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Five to 15 percent of all patients with hypertension fail to respond to drug treatment. However, a range of treatment options are now available in these cases. Alongside the established measures stand new and promising interventions such as renal sympathetic denervation. Felix Mahfoud, Frank Himmel and their co-authors present the current treatment strategies for resistant arterial hypertension in the latest issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2011; 108(43): 725).

Washington, D.C. – Researchers exploring why some women who take a common breast cancer drug develop serious joint pain have eliminated two possible causes: inflammatory arthritis and autoimmune disease. Because of these findings, researchers say women should be encouraged to continue taking the medication to gain its full benefit.

The study is published online Nov. 11 in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment. Preliminary findings were presented in 2010 at the 74th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.

[EMBARGOED FOR NOV. 11, 2011] Vaccination against Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, once the most common cause of bacterial meningitis in children, has dramatically reduced the incidence of Hib disease in young children over the past 20 years, according to a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and available online (http://www.oxfordjournals.com/our_journals/cid/prpaper1.pdf).

The hermaphroditic cleaner shrimp Lysmata amboinensis usually live in monogamous pairs, but dark passions underlie their social structure. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers in Zoology shows that cleaner shrimp, in any group larger than two, viciously attack and kill each other until only a single pair remains.

Eating a diet high in fibre, particularly from cereal and whole grains, is associated with a reduced risk of colorectal cancer, finds a new study integrating all available evidence published on bmj.com today.

Intake of dietary fibre and whole grains is known to help protect against cardiovascular disease, but its association with colorectal cancer risk is less clear. And, although the idea that dietary fibre reduces the risk of colorectal cancer has been around for nearly 40 years, studies attempting to explain the association have not had consistent results.

Most of the 300 doctors in training rotas exempted from the 48 hour limit on working time imposed by the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) are now compliant, according to a report by BMJ Careers today.

Rotas at 77 hospital trusts in England were "derogated" from the EWTD when it was introduced in August 2009, allowing them to operate at a maximum of 52 hours a week instead of 48 hours until 31 July 2011.

Berkeley -- Two new studies led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers spotlight the human health effects of exposure to smoke from open fires and dirty cookstoves, the primary source of cooking and heating for 43 percent, or some 3 billion members, of the world's population. Women and young children in poverty are particularly vulnerable.

WESTPORT, Conn. (November 11, 2011) — Children treated at home for severe pneumonia by Pakistan's "Lady Health Workers" were more likely to recover than children referred to health facilities, Save the Children found in a USAID-funded, WHO-coordinated study published in The Lancet medical journal today.

The results come the day before World Pneumonia Day, which aims to focus the world's attention on the leading cause of child death. Roughly 1.4 million children under age 5 die annually from the disease—99 percent of them in the developing world.

(Boston) — In a breakthrough study published online today in The Lancet, researchers from Boston University, Save the Children and the WHO found that young children treated at home for severe pneumonia by Pakistan's network of "lady health workers" were more likely to get well than children referred to health facilities.

The finding could save thousands of children's lives every year. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death of young children around the world, killing some 1.4 million children under age 5 annually, 99 per cent of them in developing countries.

Research on the Alcator C-Mod experiment at MIT has made an unexpected connection between two seemingly unrelated but important phenomena observed in tokamak plasmas: spontaneous plasma rotation and the global energy confinement of the plasma.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – NOVEMBER 10, 2011 – A clinical trial that compared the use of drug-eluting balloons (DEB) and bare metal stents (BMS) to both bare metal stents alone and drug-eluting stents (DES) found that the drug-eluting balloon group did not meet the primary endpoint of reduced late lumen loss. Results of the DEB-AMI (Drug Eluting Balloon in Acute Myocardial Infarction) trial were presented today at the 23rd annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium, sponsored by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation.

In plants that rely on animals for pollination, the number of seeds they produce, or their relative fitness, is influenced by pollinator visits and the successful deposition of pollen. The number of visits a plant may receive depends partly on pollinator density as well as on conspecific plant density. But what if a plant happens to grow in a population that is small or has very few pollinators visiting its flowers? Will all the effort put into flowering and attracting pollinators have gone to waste?

A fragment of whale rib found in a North Carolina strip mine is offering scientists a rare glimpse at the interactions between prehistoric sharks and whales some 3- to 4-million years ago during the Pliocene.

A key mechanism by which a bacterial pathogen causes the deadly tropical disease melioidosis has been discovered by an international team of scientists.

The findings are published today in the journal Science and show how a toxin produced by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei kills cells by preventing protein synthesis. The study, led by the University of Sheffield, paves the way for the development of novel therapies to combat the bacterium which infects millions of people across South East Asia and Northern Australia.