Body

A study in this week's PLoS Medicine shows that the replacement of dietary saturated fatty acids with polyunsaturated fatty acids reduces coronary heart disease events, bringing much needed scientific evidence to an issue debated by experts and clinical guidelines. Dariush Mozaffarian and colleagues from Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials studying the effects on coronary heart disease of increasing polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat.

Just like the rest of us, scientists today are swamped with information. As more chemical resources become freely available, text mining applications - previously focused on correctly identifying gene and protein names – are now shifting towards also correctly identifying chemical names. Now database experts have compared two chemical name dictionaries head to head, and report on the payoffs of manual versus automatic data curation in the open access publication, Journal of Cheminformatics.

ALEXANDRIA, VA – A physical therapy exercise and health education program is effective in improving postnatal well-being and reducing the risk for postnatal depression (PND), according to a randomized controlled trial published in the March issue of Physical Therapy, (PTJ) the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA).

It was still an open question in medicine. Whereas scientific research has shown beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption in healthy people, it was not clear whether this could be valid also for patients who already had heart attack, stroke or another ischemic vascular event.

OAK BROOK, Ill. – A new, large-scale study of more than 10,000 adults found that more than one in every 200 asymptomatic people screened with CT colonography, or virtual colonoscopy, had clinically unsuspected malignant cancer and more than half of the cancers were located outside the colon. The findings were published in the April issue of the journal Radiology.

OAK BROOK, Ill. – A new study published in the April issue of Radiology suggests that chest x-rays may play an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of H1N1 influenza by predicting which patients are likely to become sicker.

University of California, Davis, scientists are helping rice farmers in Uruguay stop polluting their waterways -- including drinking-water sources and a globally valuable nature reserve.

With funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health's Fogarty International Center, the UC Davis researchers helped Uruguayan university colleagues devise a simple water test that tells whether it is safe to drain flooded rice fields.

The test checks for the herbicide clomazone, which is used on 78 percent of Uruguay's rice fields.

Fairfield, Iowa USA - A leading scientific journal in Pakistan, The Journal of Management & Social Science,* recently published a paper titled "A New Role for the Military: Preventing Enemies from Arising-Reviving an Ancient Approach to Peace," indicating that the military application of the Transcendental Meditation technique has merit.

For women smokers worried about their weight, combining cognitive behavioral therapy addressing weight concerns with the medication bupropion appears more effective than counseling alone to help them quit smoking, according to a report in the March 22 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

An intensive program of surveillance, precautions, training and feedback in a large multihospital institution appears to be associated with reductions in rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) over a 15-year period, according to a report in the March 22 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Following eight recommendations — from using a simple weight check to using computerized medication orders — can help reduce medication errors among hospitalized heart and stroke patients, according to an American Heart Association scientific statement published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Whether caused by omission (failing to administer a drug, for example) or commission (giving a wrong drug), in-hospital errors contribute significantly to the estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths annually caused by medical errors.

Blacks hospitalized with the most common type of stroke are less likely than white or Hispanic patients to receive evidence-based stroke care, according to a new study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

But this disparity in care improved over time at hospitals participating in the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke quality improvement program, researchers said.

Palo Alto, CA—To engineer better, more productive crops and develop new drugs to combat disease, scientists look at how the sensor-laden membranes surrounding cells control nutrient and water uptake, secrete toxins, and interact with the environment and neighboring cells to affect growth and development. Remarkably little is known about how proteins interact with these protective structures.

Research into why people look favorably on a product shows that—as in real life—everything is relative. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, what we think of a product or brand, or how positively or negatively we assess it, depends on the context in which it is viewed.

When people acutely feel the need to belong, they may reach for a nostalgic treat, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"Have you ever wondered why it is that you are in the mood to watch an old episode of Friends, rather than your current favorite TV show? Or why you are suddenly craving an Otter Pop, a summery treat you haven't eaten since you were a kid?" ask authors Katherine E. Loveland (Arizona State University), Dirk Smeesters (Erasmus University, The Netherlands), and Naomi Mandel (Arizona State University).