Your risk of heart attack may increase during the days and weeks after the death of a close loved one, according to research reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. A study of 1,985 adult heart attack survivors showed that after a significant person's death, heart attack risks: Increased to 21 times higher than normal within the first day. Were almost six times higher than normal within the first week. Continued to decline steadily over the first month. "Caretakers, healthcare providers, and the bereaved themselves need to recognize ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have developed a new way to identify the genes of harmful microbes, particularly those that have been difficult to study in the laboratory. This new method uses chemicals to create mutant bacteria, followed by genomic sequencing to identify all mutations. By looking for common genes that were mutated in Chlamydia sharing a particular trait, the investigators were able to rapidly "zero in" on the genes responsible for that trait. The approach is versatile and inexpensive enough that it could be applied to ...

Acute kidney injury (AKI) has severe consequences, with a 25 to 80 percent risk of in-hospital death. Researchers have found a way to diagnose AKI using a urine test, enabling emergency departments to identify these high-risk patients when they first arrive at the hospital. The study will be published online on January 9, 2012, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Physicians typically measure a patient's creatinine levels to determine kidney function. But creatinine levels can remain normal for several hours after acute kidney damage, and an accurate ...

Spine Institute Northwest announced today it has launched a new website, designed to inform and engage current and future patients as they consider their options for back pain relief, including spinal injection, minimally invasive spinal surgery and other non surgical therapy options. The new site, at www.spineinstitutenorthwest.com, has moved to a dynamic, data-driven design, including a new blog. The site aims to make it easier for those suffering from chronic pain, sports injuries, leg, foot and ankle problems or people with physical therapy needs to learn more about ...

STANFORD, Calif. — A well-known protein complex responsible for controlling how DNA is expressed plays a previously unsuspected role in preventing pancreatic cancer, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Technological advances in the way researchers can compare normal and tumor DNA showed that the gene for at least one subunit of the multi-subunit SWI/SNF protein complex was either deleted, mutated or rearranged in about a third of the 70 human pancreatic cancers that the Stanford team examined. Additionally, the researchers found that ...

CHICAGO – The anticoagulant dabigatran is associated with an increased risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack) or acute coronary syndrome in a broad spectrum of patients when tested against some other medicines, according to a study published Online First by the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Clinicians should consider the potential of these serious harmful cardiovascular effects with use of dabigatran," the study concludes. Dabigatran etexilate was approved by the European Medicines Agency in 2008 for prevention of venous thromboembolism ...

CHICAGO – The use of statins in postmenopausal women is associated with increased diabetes risk, according to a study published Online First by the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. But researchers note statins address the cardiovascular consequences of diabetes and current American Diabetes Association guidelines for primary and secondary prevention should not change. Likewise, researchers write that guidelines for statin use in nondiabetic populations also should not change. Annie L. Culver, B. Pharm, Rochester Methodist Hospital, Mayo ...

CHICAGO – A substantial proportion of emergency department eye care in Florida is reimbursed through Medicaid or paid for out of pocket by patients, and those findings may help in strategic planning as the debate over how best to implement the nation's new health care reform law progresses, according to a study published in the Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will increase insurance coverage in large part by expanding eligibility for Medicaid, "an already stressed and underfunded system ...

CHICAGO – Replacing visual acuity screenings for new Medicare enrollees with coverage of a dilated eye exam for healthy patients entering the government insurance program for the elderly "would be highly cost-effective," suggests a study being published Online First by the Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. People can enroll in Medicare after they turn 65 and are supposed to receive a visual acuity screening and other preventive health checks as part of a Welcome to Medicare health evaluation within 12 months of enrollment. In 2009, the U.S. ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research shows that infectious disease-fighting drugs could be designed to block a pathogen's entry into cells rather than to kill the bug itself. Historically, medications for infectious diseases have been designed to kill the offending pathogen. This new strategy is important, researchers say, because many parasites and bacteria can eventually mutate their way around drugs that target them, resulting in drug resistance. In this study, scientists showed that using an experimental agent to block one type of an enzyme in cell cultures and mice prevented ...

Wearing a nicotine patch may help improve memory loss in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, according to a study published today in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study looked at individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the stage between normal aging and dementia when others begin to notice that an individual is developing mild memory or thinking problems. Many older adults with MCI go on to develop Alzheimer's disease. The study looked at 74 non-smokers with MCI and an average age of 76. Half of the patients ...

Over the past 10 years, Americans drank more sugar-sweetened beverages than ever—as much as 13 billion gallons a year—making these drinks the largest source of added sugar and excess calories in the American diet and, arguably, the single largest dietary factor in the current obesity epidemic. While many states have a sales tax on soda, experts believe they are too low to impact consumption. In a study conducted at Columbia University Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco, researchers estimated that if a higher, penny-per-ounce tax were imposed ...

CHICAGO -- A 2010 outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in Wisconsin has been linked to a decorative fountain in a hospital lobby, according to a study published in the February issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. When the outbreak of Legionnaires' disease was detected among eight people in southeast Wisconsin, state and local public health officials worked closely with hospital staff to launch an investigation to determine the source of the outbreak. Legionnaires' disease is a severe and ...

ALBANY, Calif. -- An interactive tool developed by researchers from the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) will help wind energy facility operators make informed decisions on efficient ways to reduce impacts on migratory bats. Fatalities of migratory bats at wind energy facilities have become a frequent occurrence. Bat migration patterns are poorly understood and the relationship between fatalities at wind energy facilities and migratory behavior are still being studied. Previous research has shown that adjusting the operations of turbines ...

Rice University researchers have figured out what gives armchair nanotubes their unique bright colors: hydrogen-like objects called excitons. Their findings appear in the online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Armchair carbon nanotubes – so named for the "U"-shaped configuration of the atoms at their uncapped tips – are one-dimensional metals and have no band gap. This means electrons flow from one end to the other with little resistivity, the very property that may someday make armchair quantum wires possible. The Rice researchers show armchair ...

A new study from SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, shows that MAL3-101, a recently developed inhibitor of the heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70), appears to have potent anti-tumor effects on multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer. Despite aggressive modes of treatments, myeloma ultimately remains incurable. The disease has a high incidence in the communities served by SUNY Downstate. The findings, published in a recent issue of Journal of Oncology, are the result of a collaborative effort among researchers working in the laboratory of Olcay Batuman, MD, ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn -- The prospect of electronics at the nanoscale may be even more promising with the first observation of metallic conductance in ferroelectric nanodomains by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Ferroelectric materials, which switch their polarization with the application of an electric field, have long been used in devices such as ultrasound machines and sensors. Now, discoveries about ferroelectrics' electronic properties are opening up possibilities of applications in nanoscale electronics and information storage. In a paper published in ...

BATAVIA, Illinois, and BERKELEY, California –Two teams of physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have independently made the largest direct measurements of the invisible scaffolding of the universe, building maps of dark matter using new methods that, in turn, will remove key hurdles for understanding dark energy with ground-based telescopes. The teams' measurements look for tiny distortions in the images of distant galaxies, called "cosmic shear," caused by the gravitational influence of massive, ...

BOSTON, MA -- Honing chemotherapy delivery to cancer cells is a challenge for many researchers. Getting the cancer cells to take the chemotherapy "bait" is a greater challenge. But perhaps such a challenge has not been met with greater success than by the nanotechnology research team of Omid Farokhzad, MD, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) Department of Anesthesiology Perioperative and Pain Medicine and Research. In their latest study with researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Massachusetts General Hospital, the BWH team created a drug delivery ...

Superior Restoration announced today it has renewed its partnership with Disaster Kleenup International (DKI), LLC, North America's largest disaster restoration contracting organization. Superior Restoration is San Diego's premier disaster cleanup and construction firm, providing 24-hour water damage restoration, fire damage repair and mold remediation services. By renewing its DKI membership, Superior Restoration will continue to utilize DKI's 24-hour call center, its DIAMOND claims tracking technology, and other tools to enhance its ability to serve its insurance and ...

Researchers have discovered that children under the age of two control speech using a different strategy than previously thought. During the study at Queen's University, the researchers changed the vowel sounds that the participants heard over headphones as they talked. They found that while the adults and young children changed their vowel sounds in response to this altered feedback, the toddlers did not. "We were very surprised to find that the two-year-olds do not monitor their own voice when speaking in the same way as adults do," says Ewen MacDonald, a former Queen's ...

Monitoring Internet search traffic about influenza may prove to be a better way for hospital emergency rooms to prepare for a surge in sick patients compared to waiting for outdated government flu case reports. A report on the value of the Internet search tool for emergency departments, studied by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine over a 21-month period, is published in the January 9 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases. The researchers reported a strong correlation between a rise in Internet searches for flu information, compiled by Google's Flu Trends ...

KLAS reports that while providers are juggling a laundry list of priorities--meaningful use, ICD-10, RAC audits, and accountable care models, HIEs are still of high interest to many providers. In the report, "HIE Perception 2011: Public or Private?" KLAS interviewed 96 healthcare executives to uncover which HIE vendors were selected in 2011 and why. "There's still an ocean of options out there," says Mark Allphin, report author, "and with all the market hype it's still hard to see which vendors are really cresting to the top. What we are really ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Modified probiotics, the beneficial bacteria touted for their role in digestive health, could one day decrease the risk of Listeria infection in people with susceptible immune systems, according to Purdue University research. Arun Bhunia, a professor of food science; Mary Anne Amalaradjou, a Purdue postdoctoral researcher; and Ok Kyung Koo, a former Purdue doctoral student, found that the same Listeria protein that allows the bacteria to pass through intestinal cells and into bloodstreams can help block those same paths when added to a probiotic. "Based ...

BOSTON – A person's risk of suffering a heart attack increases by approximately 21 times in the first 24 hours after losing a loved one, according to a study lead by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The study published Jan. 9 online in the journal Circulation found the risk of heart attack remained eight times above normal during the first week after the death of a loved one, slowly declining, but remaining elevated for at least a month. Researchers interviewed approximately 2,000 patients who suffered myocardial infarctions, or heart attacks, over ...