Body

Among 13,894 women in the Nurses' Health Study, investigators prospectively examined alcohol use assessed at midlife in relation to "successful ageing," which was defined as survival to age 70 years, not having a major chronic disease (such as coronary disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes), and having no major cognitive impairment, physical impairment, or mental health problems. Only 11% of the women met these criteria.

Hand bones from a single individual with a clear taxonomic affiliation are scarce in the hominin fossil record, which has hampered understanding of the evolution of manipulative abilities in hominins. An international team of researchers including Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany has now published a study that describes the earliest, most complete fossil hominin hand post-dating the appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record, the hand of a 1.98-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba from Malapa, South Africa.

Clinicians from a leading UK children's hospital have called for European countries to change the way they tackle the shortage of organ donations from children, after a review, published in the September issue of Acta Paediatrica, found a large number of legal, ethical and cultural barriers.

Great Ormond Street Hospital's clinical lead for organ donations, consultant paediatric intensivist Dr Joe Brierley, teamed up with Dr Vic Larcher, consultant in general paediatrics and ethics, to review the discrepancies between and within European countries.

Spontaneous ordering of DNA fragments in a special matrix holds the key to creating non-toxic gene therapy delivery vectors, according to a study recently published in the European Physical Journal E.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – At any given time, one of every 20 hospital patients has a hospital-acquired infection, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This leads to an estimated 99,000 deaths in the U.S. each year and up to $33 billion in preventable health care costs.

Now a new study by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers finds that adopting an inexpensive set of infection control measures could potentially save many thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The study appears in the September 2011 issue of Health Affairs.

Baltimore, MD – September 7, 2011 – Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center have transplanted the first lungs treated in the United States with an experimental repair process before transplantation. The procedure is part of a five-center national clinical research trial to evaluate the efficacy of repairing, before transplant, lungs that might otherwise have been passed over as unsuitable for organ donation. The results of this study, if successful, could significantly expand the number of transplantable lungs available to patients awaiting transplants.

King crabs and other crushing predators are thought to have been absent from cold Antarctic shelf waters for millions of years. Scientists speculate that the long absence of crushing predators has allowed the evolution of a unique Antarctic seafloor fauna with little resistance to predatory crabs.

Hip impingement (femoracetabular impingement) may be a risk factor of osteoarthritis (OA) of the hip. A new study reveals that the presence of an underlying deformity, known as cam impingement, is associated with hip damage in young men without any arthritis symptoms and detected using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Full findings are now published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

Like humans, mice that live in their natural habitat encounter bacteria and other pathogens that exercise their immune system, yet the lab mice typically used in immunology studies are raised in isolation from most diseases. A study on natural killer cells in wild mice published this week in Molecular Ecology examines the hypothesis that the unsterile living conditions faced by humans and wild mice may improve the readiness of the immune system to fight new infections.

Biological agents used to treat rheumatoid arthritis seem to be associated with an increased risk of skin cancer, indicates a systematic review of published research in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

Inflammatory arthritis has been linked to an increased risk of some cancers, such as lymphoma and lung cancer, but a lower risk of others, such as bowel and breast cancers. But it has been unclear to what extent tumour necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors - drugs which act on the immune system - might affect risk.

(Boston) – The risk of death increases with higher levels of overweight and obesity among African American women, according to a new study led by researchers from the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University. In addition, a larger waist size was associated with a higher risk of death among women who were not obese. The relationship between body size and risk of death was strongest for deaths from cardiovascular disease.

The past is present when it comes to human evolution.

That seems to be the takeaway from new research that concludes "archaic" humans, somewhere in Africa during the last 20-60 thousand years, interbred with anatomically modern humans and transferred small amounts of genetic material to their offspring who are alive today.

University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer and a team of evolutionary biologists, geneticists and mathematicians report the finding in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An endangered species of horse -- known as Przewalski's horse -- is much more distantly related to the domestic horse than researchers had previously hypothesized, reports a team of investigators led by Kateryna Makova, a Penn State University associate professor of biology. The scientists tested the portion of the genome passed exclusively from mother to offspring -- the mitochondrial DNA -- of four Przewalski's horse lineages and compared the data to DNA from the domestic horse (Equus caballus).

SUNY Downstate scientist Ilham Muslimov, MD, PhD, along with senior author Henri Tiedge, PhD, professor of physiology and pharmacology and of neurology, published a study suggesting that cellular dysregulation associated with certain neurodegenerative disorders may result from molecular competition in neuronal RNA transport pathways.

The paper appeared in the Journal of Cell Biology, titled, "Spatial Code Recognition in Neuronal RNA Targeting: Role of RNA-hnRNP A2 Interactions." The article was highlighted in an accompanying editorial, "RNA Targeting Gets Competitive."

New research from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) may help prevent damage to the liver caused by drugs like acetaminophen and other stressors.

Acetaminophen, more commonly known as Tylenol, helps relieve pain and reduce fever. The over-the-counter drug is a major ingredient in many cold and flu remedies as well as prescription painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin.