Body

LOS ANGELES (Oct. 6, 2010) – Cardiac imaging researchers at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute are recommending that physicians not overlook fatty deposits around the heart when evaluating patients for risk of major heart problems.

Although abdominal fat is often considered in making these assessments, recent research suggests that measuring fatty tissue around the heart is an even better predictor, and noninvasive CT scanning may provide this important information.

"We found a significant relationship between bacterial infections and acute asthma attacks - above and beyond the expected relationship between viral infections and attacks," says Hans Bisgaard, a professor of paediatrics at the DPAC.

The study examined 361 children between the ages of four weeks and three years to determine the presence of viral and bacterial infections during severe asthma attacks. The results conclude that the number of attacks was just as high in children with bacterial respiratory infections as in those with viral infections.

Common frog (Rana temporaria) populations across the UK are suffering dramatic population crashes due to infection from the emerging disease Ranavirus, reveals research published in the Zoological Society of London's (ZSL) journal Animal Conservation.

Using data collected from the public by the Frog Mortality Project and Froglife, scientists from ZSL found that, on average, infected frog populations experienced an 81 per cent decline in adult frogs over a 12 year period.

LONDON – (07 October 2010) – To mark World Menopause Day on 18th October 2010, the International Menopause Society (IMS) is launching new Recommendations for the management of postmenopausal vaginal atrophy, a distressing condition that will affect up to half of women after menopause. This new guidance is essential as, according to new research, one in two women with vaginal atrophy (VA) will live with their condition unnecessarily for over three years, despite effective treatments being available.

PHILADELPHIA — Researchers at Kaiser Permanente have found that patients with a very early form of breast cancer (ductal carcinoma in situ or DCIS) who have higher mammographic density may be at increased risk for subsequent breast cancer, especially in the breast opposite to the one with the initial cancer.

These study results are published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

An immune reaction to dystrophin, the muscle protein that is defective in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, may pose a new challenge to strengthening muscles of patients with this disease, suggests a new study appearing in the October 7, 2010, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

DALLAS – Oct. 7, 2010 – Keeping blood pressure at a low level in African-Americans with kidney disease may slow the progression of the condition in patients with proteinuria, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers found in a national study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

A new study from North Carolina State University finds that fish located near coal-fired power plants have lower levels of mercury than fish that live much further away but that appears to be linked to high levels of another chemical, selenium, near such facilities, which poses problems of its own.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The discovery of a hormone acting like molecular glue could hold a key to bolstering plant immune systems and understanding how plants cope with environmental stress.

The study, which is featured in the Oct. 6 issue of Nature, reveals how the plant hormone jasmonate binds two proteins together – an emerging new concept in hormone biology and protein chemistry. The study also identifies the receptor's crystal structure to provide the first molecular view of how plants ward off attacks by insects and pathogens.

Patients who cannot discuss their diabetes with a doctor in their own language may have poorer health outcomes, even when interpreter services are available, according to a new study by researchers at UCSF and the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

The study found that, among Latino diabetes patients with limited English skills, those seen by non-Spanish speaking doctors were nearly twice as likely to have poor control of their blood sugar than those whose doctors spoke Spanish.

Forty-three percent of patients scheduled to undergo orthopaedic surgery have insufficient levels of vitamin D and two out of five of those patients had levels low enough to place them at risk for metabolic bone disease, according to a study published this month in the October 6th issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS).

Scientists have discovered a mechanism which raises blood pressure in pre-eclampsia, a potentially deadly condition which occurs during pregnancy.

After 20 years of research, scientists from the University of Cambridge have now cracked the first step in the main process that controls blood pressure. Their findings, published today in the journal Nature, are likely to have significant implications for the treatment of pre-eclampsia as well as high blood pressure (also known as hypertension).

An exciting collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham has resulted in new insights into the hypertension that frequently blights pregnancy.

The results, published in the journal Nature [online 6th October], describe the solving of the first step in the principal process that controls blood pressure — the release of the hormone angiotensin from its source protein, angiotensinogen.