ROCHESTER, Minn. -- In the March issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers report that residential treatment for tobacco dependence among heavy smokers greatly improves the odds of abstinence at six months compared with standard outpatient treatment. The study reports that 52 percent of the patients were still not smoking six months after residential treatment, compared with 26 percent in the outpatient treatment setting. "This means there is hope for patients who are tobacco dependent and feel they have exhausted every other means of trying to quit smoking," says ...

RENO, Nev. – While unemployment has been a frequent topic of discussion during the recession, underemployment and its effects have not, even though the number of underemployed workers has also increased. A study published online last week in the Journal of Management, "'I Have a Job, But…' A Review of Underemployment," by University of Nevada, Reno Assistant Professor Frances M. McKee-Ryan and University of Alabama Assistant Professor Jaron Harvey brings attention to the topic and its potentially detrimental effects to individuals, organizations and society. The study ...

Combining targeted therapies might be required for maximum anti-tumor activity when treating HER2-positive breast cancers, according to two new studies by Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) investigators. The findings, reported in two papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that upregulation of the HER3 receptor limits the effectiveness of two classes of targeted therapies (HER2- and PI3 kinase-targeted therapies). Therefore targeting HER3 together with these agents should improve their clinical utility. Around 25 percent of ...

Researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy – University of Gothenburg, Sweden - and Karolinska Institutet have carried out the first ever national study of the prevalence of overweight and obesity in schoolchildren. It reveals that one in five children in Sweden is overweight, and that there is a link between low levels of education and overweight children. Published in the online version of the journal Obesity Reviews, the study was part of a European project, the WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative, that involved 14 European countries. "There has previously ...

The artificial intelligence program "Watson" may have outsmarted human competitors on the television quiz show "Jeopardy!" recently, but it would have to go a long way to best an intelligence analyst, according to Kristan Wheaton, J.D., associate professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College. On Feb. 14-16, the reigning champions of Jeopardy! – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter – faced a formidable new competitor – a supercomputer named Watson under development by IBM for four years. Watson defeated his adversaries handily. Wheaton's graduate students recently ...

Surgeons at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center performed the first hand transplant in the western United States in an operation that began one minute before midnight on Friday, March 4, and was completed 14-and-a-half hours later, on Saturday, March 5. The transplant was performed on a 26-year-old mother from Northern California who lost her right hand in a traffic accident nearly five years ago. UCLA is only the fourth center in the nation to offer this procedure, and the first west of the Rockies. This was the 13th hand transplant surgery performed in the United States. ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- A pair of related studies on smoking cessation by researchers at the University of Oregon and other institutions have isolated the brain regions most active in controlling urges to smoke and demonstrated the effectiveness of text-messaging to measure and intervene in those urges. Both projects used the same group of test subjects -- 27 heavy smokers recruited from the American Lung Association's Freedom From Smoking program in Los Angeles. Elliot Berkman, professor of psychology at the UO, and colleagues Emily Falk at the University of Michigan and Matthew ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8, 2011) -- Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas are reporting today at the 55th Annual Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD how they are using a novel 3D cell imaging method for studying the complex spatial-temporal dynamics of protein transport, providing a solution to this fundamental problem in cell biology. According to the authors of the study, imaging such highly dynamic processes in the cell and in 3D poses major technical challenges in a complex cell monolayer ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8, 2011) -- In work that is pushing the "diffraction barrier" associated with microscopic imaging of living cells, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM demonstrated the power of a new super-resolution microscopy technique called Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), which can simultaneously image multiple molecules in living immune cells. As described today at the 55th Annual Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD, Jesse Aaron and Jerilyn Timlin used this new technique to reveal the changes ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8 2011) -- Researchers at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon, Portugal and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, are making major strides toward understanding the life cycle of flaviviruses, which include some of the most virulent human pathogens: yellow fever virus, Dengue virus, and the West Nile Virus, among others. Today, at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore, MD, members of the team will report on studies using dengue virus as a model to elucidate the molecular details ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8 2011) -- Viruses can penetrate every part of the body, making them potentially good tools for gene therapy or drug delivery. But with our immune system primed to seek and destroy these foreign invaders, delivering therapies with viruses is currently inefficient and can pose a significant danger to patients. Now scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have engineered a virus with potential to solve this problem. They describe the new virus today at the 55th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in Baltimore, MD. "We would like to find a way ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8, 2011) -- Scientists in Israel and California have developed an instrument for rapidly analyzing molecular interactions that take place viruses and the cells they infect. By helping to identify interactions between proteins made by viruses like HIV and hepatitis and proteins made by the human cells these viruses infect, the device may help scientists develop new ways of disrupting these interactions and find new drugs for treating those infections. According to Doron Gerber, a professor at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, the PING system (Protein ...

It's all too familiar: researchers announce the discovery of a new drug that eradicates disease in animals. Then, a few years later, the drug bombs in human trials. In the latest issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, ethics experts Jonathan Kimmelman, associate professor at McGill's Biomedical Ethics Unit and Department of Social Studies of Medicine, and Alex John London, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, argue that this pattern of boom and bust may be related to the way researchers predict outcomes of their work in early stages of drug development. "We ...

Economic growth in India has no automatic connection to reducing undernutrition in Indian children and so further reductions in the prevalence of childhood undernutrition are likely to depend on direct investments in health and health-related programs. These are the conclusions of a large study by researchers at the Schools of Public Health at University of Michigan and Harvard University, that is published in this week's PLoS Medicine. Malavika Subramanyam, S V Subramanian and colleagues collected data from the National Family Health Surveys conducted in India in 1992-93 ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Jonathan Kimmelman from McGill University in Montreal, Canada and Alex London from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA argue that ethical reviewers and decision-makers pay insufficient attention to threats to validity in pre-clinical studies and consult too narrow a set of evidence. They propose a better way for ethical and scientific decision makers to assess early phase studies: first, to attend to reporting and methodological quality in preclinical experiments that support claims of internal, construct, and external validity; and ...

WASHINGTON, DC, March 3, 2011 — Communication technologies that help people stay connected to the workplace are often seen as solutions to balancing work and family life. However, a new study in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests there may be a "dark side" to the use of these technologies for workers' health—and these effects seem to differ for women and men. Using data from a national survey of American workers, University of Toronto researchers asked study participants how often they were contacted outside the workplace by phone, e-mail, ...

Hidden financial conflicts-of-interest are sneaking into published drug research through the back door, warns an international team of investigators, led by researchers from the Jewish General Hospital's Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill University in Montreal. More and more, policy decisions and what medications doctors prescribe for their patients are being driven by large "studies of studies," called meta-analyses, which statistically combine results from many individual drug trials. Led by Dr. Brett Thombs and McGill graduate student Michelle ...

In a study that included more than 120,000 adults who were treated for trauma, 16 percent of these patients died within 3 years of their injury, compared to an expected population mortality rate of about 6 percent, according to a study in the March 9 issue of JAMA. The researchers also found that trauma patients who were discharged to a skilled nursing facility had a significantly increased risk of death compared with patients discharged home without assistance. Trauma can lead to significant illness or death. "To date, there have been few large studies evaluating long-term ...

Information concerning funding and author conflicts of interest disclosed in the original reports of randomized controlled trials is rarely disclosed when these data are combined in meta-analyses, according to an article in the March 9 issue of JAMA. "Conflicts of interest (COIs) related to the funding of biomedical research by pharmaceutical companies and financial relationships between researchers and pharmaceutical companies have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. COIs may influence the framing of research questions, study design, data analysis, interpretation ...

Study participants who viewed a brief hands-only cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) video were more likely to attempt CPR, and perform better quality CPR in an emergency than participants who did not view the short videos, according to research reported in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. Each year, almost 300,000 people suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the United States. Survival rates from these events tend to be extremely low. However, research has shown that bystander CPR can double — even triple — survival from out-of-hospital cardiac ...

Participants in the first hospital-initiated, low-intensity collaborative care program to treat depression in heart patients showed significant improvements in their depression, anxiety and emotional quality of life after 6 and 12 weeks, researchers report in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal. Depression is a common condition in cardiovascular disease (CVD) patients which can result in poor prognosis and quality of life. Collaborative care depression management programs use a non-physician care manager to coordinate ...

The quality of chronic disease care under the GP pay for performance system is poorer for residents of care homes than those living in the community, according to a study published on bmj.com today. The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) for general practice is a voluntary system of financial incentives, which has been in place since 2004. Part of the programme includes specific targets for GPs to demonstrate high quality care for patients with chronic diseases. The study found that, although pay for performance systems do not invariably disadvantage residents of ...

The coalition government's Health and Social Care Bill is a missed opportunity to deliver the improvements in children's health services in England that are urgently needed, warn experts in a paper published on bmj.com today. Ingrid Wolfe and some of the country's leading experts in child health propose a fundamentally different way of delivering children's health care that is long overdue in the UK. The authors argue that care provided by UK children's health services is inferior in many regards to that in comparable European countries. However, the government's proposals ...

UK trained doctors and medical students from minority ethnic groups tend to underperform academically compared with their white counterparts, finds a study published on bmj.com today. This attainment gap has persisted for many years and must be tackled to ensure a fair and just method of training and assessing current and future doctors, say the authors. A third of all UK medical students and junior doctors are from minority ethnic groups. Although universities and the NHS are legally required to monitor the admission and progress of students and staff by ethnic group, ...

Lowering cholesterol could help the body's immune system fight viral infections, researchers have found. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have shown a direct link between the workings of the immune system and cholesterol levels. Researchers found that when the body succumbs to a viral infection a hormone in the immune system sends signals to blood cells, causing cholesterol levels to be lowered. Cholesterol produced by our cells is needed for viruses and certain bacteria to grow. Limiting our body's production of cholesterol would therefore curb the opportunity ...