Body

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University-led research team has uncovered the chemical components of the adhesive produced by oysters, providing information that could be useful for fisheries, boating and medicine.

DURHAM, N.C.—Two-thirds of Americans with voice problems don't seek medical care either because they don't know treatment is available or because they think the problem will just go away, according to a new study conducted at the Duke Voice Care Center.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have identified a new pathway that helps control the immune balance through reciprocal regulation of specialized T lymphocytes, which play very different inflammatory roles.

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 20 – A structural molecule and the cellular pump that regulates its levels influence the severity of pneumonia and could provide new ways of treating the lung infection, which is a leading cause of hospitalization and death, according to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Iowa. Their findings are available online in Nature Medicine.

A protein linked to Parkinson's disease may cause neurodegeneration by inhibiting autophagy—the process in which cells digest some of their contents—according to a study in the September 20 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology (www.jcb.org).

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Elderly people might not benefit from some of the tuberculosis vaccines currently in development, recent research suggests.

Some vaccines under study are designed to activate a specific molecule that is an early participant in the immune response against TB in young people. But a recent Ohio State University study suggests that in older people, this molecule remains relatively inactive, even in the face of TB infection.

New research from University of Minnesota hearing scientists shows that fewer than 20 percent of teenagers in the United States have a hearing loss as a result of exposure to loud sounds, thus offering a different analysis of data reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in August.

Too much television, video games and Internet can increase body fat in teens. A five-year study from the University of Montreal and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, has found teenagers have four different patterns of screen use: increasers, decreasers, consistently high and consistently low users.

Gastric cancer is a major cause of cancer deaths in the world. The outcome of large gastric tumors and those with lymph node involvement remains poor after surgical resection. The optimal adjuvant therapy after surgical resection remains to be determined. The most common strategies in the adjuvant treatment of gastric cancers include fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy with or without radiation. The introduction of capecitabine has largely replaced continuous-infusion 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) owing to its ease of administration.

Delayed hepatic arterial hemorrhage after pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD) is not a common but a fatal complication, occurring in 7% of all patients. Its ideal management remains unclear and controversial.

Severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) requires an adequate nutritional support. Enteral nutrition (EN) should be preferred to total parenteral nutrition in patients with SAP, as it is associated with reduced mortality and complications. However, in clinical practice EN is employed far less frequently than it should. The main obstacle to EN diffusion is that it is considered complicated, as to ensure full pancreatic rest, nutrition tubes should be placed in the jejunum, requiring often troublesome procedures.

More than 80% of hospitalized patients suffer more severe pain than necessary. This is the conclusion of Christoph Maier (Bochum University Hospital, Bochum, Germany) and his coauthors in their interim report of the Pain-Free Hospital Project ("Schmerzfreies Krankenhaus"), which appears in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107[36]: 607-14). The project, which was initiated in 2003, has the goal of improving pain management in hospitals across Germany.

Hyperkinetic disorders among children and adolescents are becoming increasingly common. In the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, Ingrid Schubert of the PMV Research Group at the University of Cologne and her colleagues address the question how this has affected the frequency of prescriptions for methylphenidate, a stimulant drug that is used to treat such disorders (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107[36]: 615¬21).

Treating hospital patients with thigh-length surgical stockings, rather than knee-high socks, can reduce life threatening blood clots, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that knee-high stockings, which are similar to flight socks, do little in stroke patients to prevent deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a life threatening form of blood clot that can travel up into the heart and lungs, .