Body

Poor diet, too much alcohol, smoking and increasing obesity could be leading to an epidemic of oesophageal and upper stomach cancer, according to a leading UK team of specialists at The University of Nottingham and Nottingham University Hospitals.

Do nice guys finish last, or will the meek inherit the earth? A new study published in The American Naturalist suggests that, at least for birds, the right answer is somewhere in between.

Individual male birds can differ dramatically in their behavior, and this difference is often due in part to how much testosterone they produce. In many species, some males produce high testosterone and are more aggressive, while others produce lower levels and are more parental.

Vaccinating infants against rotavirus, a leading cause of severe diarrhea and dehydration among babies and young children, was associated with a dramatic decline in U.S. hospitalization rates for acute gastroenteritis. The findings appear in a study, now available online (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/652403), published in the June 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disease resulted from, either decreased production of insulin or increased resistance to it from peripheral tissues or both factors combined together. While medical treatment remains the mainstay of treatment for diabetes, some surgical procedures, such as Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, have demonstrated some potential to be a treatment option for diabetes.

Washington, DC – Researchers at Georgetown Lombard Comprehensive Cancer Center have been able to show, in mice, how just a little adjustment in the expression of two common genes can promote the kind of cellular changes that led to breast cancer. They say these tweaks likely mimic natural variation women have in expression of the two genes.

Hospital doctors who are frequently interrupted while working in a clinical environment spend less time on tasks and fail to return to almost a fifth of their jobs in hand, reveals research published ahead of print in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care.

Hospital environments are known for being busy areas with many interruptions and multi-tasking by staff and there are concerns that these can introduce potential for clinical errors to be made.

Infants who receive sweet solutions before being immunised experience less pain and are more comfortable, reveals research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Healthcare professionals should consider giving infants aged 1-12 months a sweet solution of sucrose or glucose before immunising a child, the international team of researchers recommended, because of the child's improved reaction to injections.

Vitamin A is critical to maternal health and child survival, yet in most developing countries Vitamin A deficiency is a leading cause of blindness and increased child mortality. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has long been a leader in vitamin A research, and scientists at the School recently discovered a link between offspring lung function and maternal vitamin A supplementation. The results are published in the May 13, 2010, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Researchers studying the common genetic disorder chromosome 22q.11 deletion syndrome have identified key proteins that act together to regulate early embryonic development. One protein is essential to life; in animal studies, embryos without the protein do not survive past the first few days of gestation.

A study forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy suggests that government regulation of nurses' pay leads to higher death rates in U.K. hospitals.

URBANA – Is breast milk so different from infant formula? The ability to track which genes are operating in an infant's intestine has allowed University of Illinois scientists to compare the early development of breast-fed and formula-fed babies. They say the difference is very real.

Biological differences between the sexes could be a significant predictor of responses to vaccines, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They examined published data from numerous adult and child vaccine trials and found that sex is a fundamental, but often overlooked predictor of vaccine response that could help predict the efficacy of combating infectious disease. The review is featured in the May 2010 issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

A simple, 10-minute "frailty" test administered to older patients before they undergo surgery can predict with great certainty their risk for complications, how long they will stay in the hospital and — most strikingly — whether they are likely to end up in a nursing home afterward, new research from Johns Hopkins suggests.