(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — In an unanticipated finding, researchers at the UC Davis School of Medicine have discovered that, during early adulthood, the brain produces new excitatory neurons, and that these neurons arise from non-neuronal support cells in an area of the brain that processes smell. The study, conducted in mice, is the first to demonstrate that pyramidal neurons in the mature brain stem are generated by precursors of glial cells — non-neuronal support cells — and that these new neurons likely are capable of transmitting information to widespread regions of ...

The widespread use of a simplified clinical tool to estimate future coronary risk could lead to the classification of millions of Americans into different risk groups than when using the original, "gold-standard" tool. Millions of patients may have been misclassified into higher-risk groups and therefore potentially over-treated, while others may have ended up in lower-risk groups and therefore potentially under-treated for heart disease. The study¹, led by William Gordon from Weill Cornell Medical College in the US and colleagues, is published in the Journal of General ...

A method that is widely used to predict the risk of a major coronary event may over- or underestimate risk for millions of Americans, according to a study directed by a researcher at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco. The method in question is the simplified version of the so-called Framingham model, which is used to estimate a patient's 10-year risk of a heart attack, stroke, or other coronary event based on risk factors such as age, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and smoking. National guidelines recommend using ...

Rosemont, Ill. – The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) recently approved and released an evidence-based clinical practice guideline on the diagnosis of periprosthetic joint infections of the hip and knee. Clinical practice guidelines are one avenue the Academy uses to ensure that patients receive high quality care. A periprosthetic joint infection occurs when bacteria or other foreign organisms enter the wound during or at any point following joint replacement surgery, sometimes even years after surgery. An infection can cause the joint to be painful or cause ...

The complex fracture pattern created by the earthquake in Concepción (Chile) on 27 February 2010 was to a certain extent predictable. GPS observations from the years before the earthquake showed the pattern of stresses that had accumulated through the plate movements during the past 175 years in this area. The stress distribution derived from the observations correlates highly with the subsequent fracture distribution. In all likelihood the tremor removed all the stress that had accumulated since the last earthquake in this region, which was observed by Charles Darwin in ...

Health and social services are facing a new challenge, as many illicit drug users get older and face chronic health problems and a reduced quality of life. That is one of the key findings of research published in the September issue of the Journal of Advanced Nursing. UK researchers interviewed eleven people aged 49 to 61 in contact with voluntary sector drug treatment services. "This exploratory study, together with our wider research, suggest that older people who continue to use problematic or illegal drugs are emerging as an important, but relatively under-researched, ...

New research into how music conveys emotion could benefit the treatment of depression and the management of physical pain. Using an innovative combination of music psychology and leading-edge audio engineering the project is looking in more detail than ever before at how music conveys emotion. The project, at Glasgow Caledonian University is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The research could lead to advances in the use of music to help regulate a person's mood, and promote the development of music-based therapies to tackle ...

Milan, 9 September, 2010 – In our dynamic 3D world, we can encounter a familiar face from any angle and still recognize that face with ease, even if the person has, for example, changed his hair style. This is because our brain has used the 2D snapshots perceived by our eyes (like a camera) to build and store a 3D mental representation of the face, which is resilient to such changes. This is an automatic process that most of us are not consciously aware of, and which appears to be a challenge for people with a particular type of face-blindness, as reported in the September ...

Milan, 9 September 2010 – The human brain is a powerful simulation machine. Sports professionals and amateurs alike are well aware of the advantages of mentally rehearsing a movement prior to its execution and it is not surprising that the phenomenon, known as motor imagery, has already been extensively investigated. However, a new study published in the September 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex) suggests that there may be more to motor imagery than previously thought. A group of neuroscientists in Italy have shown that the brain is ...

A new study¹ looking at the effects of the 2006 Massachusetts Health Reform on access to care, health status and ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in healthcare, shows that the legislation has led to improvements in insurance coverage as well as a decline in financial barriers to care. However, to date, it has not increased people's access to a personal physician or improved their self-rated health. Neither has it reduced healthcare inequalities between ethnic or income groups. The research by Jane Zhu from Harvard Medical School and team suggests that health reform ...

Philadelphia, PA, 9 September, 2010 - There is new evidence that people can learn to control the activity of some brain regions when they get feedback signals provided by functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI). Dr. Andrea Caria and colleagues used this specialized imaging technique during training sessions in three groups of healthy participants who were asked to assess visual emotional stimuli (negative or neutral pictures). The scientists were interested in the signals generated by the insula, a brain region implicated in emotion regulation. While performing ...

PITTSBURGH—Computer vision systems can struggle to make sense of a single image, but a new method devised by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University enables computers to gain a deeper understanding of an image by reasoning about the physical constraints of the scene. In much the same way that a child might use a set of toy building blocks to assemble something that looks like a building depicted on the cover of the toy set, the computer would analyze an outdoor scene by using virtual blocks to build a three-dimensional approximation of the image that makes sense ...

Chevy Chase, MD—High levels of the stress hormone cortisol strongly predict cardiovascular death among both persons with and without pre-existing cardiovascular disease according to a new study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). In stressful situations, the body responds by producing the hormone cortisol. The effects of cortisol are intended to help the body recover from stress and regain a status of homeostasis, however chronically elevated cortisol levels have been associated with cardiovascular ...

Chevy Chase, MD—Many people have experienced the frustration that comes with regaining weight that was lost from dieting. According to a new study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM), the levels of appetite hormones in the body prior to dieting may serve as a predictor of weight regain after dieting. "Treating obesity with drugs or dietary programs can be very effective in the short-term, but the long-term success of maintaining the weight lost is usually poor," said Ana Crujeiras, PhD, of Compejo Hospitalario ...

September 9, 2010 – Malaria remains a serious global health problem, killing more than one million people per year. Treatment of the mosquito-borne illness relies on antibiotics, and the emergence of drug-resistant malaria is of growing concern. In a report published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), scientists analyzed the genomic features of a Peruvian parasite population, identifying the genetic basis for resistance to a common antibiotic and gaining new insights that could improve the efficacy of diagnosis and treatment strategies. The World Health ...

STANFORD, Calif. - Stanford University researchers have developed a revolutionary, non-invasive way of quickly predicting the future health of premature infants, an innovation that could better target specialized medical intervention and reduce health-care costs. "What the PhysiScore does is open a new frontier," said Anna Penn, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and a neonatologist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. "The national push toward electronic medical records helped us create a tool to detect patterns not readily ...

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have identified two genes whose mutations appear to be linked to ovarian clear cell carcinoma, one of the most aggressive forms of ovarian cancer. Clear cell carcinoma is generally resistant to standard therapy. In an article published online in the September 8 issue of Science Express, the researchers report that they found an average of 20 mutated genes per each ovarian clear cell cancer studied. Two of the genes were more commonly mutated among the samples: ARID1A, a gene whose product normally suppresses tumors; ...

Athens, GA—A new University of Georgia study published in the journal Nature has identified a critical enzyme that keeps traffic flowing in the right direction in the nervous system, and the finding could eventually lead to new treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. "There was no medical or any other applied science drive for this project; it was purely curiosity about how transport inside cells works," said study co-author Jacek Gaertig, professor in the cellular biology department in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. "But ...

New York, NY (September 8, 2010) – Dendritic cells are the grand sentinels of the immune system, standing guard 24/7 to detect foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and bring news of the invasion to other immune cells to marshal an attack. These sentinels, however, nearly always fail to respond adequately to HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Now a team of scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center has discovered a sensor in dendritic cells that recognizes HIV, spurring a more potent immune response by the sentinels to the virus. They report their findings in the September ...

Household dust contains up to 1000 different species of microbes, with tens of millions of individual bacterial cells in each gram. And these are just the ones that can be grown in the lab! Dr Helena Rintala, speaking at the Society for General Microbiology's autumn meeting in Nottingham describes how we share our living and working spaces with millions of microbes, not all of whom are bad news. Microbes are a part of our normal environment and can be both beneficial and detrimental to our health. "Exposure to microbes in childhood can prevent the development of allergies. ...

Yeast could be a powerful ally in the discovery of new therapeutic drugs to treat Parkinson's disease says a scientist presenting his work at the Society for General Microbiology's autumn meeting in Nottingham today. Dr Tiago Fleming Outeiro from the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon, Portugal describes how his group is slowly uncovering the molecular basis of Parkinson's disease by studying the associated human protein in yeast cells. Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder without any known cure that affects around 6 million people worldwide. The ...

In the latest issue of the journal Nature, Miguel Godinho Ferreira, Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) in Portugal, lead a team of researchers to shed light on a paradox that has puzzled biologists since the discovery of telomeres, the protective tips of chromosomes: while broken chromosome ends generated by DNA damage (such as radiation or cigarette smoke) are quickly joined together, telomeres are never tied to each other, thus allowing for the correct segregation of the genetic material into all cells in our body. Since telomeres erode ...

Male bedbugs are known to be very unfussy when it comes to mating, mounting any well-fed bug they can see - regardless of age or gender. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology have discovered how immature bedbug nymphs, who would be harmed by the traumatic insemination technique practiced by the males, release alarm pheromones to deter this unwanted attention. Vincent Harraca, from Lund University, Sweden, worked with a team of researchers to stage encounters between males and females or nymphs. He said, "The chemical communication, as well as the ...

By studying similarities in the genes of Scots Pine trees, scientists have shown that the iconic pine forests of Highland Scotland still carry the traces of the ancestors that colonised Britain after the end of the last Ice Age, harbouring genetic variation that could help regenerate future populations, according to new results published in the journal Heredity. The research was carried out by an international team from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Edinburgh and the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute. Today's ...

As the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned. But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the north, Antarctica was heating up. For the two decades since ice core records revealed that Europe was cooling at the same time Antarctica was warming over this thousand-year period, scientists have looked for an explanation. A new study in Nature brings them a step closer by establishing that New Zealand was also warming, indicating that the deep freeze up north, ...