findings, which showed that ...

Research by a collaborative group of scientists from UC San Diego School of Medicine, UC San Francisco and Wake Forest School of Medicine has led to identification of an existing drug that is effective against Entamoeba histolytica. This parasite causes amebic dysentery and liver abscesses and results in the death of more than 70,000 people worldwide each year. Using a high-throughput screen for drugs developed by the research team, they discovered that auranofin – a drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration 25 years ago for rheumatoid arthritis – is very effective ...

Helen E. Davies, M.D., of the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, and colleagues compared the effectiveness of treatments to relieve breathing difficulties among patients with malignant pleural effusion (presence of fluid in the pleural cavity [space between the outside of the lungs and the inside wall of the chest cavity], as a complication of malignant disease). The treatments compared were chest tube drainage and talc slurry for pleurodesis (a procedure in which the pleural space is obliterated) vs. indwelling pleural catheters (IPCs). Malignant pleural effusion ...

Peter B. Bach, M.D., of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and colleagues conducted a systematic review to examine the evidence regarding the benefits and harms of low-dose computerized tomography (LDCT) screening for lung cancer, which is the leading cause of cancer death. "Most patients are diagnosed with advanced disease, resulting in a very low 5-year survival rate," the authors write. "Renewed enthusiasm for lung screening arose with the advent of LDCT imaging, which is able to identify smaller nodules than can chest radiographs." For the review, ...

Margaret Rosenfeld, M.D., M.P.H., of Seattle Children's Hospital, and colleagues conducted a study to examine if hypertonic saline would reduce the rate of pulmonary exacerbations in children younger than 6 years of age with cystic fibrosis (CF). Inhaled hypertonic saline is recommended as therapy for patients 6 years or older with CF, but its efficacy has not been evaluated in patients younger than 6 years. In the randomized trial, the active treatment group (n = 158) received 7 percent hypertonic saline and the control group (n = 163) received 0.9 percent isotonic saline, ...

To learn its signature melody, the male songbird uses a trial-and-error process to mimic the song of its father, singing the tune over and over again, hundreds of times a day, making subtle changes in the pitch of the notes. For the male Bengalese finch, this rigorous training process begins around the age of 40 days and is completed about day 90, just as he becomes sexually mature and ready to use his song to woo females. To accomplish this feat, the finch's brain must receive and process large quantities of information about its performance and use that data to precisely ...

A new study led by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery identifies the mechanism by which a cell signaling pathway contributes to the development of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In addition, the study provides evidence that drugs under development for diseases such as cancer could potentially be used to treat RA. Rheumatoid arthritis, a systemic inflammatory autoimmune disease that can be crippling, impacts over a million adults in the United States. "We uncovered a novel mechanism by which the Notch pathway could contribute to RA, said Xiaoyu Hu, M.D., Ph.D., a ...

Internationally recognized fitness enthusiast, Flavia Del Monte, has spent years helping women learn how their bodies work, proper nutrition for women and how to exercise in a way that benefits women. As the founder of Flavilicious Fitness she has been creating workout and nutrition programs specifically designed for the needs of women. Flavia Del Monte's newest workout and nutrition program, Curvalicious, is the first to target metabolic fat loss while increasing both Myogenic and Neurogenic muscle tone. Myogenic muscle tone is the residual tension in a muscle at rest. ...

Barcelona, 20 May 2012. The Stem Cells and Cancer Research Group headed by Dr Héctor G. Palmer at the Vall d'Hebrón Institute of Oncology (VHIO) has identified the molecular mechanisms that determine patients' response to certain drugs used in clinical trials for colon cancer treatment. The study led by VHIO also benefited from the collaboration with Professor Alberto Muñoz´s laboratory at the Instituto de Investigaciones Biomedicas Alberto Sols, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IIB-CSIC-Madrid). Published today in Nature Medicine, this work identifies biomarkers ...

The histone de-acetylase (HDAC) inhibitor panobinostat is able to target and destroy triple negative breast cancer, reveals a new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Breast Cancer Research. Researchers from Tulane University Health Sciences Center have shown that panobinostat was able to destroy breast cancer cells and reduce tumor growth in mice. Approximately 15% of breast cancers are found at diagnosis to be triple negative. These aggressive tumours are missing both the estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor, which means that they do not respond ...

Finding the right clothes at the right price can be an inconvenient chore for those that do not know where to look. It will not take much to be forced to overpay, especially when on the search for wholesale apparel that is stylish and fashion forward. With some of the huge discounts of up to 60 percent now offered by the leading wholesale clothing retailer, ApparelUS.com, customers are now finding the outfits that they need while staying within their budget. Purchasing wholesale clothes in person can turn into a lengthy ordeal with pushy salespeople and second-rate items. ...

Modern day soldiers who mutilate enemy corpses or take body-parts as trophies are usually thought to be suffering from the extreme stresses of battle. But, research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) shows that this sort of misconduct has most often been carried out by fighters who viewed the enemy as racially different from themselves and used images of the hunt to describe their actions. "The roots of this behaviour lie not in individual psychological disorders," says Professor Simon Harrison who carried out the study, "but in a social history ...