About The Study: Among people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) at high risk of exacerbation, treatment with the β1-selective β-blocker bisoprolol did not reduce the number of self-reported COPD exacerbations requiring treatment with oral corticosteroids, antibiotics, or both. Quote from corresponding author Graham Devereux, M.D.: “People with COPD are at increased risk of cardiovascular conditions that benefit from treatment with beta-blockers. However, there is a well-documented ...

About The Study: Among patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis treated with pamrevlumab (a fully human monoclonal antibody that binds to and inhibits connective tissue growth factor activity) or placebo, there was no statistically significant between-group difference for the primary outcome of absolute change in forced vital capacity from baseline to week 48.  Quote from corresponding author, Ganesh Raghu, M.D.: “Current treatment with the two drugs approved by regulatory agencies ...

About The Study: In critically ill sepsis patients, treatment with intravenous acetaminophen for 5 days was safe but did not improve the primary end point of days alive and free of any organ support (dialysis, assisted ventilation, and vasopressors) to day 28 compared with placebo.   Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Lorraine B. Ware, M.D., email Lorraine.ware@vumc.org. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2024.8772) Editor’s Note: Please see the ...

Removing race from equations that estimate lung function will shift the categorization of disease severity across patient populations, moving more Black individuals into an advanced disease category, according to new research led by scientists at Harvard Medical School. At the same time, more white and Hispanic people would be reclassified as having less advanced illness. The findings, the research team said, suggest that adjusting lung function tests to include race — as has been the case historically — likely normalized worse lung function and downplayed disease severity among Black people. The work, to be published May 19 in the New England Journal ...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common form of arrythmia or irregular heartbeat worldwide, impacting millions of people in the U.S. alone. In a new study published in Heart Rhythm,  researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, analyzed real-world clinical data to measure the impact of evidence-based best-practices on patient outcomes for the most common AF procedure: radiofrequency (RF)-based ablation. One year after the procedure, 81.6 percent ...

Wireless implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) eliminate the lead-related complications that come with a wired ICD, but they are unsuitable for patients with ventricular tachycardia, when the heart beats too quickly, or bradycardia, when the resting heart rate is seen as low. Research led by Amsterdam UMC, that is published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that the first wireless modular system suitable for these patient groups is safe and exceeds performance expectations. Opening the door for a wider ...

WASHINGTON, DC (May 18, 2024) — Patients seen by a female gastroenterologist for an initial consultation are less likely to use medical care in the emergency department, hospital or primary care office for two years after their visit when compared to patients initially seen by male gastroenterologists, according to a study to be presented at Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) 2024. “If there really is something different about the way female and male gastroenterologists provide care that impacts patient outcomes, it will be important to share these learnings broadly among health care providers ...

The future of optical communications just got brighter. In a groundbreaking development reported in Advanced Photonics, researchers from Nanjing University have introduced iso-propagation vortices (IPVs), a novel concept that offers a solution to a long-standing challenge faced by scientists and engineers: how to increase information processing capacity while overcoming the limitations of traditional vortex beams. Challenge: divergence and beam size Multiplexing of optical degrees of freedom, such as polarization and wavelength, has been a staple in enhancing communication capacity. ...

On a cold winter night in 2016, Ukrainians experienced the first-ever known blackout caused by malicious code (malware) designed to autonomously attack the power grid. One-fifth of Kyiv’s citizens were plunged into darkness as attackers used malware to target the capital city’s power grid. Six years later, in the early months of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, a second attack attempted to combine kinetic and cyber attacks to take down Ukraine’s power grid. Malware attacks against physical ...

“Practice makes perfect” is no mere cliché, according to a new study from researchers at The Rockefeller University and UCLA. Instead, it’s the recipe for mastering a task, because repeating an activity over and over solidifies neural pathways in your brain. As they describe in Nature, the scientists used a cutting-edge technology developed by Rockefeller’s Alipasha Vaziri to simultaneously observe 73,000 cortical neurons in mice as the animals learned and repeated a given task over two weeks. The study revealed that memory representations transform from unstable to solid in ...

New initiative, launched on World NF Awareness Day, focuses on developing improved models to understand neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) with the goal of rapidly testing new treatments. 18 grants will be provided to leading medical research institutions in the United States and Europe. The Next-Generation NF1 Models Initiative is the Foundation’s fourth research initiative focused on accelerating a cure for neurofibromatosis. DETROIT, May 17, 2024 – Gilbert Family Foundation, a private foundation established by Dan and Jennifer Gilbert to accelerate a cure for ...

About The Study: This study found that BRCA1-associated protein (BAP1) tumor predisposition syndrome was associated with a high rate of nail abnormalities consistent with onychopapillomas (a benign tumor of the nail) in adult carriers of the disease. Findings suggest that this novel cutaneous sign may facilitate detection of the syndrome in family members who are at risk and patients with cancers associated with BAP1 given that multiple onychopapillomas are uncommon in the general population and may be a distinct clue to the presence of a pathogenic germline variant in the BAP1 gene. Corresponding Authors: To contact the corresponding authors, ...

The silver chub isn’t considered sensitive to climate change on a national scale, but context matters. For example, if climate change sensitivity is evaluated in only one region of the United States, the freshwater fish appears quite a bit more susceptible.  “Relative to other species we looked at in the gulf region of the U.S., the silver chub occupied a pretty small geographic area,” said Samuel Silknetter, a Ph.D. student in biological sciences. “If we didn’t look at the climate sensitivity across multiple ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 16, 2024) – The rich research portfolio of the Monell Chemical Senses Center on sweet taste goes way back: Monell scientists were one of four teams in 2001 that found and described the mammalian sweet taste receptor – TAS1R2-TAS1R3. Twenty years later in 2021, a pair of papers published in Mammalian Genome by Monell researchers covered the genetics of sugar-loving mice. The sweet taste receptor, expressed in taste bud cells, conveys sweetness from the mouth when it is activated. Earlier this month, a study in PLOS One, led by another Monell researcher, delved into how the sweet-taste receptor might be the first stop ...

The Science Scientists have the first direct evidence that the powerful magnetic fields created in off-center collisions of atomic nuclei induce an electric current in “deconfined” nuclear matter. This is a plasma “soup” of quarks and gluons that have been set free, or “deconfined,” from nuclear matter—protons and neutrons—in the particle collisions. The magnetic fields in deconfined nuclear matter are a billion times stronger than a typical refrigerator magnet, but their effects can be hard to detect. This new study’s evidence is from measuring the way ...

In recognition of her exceptional work in advancing health equity, the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) bestowed its 2024 Herbert W. Nickens Award to Rita Lee, MD, a University of Colorado Department of Medicine faculty member, at a May 17 meeting in Boston. “The committee has chosen to honor you as an exemplary SGIM member who has made prioritizing minority health and diversity the primary focus of your career,” Alana Biggers, MD, MPH, the chair of the award selection committee, said in a congratulatory letter to Lee. The ...

A lack of detailed record-keeping in clinics and emergency departments may be getting in the way of reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics, a pair of new studies by a pair of University of Michigan physicians and their colleagues suggests. In one of the studies, about 10% of children and 35% of adults who got an antibiotic prescription during an office visit had no specific reason for the antibiotic in their record. The rate of this type of prescribing is especially high in adults treated seen in emergency departments and in adults seen in clinics who have Medicaid coverage or no insurance, the ...

Key Takeaways Immune thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, a rare blood clotting disorder, results from an autoimmune attack against an enzyme called ADAMTS13 A recombinant form of human ADAMTS13 approved for a different condition helped to save the life of a young mother with immune thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura Results from this first use of the drug for this condition—by a team led by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital—warrants testing the drug in a clinical trial A team led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, used a new drug to save the life of a patient ...

WHAT: A new study of prion diseases, using a human cerebral organoid model, suggests there is a substantial species barrier preventing transmission of chronic wasting disease (CWD) from cervids—deer, elk and moose—to people. The findings, from National Institutes of Health scientists and published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, are consistent with decades of similar research in animal models at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Prion diseases are degenerative diseases found in some mammals. These diseases primarily involve deterioration of the brain but also can affect the eyes and other organs. ...

UPTON, N.Y. — Proteins are molecular machines, with flexible pieces and moving parts. Understanding how these parts move helps scientists unravel the function a protein plays in living things — and potentially how to change its effects. Biochemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and colleagues at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have just published a new example of how one such molecular machine works. Their paper in the journal Science Advances describes how the moving parts of ...

A Cleveland Clinic-led team of scientists and physicians have discovered that the immune checkpoint protein VISTA can directly turn off tumor-fighting T-cells during immunotherapy and resist treatment.   The study, published in Science Immunology, explains that VISTA can bind to a protein called LRIG1 in T cells, which was previously only thought to promote bone and fat development. When VISTA binds to LRIG1, the researchers found, LRIG1 sends signals that suppress T cell replication, survival ...

Horses crossed the Baltic Sea in ships during the Late Viking Age and were sacrificed for funeral rituals, according to research from Cardiff University. Published in the journal Science Advances, studies on the remains of horses found at ancient burial sites in Russia and Lithuania show that they were brought overseas from Scandinavia utilising expansive trade networks connecting the Viking world with the Byzantine and Arab Empires. Up to now, researchers had believed sacrificial horses were always locally-sourced stallions. ...

Researchers at the University of Bristol have made an important breakthrough in scaling quantum technology by integrating the world’s tiniest quantum light detector onto a silicon chip. A critical moment in unlocking the information age was when scientists and engineers were first able to miniaturise transistors onto cheap micro-chips in the 1960s. Now, for the first time, University of Bristol academics have demonstrated the integration of a quantum light detector – smaller than a human hair – onto a silicon chip, moving us one step closer to the age of quantum technologies using light. Making high performance electronics ...

Roughly one in five cancer patients benefits from immunotherapy – a treatment that harnesses the immune system to fight cancer. Such an approach to beating cancer has seen significant success in lung cancer and melanoma, among others. Optimistic about its potential, researchers are exploring strategies to improve immunotherapy for cancers that don’t respond well to the treatment, with the hope of benefiting more patients. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found, in ...

The basis of the marine food web in the Arctic, the phytoplankton, responds to heatwaves much differently than to constantly elevated temperatures. This has been found by the first targeted experiments on the topic, which were recently conducted at the Alfred Wegener Institute’s AWIPEV Station. The phytoplankton’s behaviour primarily depends on the cooling phases after or between heatwaves, as shown in a study just released in the journal Science Advances. Heatwaves, which we’ve increasingly seen around the globe in recent years, are also becoming more and ...