People who are physically fit and active have fewer and milder colds, indicates research published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The US researchers base their findings on 1,000 adults up to the age of 85 whose respiratory health was tracked for 12 weeks during the autumn and winter of 2008. Six out of 10 participants were women, and four out of 10 were aged between 18 and 39; 40% were middle aged, and one in four were aged 60 and older. All the participants reported back on how frequently they took aerobic exercise and rated their fitness levels ...

Imposing statutory limits on the salt content of processed foods could be 20 times more effective than voluntary curbs by industry, finds research published online in the journal Heart. The Australian researchers assessed the public health benefits and cost effectiveness of different strategies for reducing dietary salt content - a factor known to have a key role in the increased risk of heart disease and stroke. They looked at the current Australian 'Tick' programme. This enables food manufacturers to buy an endorsed logo for use on product packaging to achieve higher ...

A tool, widely regarded as the "gold standard," but often deemed to be too expensive, cuts needless referrals for suspected glaucoma, indicates preliminary research published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. Since the publication of new guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), new referrals for suspected glaucoma have increased substantially. And this is likely to go on rising as the population ages, warn the authors. If left untreated, glaucoma causes blindness. This sharp rise in referrals is putting a strain on ...

LAWRENCE, Kan. – A little self-awareness can help people struggling in the world of relationships, says Jeffrey Hall, assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas. Hall recently completed a study into styles of flirting among dating adults, surveying more than 5,100 people regarding their methods of communicating romantic interest. "Knowing something about the way you communicate attraction says something about challenges you might have had in your past dating life," Hall said. "Hopefully, this awareness can help people avoid those mistakes ...

Rural teens appear more likely than their urban peers to use prescription drugs for non-medical purposes, according to a report posted online today that will appear in the March 2011 print issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The non-medical use of prescription drugs is common among U.S. adolescents, with about one in eight reporting lifetime non-medical use of prescription opioids, according to background information in the article. "During adolescence, non-medical prescription drug use is particularly problematic ...

Poor, minority and special needs children are more likely to be affected by toothache, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Toothache is a source of chronic and often severe pain that interferes with a child's ability to play, eat and pay attention in school," the authors write as background information in the study. The authors also note that "the most common cause of toothache is dental decay" and the "process of dental decay is one that optimally would be prevented or, at the ...

More than one-fourth of children hospitalized with 2009 novel influenza A(H1N1) in California required intensive care or died, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. A second report assessing children in Israel found that those with underlying illnesses and infants born prematurely were at greater risk of severe complications following 2009 novel influenza A(H1N1) infection. "Following the detection of the first cases of 2009 novel influenza A(H1N1) in California in April 2009, the ...

After a three-year implementation period, home visits by nurses to high-risk mothers appear to increase their likelihood of waiting at least two years to have a second child, according to a report posted online today that will appear in the March 2011 print issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "The Nurse-Family Partnership, a program of prenatal, infancy and toddler home vistitation by nurses for low-income mothers bearing their first children, is designed to improve the outcomes of pregnancy, children's health and ...

London, ON - Three leading physicians have published a review in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology warning about the danger of dietary cholesterol for those at risk of a heart attack or stroke. And they say one of the worst offenders is the egg yolk which, depending on size, can contain 215 to 275 mg of cholesterol. The Double Down from Kentucky Fried Chicken contains 150 mg of cholesterol. Patients at risk of cardiovascular disease are advised to limit their total dietary cholesterol to less than 200 mg per day. The review of studies was authored by stroke prevention ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A study of adolescents who had a major depressive disorder found that nearly all recovered from their episode after treatment. But within five years, nearly half of them had relapsed, and females were at much higher risk of another major episode, researchers at Duke University Medical Center found. "We need to learn why females in this age range have higher chances of descending into another major depression after they have made a recovery," said John Curry, Ph.D., lead author of the study and professor in the Duke Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral ...

Half of teens who have oral sex during the ninth grade will have intercourse by the end of the 11th grade, and most sexually active teenagers will begin engaging in oral sex and sexual intercourse within the same six-month period, according to findings from a new survey conducted by researchers at UCSF and UC Merced. The study is the first to track teens' sexual behavior over time to determine whether oral sex increases the likelihood of having sexual intercourse or acts as a protective measure delaying the onset of further sexual activity. The data, explain the researchers, ...

VIDEO: How adiponectin protects the hearts of healthy people has long been a mystery, and now a team led by Barbara Ranscht, Ph.D. and Pilar Ruiz-Lozano, Ph.D. at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research... Click here for more information. LA JOLLA, Calif., November 1, 2010 – One of the many advantages of maintaining a normal body weight is having healthy fat, which in turn supports a healthy heart. Fat tissue is increasingly seen as more than just a storage depot – it's also an active ...

An overwhelming majority of Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) facilities performing breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the U.S. are up-to-par with American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) and European Society of Breast Imaging (EUSOBI) technical standards and requirements, according to a study in the November issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (www.jacr.org). The BCSC is a collaborative effort to improve breast cancer research. It consists of five mammography registries and two affiliated sites with linkages to pathology ...

Full-term babies are born with a key collection of networks already formed in their brains, according to new research that challenges some previous theories about the brain's activity and how the brain develops. The study is published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers led by a team from the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London used functional MRI scanning to look at 'resting state' networks in the brains of 70 babies, born at between 29 and 43 weeks of development, who were receiving treatment at Imperial ...

Anti-inflammatory drugs currently used to treat diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis may also help prevent cognitive decline after surgery, according to a new study led by researchers at UCSF and colleagues at Imperial College, London. The research explains for the first time why many patients experience memory loss or other forms of cognitive dysfunction after surgery or critical illness, a process the researchers traced to a specific inflammatory response in the brain. The findings could lead directly to human clinical trials in as short as 12 months, the authors ...

A drug in testing to treat atherosclerosis significantly inhibited growth of ovarian cancer in both human cell lines and mouse models, the first such report of a peptide being used to fight malignancies, according to a study by researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. The study follows previous discovery by the same group showing that a protein called apolipoprotein A-I (apoA-I) in patients may be used as a biomarker to diagnose early stage ovarian cancer, when it typically is asymptomatic and is much easier to treat. These earlier findings could be ...

Boulder, CO, USA - The meters-long, carnivorous "shrimp" from hell that once ruled the seas of Earth a half billion years ago may have been a real softy, it turns out. A new 3-D modeling of the mouth parts of the Anomalocaris, along with evidence that these parts were not hard like teeth, but flexible, shows that the famed predator could not have been munching on the hard shells of trilobites and other such creatures of the early seas. What's more, there is no evidence from fossilized stomach contents or feces that Anomalocaris' ate anything hard enough to leave a fossilized ...

Boulder, CO, USA - One common mitigation approach is to build a raised bed and fill it with freshly composted, low-lead soil from elsewhere, right? Maybe not, according to researchers studying the mysterious case of the lead contamination found within raised beds in community gardens in the Boston communities of Roxbury and Dorchester. "Raised beds are surrounded by a sea of contaminated soil," said Daniel Brabander of Wellesley College. Brabander, his students and colleagues have been studying the lead in 144 backyard gardens in coordination with The Food Project, an ...

Morrison, CO, USA–Staff at the Morrison Natural History Museum have again discovered infant dinosaur footprints in the foothills west of Denver, Colorado, near the town of Morrison. Dating from the Late Jurassic, some 148 million years ago, these tracks were made before the Rocky Mountains rose, when Morrison was a broad savanna full of dinosaurs. The fossil tracks represent infant sauropods, according to discoverer Matthew Mossbrucker, the museum's director. Sauropods are giant, herbivorous long-necked dinosaurs, sometimes known as "brontosaurs." The sauropod Apatosaurus ...

Boulder, CO, USA - It's not hard to argue in favor of alternatives to fossil fuels these days, but one popular argument – domestic energy security – may be standing on very shaky legs. A lot of rare metals are needed to make photovoltaic panels, rare earth magnets for wind generators, fuel cells and high-capacity batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles. But most industrialized nations, including the United States, are almost entirely dependent on foreign sources for those metals. The only way this is going to change is if there is more domestic exploration and mining. ...

The November 2010 issue of "Environmental Pollution" details successful experiments at the University of Cincinnati wherein rabbit's food resulted in the abiotic (non-biological) transformation and absorption of four different types of estrogen, reducing the levels of these estrogen hormones by more than 80 percent in wastewater. The research has practical implications since it could point to inexpensive treatment technologies and materials for reducing estrogens in wastewater. Currently, estrogen in wastewater represents a major conduit for the entry of the hormone, ...

Short courses of antibiotics can leave normal gut bacteria harbouring antibiotic resistance genes for up to two years after treatment, say scientists writing in the latest issue of Microbiology, published on 3 November. The researchers believe that this reservoir increases the chances of resistance genes being surrendered to pathogenic bacteria, aiding their survival and suggesting that the long-term effects of antibiotic therapy are more significant than previously thought. Antibiotics that are prescribed to treat pathogenic bacteria also have an impact on the normal ...

Researchers are calling for clear guidelines on childhood stroke after a study, published in the November issue of Acta Paediatrica, found wide variations in time lag to diagnosis, investigation and treatment. They are also keen to see the development of appropriate rehabilitation services, after a follow-up study found that 85% of the children who survived a stroke had neurological dysfunction or limitations. Dr Sten Christerson studied the records of all children who had experienced their first stroke over a seven-year period in the Uppsala-Orebro Health Care Region, ...

Anti-inflammatory drugs currently used to treat diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis may also help prevent cognitive problems after surgery, according to a new study by researchers at Imperial College London and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The research also reveals for the first time that a specific inflammatory response in the brain may explain why many patients experience memory loss or other forms of cognitive dysfunction after surgery or critical illness. The findings, from research in mouse models, could lead to human clinical trials within ...

When confined to a 2-dimensional sheet, some exotic particle-like structures known as anyons appear to entwine in ways that could lead to robust quantum computing schemes, according to research appearing in the November 1 issue of the journal Physical Review B. The physicists at Bell Laboratories who performed the research are hopeful the anyons can be induced to follow paths that twist into braids that would be much more resistant to disturbances that corrupt data and calculations in quantum computers relying on individual particles. The anyons the researchers believe ...