EDITOR'S PICK: A benefit of 'flu: protection from asthma? The number of people with asthma has increased sharply over the past few decades. It has been suggested that this is a result of decreased childhood exposure to microorganisms. A team of researchers — led by Dale Umetsu, at Harvard Medical School, Boston; Michio Shimamura, at the University of Tsukuba, Japan; and Petr Illarionov, at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom — has now provided concrete evidence in mice to support this idea and identified an underlying mechanism to explain this protection, which ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Imposing higher taxes on sodas and other sweetened drinks may generate a lot of money – but would lead to only minimal weight loss among most people and would have no effect on weight among consumers in the highest and lowest income groups, according to new research from Duke-National University of Singapore (NUS) Graduate Medical School. The study, led by Eric Finkelstein, PhD, associate professor of health services at Duke-NUS, looked at the differential impact on calories and weight of a 20 percent and 40 percent tax on sodas and other sweetened beverages ...

UPTON, NY - One big challenge in converting plants to biofuels is that the very same molecules that keep plants standing up make it hard to break them down. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory are unraveling details of how plant cells' structural supports - their cell walls - are made, with the hope of finding ways to change their composition for more efficient biofuel production. In a paper to be published the week of December 13, 2010, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe ...

December 14, 2010 – Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death among gynecological cancers. To better understand the disease and improve therapies, researchers are investigating how deregulation of genes across the genome could be contributing to malignancy. In a study published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), scientists have identified age-related gene-specific accumulation of DNA methylation that suppresses a critical cellular pathway contributing to ovarian carcinogenesis, information that will be crucial for future translational research. Epigenetic ...

An unprecedented combination of heat plus decades of drought could be in store for the Southwest sometime this century, suggests new research from a University of Arizona-led team. To come to this conclusion, the team reviewed previous studies that document the region's past temperatures and droughts. "Major 20th century droughts pale in comparison to droughts documented in paleoclimatic records over the past two millennia," the researchers wrote. During the Medieval period, elevated temperatures coincided with lengthy and widespread droughts. By figuring out when ...

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — December 9, 2010 — A new collaborative paper by economist Richard Easterlin — namesake of the "Easterlin Paradox" and founder of the field of happiness studies — offers the broadest range of evidence to date demonstrating that a higher rate of economic growth does not result in a greater increase of happiness. Across a worldwide sample of 37 countries, rich and poor, ex-Communist and capitalist, Easterlin and his co-authors shows strikingly consistent results: over the long term, a sense of well-being within a country does not go up with income. In ...

Opioids appear to be associated with more adverse events among older adults with arthritis than other commonly used analgesics, including coxibs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, according to a report in the December 13/27 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In a second report assessing only opioid use, different types of drugs within the class were associated with different safety events among older patients with non-malignant pain. "In the United States, one in five adults received a prescription for an analgesic in 2006, ...

Personalized electronic messages to patients overdue for screenings, or mailings targeted to patients with expired orders for colonoscopies, may each increase colorectal cancer screening rates over the short term, according to two reports posted online today that will be published in the April 11 print issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in the United States, according to background information in the articles. "Colorectal cancer screening detects cancers at more ...

High levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), also known as "good" cholesterol, appear to be associated with a reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease in older adults, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Dyslipidemia [high total cholesterol and triglycerides] and late-onset Alzheimer's disease are highly frequent in western societies," the authors write as background information in the article. "More than 50 percent of the U.S. adult population has high cholesterol. About 1 percent of people age 65 to ...

African Americans and those with lower socioeconomic status appear to have more severe parkinsonism with greater levels of disability, according to a report posted online today that will appear in the April 2011 print issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Parkinsonism (slow movements, tremor and rigidity) is a common condition among older U.S. adults, according to background information in the article. "The most common cause of parkinsonism is Parkinson's disease, a debilitating, chronic, progressive neurodegenerative disorder with an incidence ...

Acupuncture could potentially become an alternative to patching for treating amblyopia (lazy eye) in some older children, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. About 0.3 percent to 5 percent of individuals worldwide have amblyopia, according to background information in the article. About one-third to one-half of the cases are caused by differences in the degree of nearsightedness or farsightedness between the two eyes, a condition known as anisometropia. Correcting these refractive errors with glasses ...

TEMPE, Ariz. – In 1986, Marc Reisner published "Cadillac Desert: The American West and its disappearing water," a foundational work about the long-term environmental costs of U.S. western state's water projects and land development. It sounded an alarm about the direction of the American West and how it was using its most precious resource. Now it all appears to becoming true. Researchers applying modern scientific tools and mapping technologies, unavailable during Reisner's time, find his conclusions for the most part to be accurate and scientifically correct. As a ...

Sophia Antipolis, 14 December 2010: Today, heart failure is by far the single biggest reason for acute hospital admission. Around 30 million people in Europe have heart failure and its incidence is still increasing: more cases are being identified, more people are living to an old age, and more are surviving a heart attack but with damage to the heart muscle. Yet traditional risk-factor prediction models have only limited accuracy in this population to identify those at highest risk for worsening outcomes. So far, those risk prediction models have relied on measurements ...

A new UC Davis study contradicts earlier reports that salmon farms were responsible for the 2002 population crash of wild pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago of western Canada. The Broughton crash has become a rallying event for people concerned about the potential environmental effects of open-net salmon farming, which has become a $10 billion industry worldwide, producing nearly 1.5 million tons of fish annually. The new study, to be published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not determine what caused the crash, but it ...

Researchers at King's College London have discovered that leukaemic stem cells can be reversed to a pre-leukaemic stage by suppressing a protein called beta-catenin found in the blood. They also found that advanced leukaemic stem cells that had become resistant to treatment could be 're-sensitised' to treatment by suppressing the same protein. Professor Eric So, who led the study at the Department of Haematology at King's College London, says the findings, published today in the journal Cancer Cell, represent a 'critical step forward' in the search for more effective ...

Deep sediment cores retrieved from the Bering Sea floor indicate that the region was ice-free all year and biological productivity was high during the last major warm period in Earth's climate history. Christina Ravelo, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present the new findings in a talk on December 13 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. Ravelo and co-chief scientist Kozo Takahashi of Kyushu University, Japan, led a nine-week expedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) ...

DURHAM, N.C. – There are many mechanisms that alter the activity of genes – direct changes to the DNA code like mutations and deletions, or changes that control when genes are switched on and off, called epigenetic means. Tumor-suppressor genes are often inactivated through epigenetics, which provides an opening for the cancerous growth of cells. Researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute have found evidence of epigenetics at work on a genome-wide scale in cases of ovarian cancer. One major biological signaling pathway in particular was found to contain many genes influenced ...

Baltimore, MD – Dec. 13, 2010. African American patients and those with lower socioeconomic status have more advanced disease and greater disability when they seek treatment from Parkinson's disease specialists, according to a study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The researchers found that race, education and income were each significant and independent factors in determining a patient's level of disability. The disparities in health care are associated with greater disease severity and earlier loss of independence. The study is published in the December ...

Athens, Ga. – Water scarcity in the western U.S. has long been an issue of concern. Now, a team of researchers studying freshwater sustainability in the U.S. have found that the Southeast, with the exception of Florida, does not have enough water capacity to meet its own needs. Twenty-five years ago, environmentalist Marc Reisner published Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, which predicted that water resources in the West would be unable to support the growing demand of cities, agriculture and industry. A paper co-authored by a University ...

Harnessing the power of ocean tides has long been imagined, but countries are only now putting it into practice. A demonstration project planned for Puget Sound will be the first tidal energy project on the west coast of the United States, and the first array of large-scale turbines to feed power from ocean tides into an electrical grid. University of Washington researchers are devising ways to site the tidal turbines and measure their environmental effects. Brian Polagye, UW research assistant professor of mechanical engineering, will present recent findings this week ...

Cambridge, Mass., December 6, 2010 – Utilizing a century-old phenomenon discovered in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, applied scientists at Harvard University have demonstrated, for the first time, highly collimated unidirectional microlasers. The result of a collaboration with researchers from Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan, and the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Magdeburg, Germany, the advance has a wide range of new applications in photonics such as sensing and communications. Published online this week in the Proceedings of the ...

VIDEO: This is a computer simulation of how sediment particles suspended in the water would change as they pass through a tidal turbine. Some particles speed up (turn red) as they... Click here for more information. The emerging tidal-energy industry is spawning another in its shadow: tidal-energy monitoring. Little is known about tidal turbines' environmental effects and environmentalists, regulators and turbine manufacturers all need more data to allow the industry ...

A study from New Delhi India has revealed high rates of vitamin D deficiency among hip fracture patients, confirming the conclusions of similar international studies which point to vitamin D deficiency as a risk factor for hip fracture. A group of 90 hip fracture patients was compared to a matched control group of similar age, sex and co-morbidity. Of the patients who had suffered hip fractures, 76.7% were shown to be vitamin D deficient as measured by serum 25(OH)D levels of less than 20 ng/ml. In addition, 68.9% had elevated PTH levels. In comparison, only 32.3% of ...

A new study presented today at the 1st Asia-Pacific Osteoporosis Meeting in Singapore confirms rising rates of hip fractures in Beijing, China. The research was based on hospital discharge data from all Beijing hospitals that treat hip fracture patients, collected from 1990-1992 and 2002-2006 and using official population census figures for 1990 and 2004. The researchers identified over- and under-reporting caused by changes in methods of reporting and in patterns of referral over these two time periods. After adjustments were made, it was found that the rate of hip ...

Bone health experts attending the 1st Asia-Pacific Osteoporosis Meeting in Singapore this week have flagged vitamin D deficiency as a major concern in the region, particularly in South Asia where the problem is especially severe and widespread across the entire population. Dr. Nikhil Tandon, Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences of New Delhi, India highlighted the results of various studies which show severe deficiency across India and Pakistan in all age groups, as well as insufficiency in populations of South-East and ...