Body

A placebo-controlled trial may provide a strategy for improving fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) for patients with recurrent Clostridium difficile infection. The study identified microorganisms that are key for cure with fecal microbiota transplantation.

African-American women who have never smoked have a high prevalence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) -7 percent versus 5.2% of European-American womenand 2.9% of never-smoking European-American men.

Researchers are scrambling to explain it because COPD is the third leading cause of death in the USA and smoking is considered the biggest risk factor for the disease. Yet 25 percent of Americans with COPD have never smoked.

Smoking causes increased relative risks for coronary heart disease, so the number of cigarettes must also. If you smoke twice as many cigarettes, your risk should be twice as high, right? 

A new study instead says it's time spent smoking, not quantity of cigarettes. 

Using human immune cells, researchers report they have identified a critical cellular "off" switch for the inflammatory immune response that contributes to lung-constricting asthma attacks. The switch, they say, is composed of regulatory proteins that control an immune signaling pathway in cells.

Data from 73,147 women involved in the Nurses' Health Study between 1984 and 2012, and 42,635 men who were in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study between 1986 and 2010, correlates saturated fats in red meat, dairy, butter, lard, and palm oil, may increase the risk of coronary heart disease.

Based on measurements of radioactivity in samples of infant formula manufactured and sold around the world, researchers estimate that infants 1 year of age or younger who consume these formulas would ingest a significantly higher radioactivity dose than reported levels, but lower than internationally recommended limits.

Research from Indiana University has found that sexual activity triggers physiological changes in the body that increase a woman's chances of getting pregnant, even outside the window of ovulation.

The results could eventually influence recommendations regarding how often to engage in sexual intercourse for couples trying to get pregnant. It could also potentially impact treatment for people with autoimmune disorders.

The conclusions are reported in papers recently published in the journal Fertility and Sterility and the journal Physiology and Behavior.

Younger marijuana users were twice as likely as non-users to experience stress cardiomyopathy, a sudden, usually temporary, weakening of the heart muscle that occurs more commonly in older women.If you use marijuana and experience chest pain or shortness of breath, seek medical help to rule out this infrequent but serious condition.

Stress cardiomyopathy is a sudden, usually temporary, weakening of the heart muscle that reduces the heart's ability to pump, leading to chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness and sometimes fainting.

Long-term exposure to the combination of even modestly lower LDL cholesterol (LDL-C) and systolic blood pressure (SBP) has the potential to "dramatically reduce" a person's lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease, according to new findings reported at ESC Congress 2016.

One in six women (17 percent) diagnosed with breast cancer go to their doctor with a symptom other than a lump - the most commonly reported breast cancer symptom - according to data from 2009/10 National Audit of Cancer Diagnosis in Primary Care presented at the 2016 National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer conference in Liverpool. There are more than 53,600 breast cancers diagnosed in the UK every year and 11,400 deaths from the disease annually.

Vitamin D levels have been linked to an increased risk of bladder cancer - but the source is a systematic review of just seven studies, so no one outside mainstream media and supplement salespeople promote panic about it.

Pigs are a main livestock species for food production worldwide and is also widely used as an animal model in biomedical research. Today we know that the many types of bacteria that inhabit the gut are important for health and disease. Knowledge of the genes of these bacteria and their function therefore constitutes the first step towards a more comprehensive understanding of how bacteria in the gut affect health and disease.

Scientists have measured the catastrophic genetic damage caused by smoking in different organs of the body and identified several different mechanisms by which tobacco smoking causes mutations in DNA. The researchers found that smokers accumulated an average of 150 extra mutations in every lung cell for each year of smoking one pack of cigarettes a day.

In rare cases, someone who is thin could still end up with type 2 diabetes while an obese person may be surprisingly healthy. Some Asian countries have a higher diabetes rate than the United States even though the obesity rate is relatively low. New research points toward an answer to the riddle of the obesity paradox: An accumulation of a toxic class of fat metabolites, known as ceramides, may increase the risk for type 2 diabetes.

Researchers are exploring ways to help clinicians and investigators use and share routinely collected medical data (such as information in electronic health records) to improve care and advance clinical research.

In a recent article, experts note that with the development of platforms enabling the use of routinely collected clinical data in the context of international research, scalable solutions for cross-border and cross-domain interoperability need to be developed.