Cardiologists from the Mayo Clinic performed sheathless transradial percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to remedy complex lesions, achieving a 90% success rate with no radial complications. Standard guiding catheters were used during the procedure. Details of this novel approach—overcoming the last hurdle to greater adoption of transradial PCI in the U.S.—are published in the December issue of Catheterization and Cardiovascular Intervention, the official journal of The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions. PCI, commonly known as angioplasty, ...

On Tuesday 7 December 2010, maternal health professionals from Africa and Asia will be attending a workshop in Liverpool to discuss the effects of 'Making It Happen', a programme with a life-saving training package for health care providers at its heart. Participants will share successes and lessons learned from this maternal and newborn health intervention, to better determine how the programme can be scaled-up. Supported by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), UNICEF and other bodies and in partnership with the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In an era when social networking sites and blogs are visited by three quarters of online users, it's only natural that the medical profession would also tap into the power of social media tools. Caroline Richardson, M.D., associate professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, and her colleagues found that adding an interactive online community to an Internet-based walking program significantly decreased the number of participants who dropped out. Seventy-nine percent of participants who used online forums to motivate ...

When an antibiotic is consumed, researchers have learned that up to 90 percent passes through a body without metabolizing. This means the drugs can leave the body almost intact through normal bodily functions. In the case of agricultural areas, excreted antibiotics can then enter stream and river environments through a variety of ways, including discharges from animal feeding operations, fish hatcheries, and nonpoint sources such as the flow from fields where manure or biosolids have been applied. Water filtered through wastewater treatment plants may also contain used ...

Brussels, 7 December 2010 – Polar research must become an integral part of the European Union's research activities if Europe is to benefit from the dramatically changing face of the Polar Regions, the European Polar Board (EPB) said today at the launch of its strategic position paper on European polar research: "Relevance, Strategic Context and Setting Future Directions." European research activities in the Polar Regions are significant, amounting to over 300 million euro per year in recognition of the regions' key role as driver of the Earth's climate and the functioning ...

People who live in walkable communities are more civically involved and have greater levels of trust than those who live in less walkable neighborhoods. And this increase in so-called 'social capital' is associated with higher quality of life, according to Shannon Rogers and her team from the University of New Hampshire in the US. Their research, looking at the social benefits of walkability in communities, is published online in Springer's journal Applied Research in Quality of Life. A walkable community provides residents with easy access to post offices, town parks ...

Tel Aviv ― Career women who put babies on hold until after 40, or even 45, will be reassured by new research from Tel Aviv University. Even though there are associated risks for babies when postponing child-bearing, the neonates can overcome them, says Prof. Yariv Yogev of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine and the Hospital for Women at Rabin Medical Center. Working as a clinician in Israel, a country that supports in vitro fertilization (IVF) in older women, Prof. Yogev and his colleagues investigated the outcomes for mothers of 45 or more and their ...

7 December 2010 – We commonly think of sleep as a healing process that melts away the stresses of the day, preparing us to deal with new challenges. Research has also shown that sleep plays a crucial role in the development of memories. An important component of anxiety disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is the formulation of memories associated with fear. Therefore, researchers decided to evaluate whether sleep deprivation after exposure to an aversive event might eliminate the associated fear, due to the lack of memory consolidation that would ...

BOSTON (December 7, 2010) —Newly-created bioactive peptides promote wound healing through the growth of new blood vessels and epithelial tissue, such as skin. These wound-healing peptides, synthesized by researchers at the Tufts Center for Innovations in Wound Healing Research, increased angiogenesis in vitro by 200 percent. The discovery, reported online in advance of print this week in Wound Repair and Regeneration, provides a better understanding of the mechanisms regulating wound healing and may lead to new therapies for acute and chronic wound healing. "We identified ...

AUSTIN, Texas—The role a key molecule plays in a plant's ability to remember winter, and therefore bloom in the spring, has been identified by University of Texas at Austin scientists. Many flowering plants bloom in bursts of color in spring after long periods of cold in the winter. The timing of blooming is critical to ensure pollination, and is important for crop production and for droves of people peeping at wildflowers. One way for the plants to recognize the spring—and not just a warm spell during winter—is that they "remember" they've gone through a long enough ...

When two individuals face off in conflict, the classic problem in evolutionary biology known as the prisoner's dilemma says that the individuals are not likely to cooperate even if it is in their best interests to do so. But a new study suggests that with incentives to cooperate, natural selection can minimize conflict, changing the game from one of pure conflict to one of partial cooperation. The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that the prisoner's dilemma game, which has reigned as the dominant theoretical paradigm used to ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A new technique that jumpstarts the growth of nerve fibers could reverse much of the damage caused by strokes, researchers report in the Jan. 7, 2011 issue of the journal Stroke. "This therapy may be used to restore function even when it's given long after ischemic brain damage has occurred," senior author Gwendolyn Kartje, MD, PhD and colleagues write. The article has been published online in advance of the print edition of Stroke. Kartje is director of the Neuroscience Institute of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and chief of ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- Surgery to remove tumors under the brain known as acoustic neuromas produces favorable outcomes in the "vast majority" of patients, according to one of the largest studies of its kind. Loyola University Hospital surgeons Dr. Douglas Anderson and Dr. John Leonetti followed 730 patients whom they had jointly operated on during a 21-year period. Patients ranged in age from 9 to 79, with a median age of 48. The average clinical followup was 32 months. Every patient survived the surgery, and the surgeons were able to completely remove the tumors in 95.1 percent ...

DURHAM, N.C. – The brain's visual neurons continually develop predictions of what they will perceive and then correct erroneous assumptions as they take in additional external information, according to new research done at Duke University. This new mechanism for visual cognition challenges the currently held model of sight and could change the way neuroscientists study the brain. The new vision model is called predictive coding. It is more complex and adds an extra dimension to the standard model of sight. The prevailing model has been that neurons process incoming ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A grant from the D. J. Angus-Scientech Educational Foundation has made it possible for a student from a suburban Indianapolis high school to co-author, along with his mentor and two other scientists, a theoretical physics study in a top tier peer-reviewed scientific journal, a paper which has been selected for rapid communication due to its importance to the field. "It is extremely rare for a high school student to be a co-author on a physics paper. Statistics on this aren't available, but it is likely less than 1 paper in 1,000, that's one tenth of one ...

HOUSTON (Dec. 7, 2010) – Private insurers appear to be more effective in controlling health care spending differences between two Texas cities than Medicare, according to researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health. Researchers found that sharp disparities in per-capita Medicare healthcare spending between McAllen and El Paso were significantly diminished when private insurance paid for health care costs in the under-65 population. "For a number of reasons, insurers generally are reluctant to intrude on ...

Among patients with a family or past history of colorectal cancer (CRC), testing between colonoscopies helps detect CRC and advanced tumors that are either missed or develop rapidly, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. "By using fecal immunochemical testing — a new type of stool blood test — in the interval between surveillance colonoscopies, we were able to detect cancer much sooner than if we had waited for the scheduled surveillance," said Graeme P. Young, MD, AGAF, FRACP, ...

Are you ready for robots in the ER? A group of computer engineers at Vanderbilt University is convinced that the basic technology is now available to create robot assistants that can perform effectively in the often-chaotic environment of the emergency room. The specialists in emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are enthusiastic about the potential advantages. So, the two groups have formed an interdisciplinary team to explore the use of robotics in this critical and challenging setting. Team member Mitch Wilkes, associate professor of electrical ...

In these modern times, people can have jobs that weren't traditionally associated with their genders. Men are nurses; women are CEOs. A new study examines perceptions of people in high-powered jobs and finds that they're likely to be judged more harshly for mistakes if they're in a job that's not normally associated with their gender. "The reason I got interested is, there was so much talk about race and gender barriers being broken," says Victoria Brescoll, a psychological scientist at Yale University and first author of the study. In the 2008 presidential election, ...

Manhattan, KS —December 7, 2010— We've all been there: we are watching a movie with a parent or relative when a steamy love scene appears. A new study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology shows that all of that squirming and averting of eyes is normal, especially when you are accompanied by your parents. The authors of the study assert that not all movie-watching experiences are enjoyable or positive. Some movies make us feel downright uncomfortable or disturbed in their content and delivery, while others are inspirational, touching, or have us rolling on the floor. ...

Questionnaire results and DNA samples volunteered by a group of University of Alberta students has broken new ground in the study of aggression. U of A Psychology researcher Peter Hurd was looking at the link between an individual's sensitivity to testosterone and aggressive behaviour. "I looked at the gene that makes the body's testosterone detector to determine if variations in this detector's sensitivity to the chemical causes people to be more or less aggressive," said Hurd. Hurd came across a previously published study in India that found violent criminals had ...

Scientists have created a way to isolate neural stem cells – cells that give rise to all the cell types of the brain – from human brain tissue with unprecedented precision, an important step toward developing new treatments for conditions of the nervous system, like Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases and spinal cord injury. The work by a team of neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center was published in the Nov. 3 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Neurologist Steven Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Neurology, led the team. The ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Researchers have found compelling evidence for an extensive biological community living in porous rock deep beneath the seafloor. The microbes in this hidden world appear to be an important source of dissolved organic matter in deep ocean water, a finding that could dramatically change ideas about the ocean carbon cycle. Matthew McCarthy, associate professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led a team of researchers from several institutions who analyzed the dissolved organic matter in fluids from natural vents on the seafloor ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University research team developed a nanoparticle that can hold and release an antimicrobial agent as needed for extending the shelf life of foods susceptible to Listeria monocytogenes. Yuan Yao, an assistant professor of food science, altered the surface of a carbohydrate found in sweet corn called phytoglycogen, which led to the creation of several forms of a nanoparticle that could attract and stabilize nisin, a food-based antimicrobial peptide. The nanoparticle can then preserve nisin for up to three weeks, combating Listeria, a potentially ...

Investigators at Southern Methodist University and The University of Texas at Dallas have discovered a family of small molecules that shows promise in protecting brain cells against nerve-degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's, which afflict millions. Dallas-based startup EncephRx, Inc. was granted the worldwide license to the jointly owned compounds. A biotechnology and therapeutics company, EncephRx will develop drug therapies based on the new class of compounds as a pharmaceutical for preventing nerve-cell damage, delaying onset of ...