A multidisciplinary team of researchers from UCLA and India has found that a new type of intervention program, in which lay women in the rural Indian province of Andra Pradesh were trained as social health activists to assist women who have HIV/AIDS, significantly improved patients' adherence to antiretroviral therapy and boosted their immune-cell counts and nutrition levels.
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A new study by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame provides an important new insight into how cancer cells are able to avoid the cell death process. The findings may suggest a chemotherapeutic approach to prevent the spread of cancers.
HEIDELBERG, 21 June 2013 – Researchers in Berlin and Munich, Germany and Oxford, United Kingdom, have revealed that a protein well known for its role in Alzheimer's disease controls spindle development in muscle and leads to impaired movement in mice when the protein is absent or treated with inhibitors. The results, which are published in The EMBO Journal, suggest that drugs under development to target the beta-secretase-1 protein, which may be potential treatments for Alzheimer's disease, might produce unwanted side effects related to defective movement.
Scientists discovered a new species of burying beetle, Nicrophorus efferens. Burying beetles are well known to most naturalists because of their large size, striking black and red colors, and interesting reproductive behaviors - they bury small vertebrate carcasses which their offspring eat in an underground crypt, guarded by both parents. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys.
Twitter has become a visible player in the sport media industry and a recently published journal article illustrates how sports journalists' social network developed and enlarged over the beginning phases of the Jerry Sandusky saga.
Scientists have long known that seeds gobbled by birds and dispersed across the landscape tend to fare better than those that fall near parent plants where seed-hungry predators and pathogens are more concentrated.
Now it turns out it might not just be the trip through the air that's important, but also the inches-long trip through the bird.
STANFORD, Calif. — Men who are diagnosed as azoospermic — infertile because of an absence of sperm in their ejaculate — are more prone to developing cancer than the general population, a study led by a Stanford University School of Medicine urologist has found. And a diagnosis of azoospermia before age 30 carries an eight-fold cancer risk, the study says.
Taking iron daily during pregnancy is associated with a significant increase in birth weight and a reduction in risk of low birth weight, finds a study published on bmj.com today.
The effects were seen for iron doses up to 66 mg per day. The World Health Organization currently recommends a dose of 60 mg per day for pregnant women.
Both the UK and Canada have experienced huge falls in diabetes-related mortality since the mid-1990s, with the result that the gap in mortality risk between those with and without diabetes has narrowed substantially.
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half take two, Mayo Clinic and Olmsted Medical Center researchers say. Antibiotics, antidepressants and painkilling opioids are most commonly prescribed, their study found. Twenty percent of patients are on five or more prescription medications, according to the findings, published online in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Washington, DC (June 20, 2013) — While intravenous iron is critical for maintaining the health of many dialysis patients, administering large doses over a short period of time increases patients' risk of developing serious infections, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Smaller doses given for a longer period of time appears to be much safer.
Bacterial DNA may integrate into the human genome more readily in tumors than in normal human tissue, according to a new study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Institute for Genome Sciences. Researchers analyzed genomic sequencing data available from the Human Genome Project, the 1,000 Genomes Project and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). They considered the phenomenon of lateral gene transfer (LGT), the transmission of genetic material between organisms in the absence of sex.
MANHATTAN, Kan. -- As temperatures go up, bison get smaller.
Joseph Craine, research assistant professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University, examined how climate change during the next 50 years will affect grazing animals such as bison and cattle in the Great Plains. The study, "Long-term climate sensitivity of grazer performance: a cross-site study," was recently published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS ONE.
NEW YORK (June 20, 2013) -- The 9/11 attacks on America appear to have caused about one million former smokers across the country to take up the habit again and maintain it, according to a Weill Cornell Medical College public health study.
The analysis, published in the June 20 issue of the journal Contemporary Economic Policy, is the first to look at the net costs to society of terrorism-induced smoking in the United States after 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Memphis, Tenn. (June 20, 2013) – Inflammation in the kidney is a serious, common issue among adults and children in North America. Finding noninvasive ways to properly diagnose, monitor and treat the inflammation may be getting easier thanks to research by Robert J. Wyatt, MD, professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC). Dr. Wyatt is co-author of a Medical Progress report titled, "IgA Nephropathy" in this week's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. His co-author is Bruce A.