The report by Jeanne Lenzer, a medical investigative journalist in New York, and Shannon Brownlee from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire, looks at the FDA's approval of a device to prevent or reduce seizures in patients with epilepsy who do not respond to drug treatment. The device, manufactured by Cyberonics, is implanted under the skin and sends electrical impulses to stimulate the vagus nerve in the neck. It was approved by the FDA in 1997 on the condition that Cyberonics carried out a post-approval study to examine the ...

In the UK, medical students are 4.5 to 7.2 times more likely to come from the wealthier socio-economic groups 1-3 than 4-7, write Professor Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and Lucy Stephenson, a medical student. Selection to a medical course should not depend on the applicants' financial status. However, with "grade inflation" at A level, choosing between applicants can involve other criteria that may depend on ability to pay, they say. They calculate that the activities required as part of the selection process ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Value-Based Insurance Design — a concept created at the University of Michigan and incorporated in the nation's new health care reform law — is the focus of an upcoming national policy journal. Health Affairs, the nation's premier health policy journal, is featuring a cluster of papers in its November issue about growing interest in and adoption of Value-Based Insurance Design (V-BID). The concept was first developed and named by U-M faculty A. Mark Fendrick, M.D., and Dean Smith, Ph.D., along with Michael Chernew, Ph.D., formerly of U-M and now at ...

Strengthening routine influenza vaccination and health programs may help states improve their vaccination coverage against future pandemics or other health emergencies, a new study suggests. The study -- conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- examined factors that may have contributed to the striking state-by-state variation in U.S. H1N1 flu vaccination rates. The results of the study were revealed on Oct. 26 at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision ...

The GOES-13 satellite keeps a continuous eye on the eastern half of the U.S. and Atlantic Ocean basin, and has provided meteorologists with an infrared look at a strengthening Tropical Storm Tomas this morning. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites like GOES-13 are managed by NOAA. The NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. creates images and animations from the GOES satellite data. When GOES-13 provided an infrared image (because it was taken at night) today, Nov. 2 at 0845 UTC (4:45 a.m. EDT), Tropical Storm Tomas ...

NJIT Associate Professor Victor Matveev, PhD, in the department of mathematical sciences, was part of a research team that published "N-type Ca2+ channels carry the largest current: Implications for nanodomains and transmitter release," in Nature Neuroscience on Oct. 17, 2010. http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n11/abs/nn.2657.html Leading the project, Elise Stanley, PhD, a senior scientist at the Toronto Western Research Institute, said that Matveev's mathematical modeling showed that calcium influx through a single N-type calcium channel is sufficient to trigger ...

Faster and more widely available internet access has improved our lives in many ways but healthcare is lagging behind, according to researchers writing in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics. The US team suggests that there is immense potential for the utilization of digitized personal health records (PHR) in chronic disease management. They have reviewed the state of the art in healthcare portals, assessed the standardization and the legality of health record s and point to a need to improve interoperability, which still represents a major ...

WHAT: Secondary infections with bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia, were a major cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic and may be important in modern pandemics as well, according to a new article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases co-authored by David M. Morens, M.D., senior advisor to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers examined 13 studies published between 1918 and 1920. During this time, many scientists erroneously believed that ...

Gastric bypass surgery decreases the preference for sweet-tasting substances in obese rats, a study finding that could help in developing safer treatments for the morbidly obese, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. "Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery is the most common effective treatment for morbid obesity," said Andras Hajnal, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Neural and Behavioral Science and Surgery. "Many patients report altered taste preferences after having the procedure." This surgery involves the creation of a small gastric ...

This year's Salary Survey saw drops in salaries across the board with almost every speciality suffering a setback, some with dips as large as $20,000 (ecology) and $28,000 (virology). However, a few select fields, namely bioinformatics, biophysics, biotechnology, and neuroscience, bucked the trend and actually posted salary increases this year. Whilst it is not easy to determine why these specialities saw salaries rise and others saw salaries cut, Mark Musen, head of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University commented: "I've noticed ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have learned the structure that results when an antibody binds to the West Nile virus, neutralizing the virus by locking up its infection mechanism. The information could help scientists develop a vaccine against the mosquito-borne disease. The findings show precisely how a key part of the antibody, called the antigen binding fragment, or Fab, attaches to two adjacent protein molecules that make up the virus's outer shell. This "crosslinking" attachment between molecules is repeated over the entire shell, interlocking the 30 molecular ...

Winston-Salem, N.C. – Researchers for the first time have shown that drinking beet juice can increase blood flow to the brain in older adults – a finding that could hold great potential for combating the progression of dementia. The research findings are available online in Nitric Oxide: Biology and Chemistry, the peer-reviewed journal of the Nitric Oxide Society and will be available in print soon. (Read the abstract.) "There have been several very high-profile studies showing that drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure, but we wanted to show that drinking beet ...

TORONTO, Ont., Nov. 2, 2010-Severely injured patients should be transported directly from the scene of an accident to a trauma center, even if it means bypassing a closer hospital, according to new research that shows this results in a nearly 25 per cent lower death rate. However, even though 80 to 85 per cent of people in North America live within a one-hour drive or flight of a trauma center, 30 to 60 per cent of severely injured patients are still taken to the nearest hospital. Researchers led by Dr. Avery Nathens, trauma director at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, ...

A study by the team headed by Lluís Ribas de Pouplana, ICREA professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), has been chosen as "Paper of the week" in the December issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which is already available online. The article describes the discovery of a new protein in the fly Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) that is crucial for mitochondria. The removal of SLIMP in these flies leads to aberrant mitochondria and loss of metabolic capacity, thus causing death. The study, whose first author is Tanit Guitart, a PhD ...

A University of Toronto study shows that visual attention -- the brain's ability to selectively filter unattended or unwanted information from reaching awareness -- diminishes with age, leaving older adults less capable of filtering out distracting or irrelevant information. Further, this age-related "leaky" attentional filter fundamentally impacts the way visual information is encoded into memory. Older adults with impaired visual attention have better memory for "irrelevant" information. The research, conducted by members of U of T's Department of Psychology, will ...

Canadians who work night and rotating shifts are almost twice as likely to be injured on the job than those working regular day shifts, according to a study by researchers at the University of British Columbia. The study, published in the current issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health, examined data on more than 30,000 Canadians collected as part of Statistics Canada's Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics and compared results between workers involved in different types of shift work from 1996-2006. It shows that while the overall rate of work ...

Every person emits the equivalent of approximately two tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the time food is produced to when the human body excretes it, representing more than 20% of total yearly emissions. That is what a study by the Universidad de Almería says, confirming for the first time that human excrements contribute to water pollution, primarily with nitrogen and phosphorus. A team of researchers from the Universidad de Almería (UAL) has estimated the environmental impact of the Spanish diet and role that human excrements play in the life cycle of food. It is ...

A new report from the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) in Berkeley projects that development of cost-competitive algae biofuel production will require much more long-term research, development and demonstration. In the meantime, several non-fuel applications of algae could serve to advance the nascent industry. "Even with relatively favorable and forward-looking process assumptions (from cultivation to harvesting to processing), algae oil production with microalgae cultures will be expensive and, at least in the near-to-mid-term, will require additional income streams ...

Amsterdam, 2 November, 2010 - An investigation conducted in the context of the Swiss National Research Programme (NRP50), Endocrine Disrupters: Relevance to Humans, Animals and Ecosystems, demonstrates for the first time that internal exposure of humans to cosmetic UV filters is widespread. In the course of the Summer and Fall 2004, 2005 and 2006 (3 cohorts), human milk was sampled by mothers who had given birth at the University Women's Hospital in Basel. The participants filled out a detailed questionnaire with general questions and, as special feature, in depth questions ...

Over the past decade, the undersea robots known as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have become increasingly important in oceanographic research. Today's AUVs fall into two groups: 1) propeller-driven vehicles that can travel fast and carry lots of instruments, but are limited to expeditions of only a few days; and 2) "gliders," which can stay at sea for weeks or even months at a time, but cannot travel very quickly. MBARI engineers recently demonstrated a new super-efficient AUV that combines the best of these two approaches. This new long-range AUV (LRAUV) can travel ...

The November issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings includes three articles with leading research, highlighted below. Khat Chewing Increases Risk of Stroke and Death in Patients With Acute Coronary Syndrome ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Researchers found that people who chew khat and present with acute coronary syndrome had significantly higher rates of death, cardiogenic stroke, and stroke complications, despite having lower cardiovascular risk profiles. "The leaves of khat, a leafy green shrub, are chewed habitually for euphoric and stimulating effects. The main ingredients, ...

Note to journalists: Please credit the journal or the American Chemical Society as publisher of this report. WASHINGTON, Nov. 2, 2010 — For the first time in the United States, researchers are reporting in a peer-reviewed scientific journal today detection of Bisphenol A (BPA) in fresh and canned food as well as food wrapped in plastic packaging. The amounts in the limited sample, however, were almost 1,000 times lower than the "tolerable daily intake" levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Their report ...

A team of scientists from Japan and the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have created a new mouse model that confirms that mutations of a protein called beta-synuclein promote neurodegeneration. The discovery creates a potential new target for developing treatments of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. The work is published in today's issue of Nature Communications. Lead author is Makoto Hashimoto of the Division of Chemistry and Metabolism, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience, with colleagues including Eliezer Masliah, MD, professor ...

A Spontaneous Self-Reference Effect in Memory: Why Some Birthdays Are Harder to Remember Than Others (http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/10/1525.abstract) Selin Kesebir and Shigehiro Oishi People may have a better memory for birthdays that are closer to their own: Volunteers recalling their friends' birthdays tended to remember birthdays that were closer to their own than birthdays that were farther away from their own birthday. In a separate experiment, after reading brief biographies of people they did not know, volunteers correctly remembered the birthdays of the ...

In an article published in November 3 edition of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Chad Boult, MD, MPH, MBA, professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, calls for key improvements to primary care in order to improve the health of the nation's most costly patients—older adults with multiple chronic conditions. Boult and his co-author, G. Darryl Wieland, PhD, MPH, research director of Geriatrics Services at Palmetto Health Richland Hospital, Columbia, South Carolina, evaluated studies of new primary care ...