EAST LANSING, Mich. — Despite an international effort to raise awareness about epilepsy in resource-poor nations, a recently published study found nearly 50 percent of pharmacies in Zambia do not carry antiepileptic drugs, seriously hampering efforts to tackle one of the most cost-effective chronic conditions to treat. The study, recently published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, was led by Gretchen Birbeck, an associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology and director for the International Neurologic & Psychiatric Epidemiology Program in ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.— It may seem obvious that dunking relatively spherical objects in a sauce — blueberries in melted chocolate, say — will result in an array of completely encapsulated berries. Relying on that concept, fabricators of spherical nanoparticles have similarly dunked their wares in protective coatings in the belief such encapsulations would prevent clumping and unwanted chemical interactions with solvents. Unfortunately, reactions in the nanoworld are not logical extensions of the macroworld, Sandia National Laboratories researchers Matthew Lane and Gary ...

Many young people with mental health problems are at risk of falling through a huge gap in provision when they move from adolescent to adult care services, according to new research from the University of Warwick. A team led by Professor Swaran Singh at Warwick Medical School looked at the transition from child mental health services to adult mental health services and found for the vast majority of users the move was "poorly planned, poorly executed and poorly experienced". In a study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, the research team looked at 154 service ...

Donor kidneys can be successfully transplanted even if there is strong tissue incompatibility between donor and recipient. An interdisciplinary working group headed by Dr. Christian Morath, senior consultant at the Department of Nephrology at Heidelberg University Hospital (Medical Director: Professor Dr. Martin Zeier) and Professor Dr. Caner Süsal, head of antibody laboratory in the Department of Transplantation Immunology, showed in a study of 34 sensitized high-risk patients that the success rate in these patients was not different from the success rate of patients with ...

MADISON — The mathematical skills of boys and girls, as well as men and women, are substantially equal, according to a new examination of existing studies in the current online edition of journal Psychological Bulletin. One portion of the new study looked systematically at 242 articles that assessed the math skills of 1,286,350 people, says chief author Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These studies, all published in English between 1990 and 2007, looked at people from grade school to college and beyond. ...

(CHICAGO)–In a study to determine the durability and long-term effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), psychiatric researchers at Rush University Medical Center have found the non-invasive, non-drug therapy to be an effective, long-term treatment for major depression. Results of the study were published in the October 2010 issue of Brain Stimulation, a journal published by Elsevier. TMS therapy is a non-invasive technique that delivers highly focused magnetic field pulses to a specific portion of the brain, the left prefrontal cortex, in order to stimulate ...

European researchers have proven for the first time that targeting the epidermal growth factor receptor can provide substantial clinical benefit for women with hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancer. At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy, the researchers presented results from a Phase-II randomized trial showing that adding the anti-EGFR antibody cetuximab to cisplatin chemotherapy doubled the response rate and time to progression when compared to cisplatin chemotherapy given alone in a study of 173 heavily pre-treated ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – University of Michigan scientists have identified events inside insulin-producing pancreatic cells that set the stage for a neonatal form of non-autoimmune type 1 diabetes, and may play a role in type 2 diabetes as well. The results point to a potential target for drugs to protect normally functioning proteins essential for producing insulin. A study published online today in the journal PLoS One shows that certain insulin gene mutations involved in neonatal diabetes cause a portion of the proinsulin proteins in the pancreas' beta cells to misfold. ...

October 10, 2010─(BRONX, NY) ─Two major international studies looking at data from a quarter of a million people around the globe have found a new set of genes associated with body fat distribution and obesity. Researchers at 280 institutions worldwide, including Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, conducted the studies. The research, published in the October 10 online edition of Nature Genetics, sheds light on the biological processes involved in body fat distribution, possibly leading to new ways of treating obesity. "These studies ...

Los Angeles, CA (October 11, 2010) NFL players with concussions now stay away from the game significantly longer than they did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, according to research in Sports Health (owned by American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine and published by SAGE). The mean days lost with concussion increased from 1.92 days during 1996-2001 to 4.73 days during 2002-2007. In an effort to discover whether concussion injury occurrence and treatment had changed, researchers compared those two consecutive six-year periods to determine the circumstances of ...

Patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who have progressed after chemotherapy live significantly longer if treated with the drug abiraterone acetate compared to placebo, the results of a large Phase-III clinical trial confirm. "This is a major step forward in prostate cancer therapeutics," said Dr Johann de Bono from The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, who presented the study results at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy. "Patients in this Phase-III ...

Many cancer survivors experience changes in sexual function that leave them feeling guilty and a longing for intimacy, Australian researchers told at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy. The researchers say that these sexuality and fertility concerns are often not adequately addressed by doctors. Professor Bogda Koczwara from Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide said that fertility concerns among cancer survivors was a growing problem, due to a combination of improved cancer treatment outcomes in young cancer survivors ...

In life, we're told, we must take the good with the bad, and how we view these life events determines our well-being and ability to adjust. But according to Prof. Dov Shmotkin of Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychology, you need more than the right attitude to successfully negotiate the vicissitudes of life. As recently reported in Aging and Mental Health, Prof. Shmotkin's research reveals that people's well-being and their adaptation can be ascertained by their "time trajectory" ― their concept of how they have evolved through their remembered past, currently ...

New drugs that target specific molecular mechanisms of cancer have improved the treatment of cancer patients in recent years, but those benefits may come with a cost to the patient's sex life, researchers have found. At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy, French researchers reported on one of the few studies to investigate the impact of cancer therapy on the sexual functioning of patients. Dr Yohann Loriot and Dr Thomas Bessede from Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France and colleagues found that patients taking ...

Lung cancer patients who have already been treated with the EGFR inhibitors erlotinib or gefitinib seem to gain further benefits in terms of progression-free survival and tumor shrinkage when treated with the new drug afatinib, the results of a Phase IIb/III trial show. At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy, Dr Vincent Miller from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, USA, reported findings from the LUX-Lung 1 trial of afatinib in 585 patients with lung adenocarcinoma whose cancer had progressed after chemotherapy ...

A new-generation lung cancer drug has shown an impressive ability to prevent disease progression when administered as a first-line treatment in patients with advanced disease, investigators reported at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). Preliminary results from an ongoing Phase-II trial of the drug PF299804 (PF-299) showed that close to 85% of patients whose cancers harbor mutated forms of the EGFR gene have remained progression-free for at least nine months, reported Dr Tony Mok from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. While some ...

An ongoing Phase-II trial investigating a new, targeted therapy for metastatic urothelial cancer has generated promising early results, Italian researchers reported at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy. Urothelial cancers affect the tissue lining the inner surfaces of the bladder and other parts of the urinary system. In cases of metastatic disease, median survival is approximately 12-15 months and there is a 10-15% chance of prolonging it by the use of standard chemotherapy regimens, particularly in otherwise healthy ...

The results of a large Phase-III clinical trial have shown that the drug everolimus delays tumor progression in patients with a hard-to-treat group of rare cancers that affect particular hormone-producing cells. At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), Dr Marianne Pavel from Charité University in Berlin, Germany reported that everolimus improved progression-free survival by 5.1 months in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumors. Neuroendocrine tumors are slow-growing malignancies that originate from cells of the body's neuroendocrine ...

A new class of compounds identified by researchers at Emory University School of Medicine could be developed into drugs for the treatment of schizophrenia. The compounds enhance signaling by molecules in the brain called NMDA receptors, which scientists believe are functioning at low levels in people with schizophrenia. Led by Stephen Traynelis, PhD, professor of pharmacology, a team of Emory researchers sifted through thousands of chemicals and found one, called CIQ, which could selectively enhance the function of certain NMDA receptors without affecting others. The ...

Iowa City, IA—October 11, 2010— A new study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology finds that college-aged men are very likely to remember a woman's initial sexual interest (attraction or rejection), especially when the woman in question is thought to be attractive, is dressed more provocatively, and expresses positive sexual interest. In the study the men were shown full-body photographs of college-aged women who expressed cues of sexual interest or rejection. The participating males represented mixed sexual histories, and a capacity for varying degrees of sexually ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University of Florida researchers presenting new fossil evidence of an exceptionally well-preserved 55-million-year-old North American mammal have found it shares a common ancestor with rodents and primates, including humans.The study published today in the online edition of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, describes the cranial anatomy of the extinct mammal, Labidolemur kayi. High resolution CT scans of the specimens allowed researchers to study minute details in the skull, including bone structures smaller than one-tenth of a millimeter. ...

The genetic inherited material DNA was long viewed as the sole bearer of hereditary information. The function of its packaging proteins, the histones, was believed to be exclusively structural. Additional genetic information can be stored, however, and passed on to subsequent generations through chemical changes in the DNA or histones. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have succeeded in creating an experimental system for testing the function of such chemical histone modifications and their influence on the organism. Chemical ...

More brilliant X-rays, more cost-effective methods for developing new energy sources and advanced manufacturing processes are just some of the benefits which may come from a novel technology, proven at the theoretical level by a consortium of British and European laser scientists. The research, led by scientists at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Central Laser Facility is published in this week's edition of Nature Physics (October 10 2010). A team of scientists from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Imperial College London, and the Universities ...

A University of Colorado at Boulder space dust counter designed, tested and operated by students that is flying aboard NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto now holds the record for the most distant working dust detector ever to travel through space. The instrument on the New Horizons mission -- officially named the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, or SDC, after an 11-year-old English girl who named Pluto more than 75 years ago -- reached a distance of 1.67 billion miles from Earth on Oct. 10. Designed by a student team from CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric ...

Providence, RI---It was a mathematician, Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), who coined the term "greenhouse effect". That this term, so commonly used today to describe human effects on the global climate, originated with a mathematician points to the insights that mathematics can offer into environmental problems. Three articles in the November 2010 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society examine ways in which mathematics can contribute to understanding environmental and ecological issues. "Earthquakes and Weatherquakes: Mathematics and Climate Change", ...