Impairments to health and physical performance are not primarily a result of aging but of unfavorable lifestyle habits and lack of exercise. This is the position taken by Dieter Leyk and his coauthors in the new issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107[46]: 809󈝼). Sporty elderly people have a life expectancy that is almost 4 years higher and are often faster than younger athletes. In their study, the sports scientists analyzed the stamina of more than 600 000 marathon and half marathon runners and asked participants about their ...

Scientists from The University of Manchester say a naturally occurring chemical found in soy could prove to be an effective new treatment for a fatal genetic disease that affects children. Dr Brian Bigger, from the University's MPS Stem Cell Research Laboratory, found that genistein – derived from soya beans and licensed in the US as an osteoporosis drug – had a dramatic effect on mice suffering from the human childhood disease Sanfilippo. "Sanfilippo is an untreatable mucopolysaccharide (MPS) disease affecting one in 89,000 children in the United Kingdom," said Dr ...

Philadelphia, PA, 2 December 2010 - Many brain imaging studies have reported that tobacco smoking is associated with large-scale and wide-spread structural brain abnormalities. The cerebral cortex is a specific area of the brain responsible for many important higher-order functions, including language, information processing, and memory. Reduced cortical thickness has been associated with normal aging, reduced intelligence, and impaired cognition. However, prior research had not described the impact of smoking upon cortical thickness. A new study, published in ...

People who are deemed social misfits or "losers" aren't effective leaders, even if they are crusading for a cause that would benefit a larger group, according to new research from Rice University, the University of Texas and Universitat de Valencia. The study's authors observed the contributions of 80 participants in a repeated public-goods game and found that players were more likely to mimic the actions of a leader they perceived as a high-status individual; they ignored leaders perceived as low-status and, when they had a chance, punished them for trying to lead. ...

Tel Aviv ― Could the bacteria that we carry in our bodies decide who we marry? According to a new study from Tel Aviv University, the answer lies in the gut of a small fruit fly. Prof. Eugene Rosenberg, Prof. Daniel Segel and doctoral student Gil Sharon of Tel Aviv University's Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology recently demonstrated that the symbiotic bacteria inside a fruit fly greatly influence its choice of mates. The research was done in cooperation with Prof. John Ringo of the University of Maine, and was recently published in the Proceedings ...

A widely-used arthritis drug reduces the incidence of non-melanoma skin cancers – the most common cancers in humans – according to a study published this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib (brand name Celebrex), which is currently approved for the treatment of osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and acute pain in adults led to a 62 percent reduction in non-melanoma skin cancers, which includes basal cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas. Celecoxib, a prescription-strength nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Quitting smoking is certainly healthy for the body, but doctors and scientists haven't been sure whether quitting makes people happier, especially since conventional wisdom says many smokers use cigarettes to ease anxiety and depression. In a new study, researchers tracked the symptoms of depression in people who were trying to quit and found that they were never happier than when they were being successful, for however long that was. Based on their results, the authors of the article published online Nov. 24 in the journal Nicotine ...

A prescribed set of hospital-wide patient-safety programs can lead to rapid improvements in the "culture of safety" even in a large, complex, academic medical center, according to a new study by safety experts at Johns Hopkins. "It doesn't take decades or tons of money to get from a culture that says 'mistakes are inevitable' to a belief that harm is entirely preventable," says Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of the study published online in the journal ...

Expectant parents who completed a brief relationship-strengthening class around the time their child was born showed lasting effects on each family member's well being and on the family's overall relationships, according to a recent Penn State study. The team, led by Mark Feinberg, senior research associate in Penn State's Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development, analyzed the effects of the Family Foundations program for three years after a child was born. The Family Foundations program, offered in several Pennsylvania locations as part of ...

Atopic dermatitis (also known as atopic eczema) is a chronic and extremely painful inflammation of the skin that frequently occurs in early childhood, generally already in infancy. Up to 20 percent of all children in industrialized countries are affected, making it one of the most common childhood skin diseases. The need to better understand this disease is all the greater considering the intense suffering it causes in small children. Atopic dermatitis is, however, an allergic condition and all allergic reactions result from complex interactions of genetic and environmental ...

Using a widely heralded Johns Hopkins checklist and other patient-safety tools, intensive care units across the state of Michigan reduced the rate of potentially lethal bloodstream infections to near zero. Now, led by the same Johns Hopkins patient-safety expert who spearheaded the Michigan program, researchers in Rhode Island have shown the Michigan results weren't just a fluke. The new study, published in the December issue of the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care, found that the rate of central-line associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) fell by 74 ...

Why does a child grow up to become a lawyer, a politician, a professional athlete, an environmentalist or a churchgoer? It's determined by our inherited genes, say some researchers. Still others say the driving force is our upbringing and the nurturing we get from our parents. But a new child-development theory bridges those two models, says psychologist George W. Holden at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Holden's theory holds that the way a child turns out can be determined in large part by the day-to-day decisions made by the parents who guide that child's ...

People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is most common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death. In fact, 76% of children that report fear of death is due to their mothers avoiding the topic. Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death. These are some of the conclusions drawn from a research entitled Educación para la muerte: Estudio sobre la construcción del concepto de muerte en niños de entre ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Exposure to polluted air early in life led to an accumulation of abdominal fat and insulin resistance in mice even if they ate a normal diet, according to new research. Animals exposed to the fine-particulate air pollution had larger and more fat cells in their abdominal area and higher blood sugar levels than did animals eating the same diet but breathing clean air. Researchers exposed the mice to the polluted air for six hours a day, five days a week for 10 weeks beginning when the animals were 3 weeks old. This time frame roughly matches the toddler ...

A new study by researchers at the Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, is raising questions about the therapeutic use of botulinum toxin A. The study found that animals injected with Clostridium Botulinum type A neurotoxin complex (BOTOX, Allergan, Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada) experienced muscle weakness in muscles throughout the body, even though they were far removed from the injection site. The study also found that repeated injection induced muscle atrophy and loss of contractile tissue in the limb that was not injected with the Toxin. "We were surprised ...

A fascinating study published in the BMJ shows that although the French drink more than the Northern Irish each week, as they drink daily, rather than more on less occasions, the French suffered from considerably less coronary heart disease than the Northern Irish. Ruidavets and colleagues compared groups of middle aged men in France and Northern Ireland, who have very different drinking cultures and rates of heart disease.The authors found that men who "binge" drink (drink =50 g of alcohol once a week) had nearly twice the risk of myocardial infarction or death from coronary ...

For more than a decade, Dr. Joseph Ortiz, associate professor of geology at Kent State University and part of an international team of National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers, has been studying long-term climate variability associated with El Niño. The researchers' goal is to help climatologists better understand this global climate phenomenon that happens every two to eight years, impacting much of the world. El Niño is the periodic warming of central and eastern tropical Pacific waters. The last El Niño occurred in 2009, Ortiz said, and its impact was ...

From hotel-style room service to massage therapy to magnificent views, hospitals are increasingly touting their luxury services in a bid to gain market share, especially those in competitive urban markets. An important new article, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, raises crucial questions about the role of amenities in hospital care, explaining that how we decide to value the patient experience can have a significant effect on health care costs. "Though amenities have long been relevant to hospital competition, they seem to have increased in importance ...

Experiences with violence cause teens growing up in dangerous neighborhoods to adopt a range of coping strategies, with notable impact whether the violence takes place at home, among friends or during police incidents, a University of Chicago study shows. The responses to violence include seeking out non-violent friends, avoiding trouble, becoming resigned to the situation, striving to do well in school, or for some, retaliating physically, the authors said. "Exposure to community violence is pervasive among youth in many urban neighborhoods. We found in one study that ...

Perhaps you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but scientists are reporting progress in pulling off the same trick with the notoriously bland flavor of pork. They are reporting new insights into the biochemical differences in the meat of an Italian swine renowned for its good flavor since the ancient Roman Empire and the modern "Large White" or Yorkshire hog, whose roots date back barely 125 years. Their study appears in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research. Lello Zolla and colleagues note that modern lean pork's reputation as bland and tasteless — "the other white ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- There has been controversy about whether life originated in a hot or cold environment, and about whether enough time has elapsed for life to have evolved to its present complexity. But new research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill investigating the effect of temperature on extremely slow chemical reactions suggests that the time required for evolution on a warm earth is shorter than critics might expect. The findings are published in the Dec. 1, 2010, online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Enzymes, ...

A team of physicists from the University of Toronto and Rutgers University have mimicked the explosion of a supernova in miniature. A supernova is an exploding star. In a certain type of supernova, the detonation starts with a flame ball buried deep inside a white dwarf. The flame ball is much lighter than its surroundings, so it rises rapidly making a plume topped with an accelerating smoke ring. "We created a smaller version of this process by triggering a special chemical reaction in a closed container that generates similar plumes and vortex rings," says Stephen ...

Scientists are announcing development and successful testing of the first "perfumery radar (PR)." It's not a new electronic gadget for homing in on the source of that Eau de Givenchy or Jungle Tiger in a crowded room. Rather, PR is a long-awaited new tool for bringing scientific order to the often arbitrary process of classifying the hundreds of odors that make-up perfumes. A report on the advance appears in ACS' journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. Alírio Rodrigues and colleagues note that the typical perfume has 50-100 fragrant ingredients. Experts who ...

Scientists are proposing an international effort, on the scale of the Human Genome Project (HGP), to identify all the proteins present in cancer cells. HGP was the international scientific research project that identified and mapped all the genes in humans. Within a decade, they believe, results of the new effort could provide cancer patients with more effective treatments customized to their own biology. The perspective appears in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research. Cristobal Belda-Iniesta and colleagues point out that medicine already is moving toward individual treatments ...

People in a jetliner act and feel one way when crammed together like sardines in a can. But they have quite a different mindset when the middle seat is empty and they have more personal space. Scientists are pursuing a remarkable parallel that exists among the proteins involved in health and disease inside living cells. The cover story in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine, focuses on how the study of proteins crowded together inside cells is opening new doors to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. C&EN Senior ...