Culture

Depression affects more than one out of three survivors of critical illness, according to a Vanderbilt study released in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and the majority of patients experience their symptoms physically rather than mentally.

Fibroblasts, cells long thought to be boring and irrelevant, could offer an alternative to heart transplants for patients with heart disease.

Researcher Dr Milena Furtado, and her team from the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) at Monash University, found the heart cell fibroblast is a close relative to a cardiomyocyte, the cell responsible for a healthy beating heart.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a new ultrasound device that could help identify arterial plaque that is at high risk of breaking off and causing heart attack or stroke.

At issue is the plaque that builds up in arteries as we age. Some types of plaque are deemed "vulnerable," meaning that they are more likely to detach from the artery wall and cause heart attack or stroke.

Moffitt Cancer Center researchers say clinical trials for a new experimental drug to treat acute myeloid leukemia (AML) are very promising. Patients treated with CPX-351, a combination of the chemotherapeutic drugs cytarabine and daunorubicin, are showing better responses than patients treated with the standard drug formulation.

When the economy hits the skids, government stimulus checks to the poor sometimes follow.

Stimulus programs — such as those in 2001, 2008 and 2009 — are designed to boost the economy quickly by getting cash into the hands of people likely to turn around and spend it.

But sending cash to just the very poor may not be the right approach, according to researchers from Princeton University and New York University who analyzed information on the finances of U.S. households from 1989 to 2010.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Parents and physicians concerned about an increase in adolescents' marijuana use following the legalization of medical marijuana can breathe a sigh of relief. According to a new study at Rhode Island Hospital which compared 20 years worth of data from states with and without medical marijuana laws, legalizing the drug did not lead to increased use among adolescents. The study is published online in advance of print in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Lowland South America, including the Amazon Basin, harbors most of the last indigenous societies that have limited contact with the outside world. Studying these tribes, located deep within Amazonian rainforests, gives scientists a glimpse at what tribal cultures may have been like before the arrival of Europeans. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have used satellite images to assess the demographic health of one particular village of isolated people on the border between Brazil and Peru.