Body

• Neonatal meconium can be used to examine gestational alcohol exposure during the second and third trimesters.
• A new study has examined fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEEs) and ethylglucuronide (EtG) in meconium samples from public hospitals in seven Italian cities to test for prenatal exposure to alcohol.
• Results indicate that fetal alcohol exposure is underestimated or misreported in Italy.

December 15, 2011 -- Nearly 20 million Americans annually visit a dentist but not a general healthcare provider, according to an NYU study published today in the American Journal of Public Health.

The study, conducted by a nursing-dental research team at NYU, is the first of its kind to determine the proportion of Americans who are seen annually by a dentist but not by a general healthcare provider.

Thirsty? You may be more inclined to reach for plain old H2O if you knew how many calories are in sugar-sweetened beverages; this is according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

WORCESTER, Mass. - An inexpensive, culturally sensitive diabetes prevention program created by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School reduced pre-diabetes indicators in a Latino population at risk for developing diabetes. Results of this three-year study, which were published online in the American Journal of Public Health, are significant because they replicate results of earlier studies that were similar but carried out in more educated and higher-income populations, and much more expensive to conduct.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio State University researchers have discovered a hereditary cancer syndrome that predisposes certain people to a melanoma of the eye, along with lung cancer, brain cancer and possibly other types of cancer.

The hereditary cancer syndrome is caused by an inherited mutation in a gene called BAP1, researchers say.

The findings suggest that BAP1 mutations cause the disease in a small subset of patients with hereditary uveal melanoma and other cancers.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Clinical gene therapy may be one step closer, thanks to a new twist on an old class of molecules.

A group of University of Illinois researchers, led by professors Jianjun Cheng and Fei Wang, have demonstrated that short spiral-shaped proteins can efficiently deliver DNA segments to cells. The team published its work in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

"The main idea is these are new materials that could potentially be used for clinical gene therapy," said Cheng, a professor of materials science and engineering, of chemistry and of bioengineering.

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) has taken a proactive role in advancing discussions with the international lung cancer community on how we should take lung cancer screening forward. The IASLC released an initial statement to the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) at the World Lung Cancer Conference in Amsterdam this April and also hosted a CT screening workshop with over 75 international experts in the field. The findings from this workshop are published in the Dec.

Researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard University have developed a tool that can tackle large data sets in a way that no other software program can. Part of a suite of statistical tools called MINE, it can tease out multiple patterns hidden in health information from around the globe, statistics amassed from a season of major league baseball, data on the changing bacterial landscape of the gut, and much more. The researchers report their findings in a paper appearing in the December 16 issue of the journal Science.

Biologists have long assumed that all jawed vertebrates possess a full complement of nearly identical genes for critical aspects of their development. But a paper in the December 16 issue of Science with Benjamin King of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) as lead author shows that elasmobranchs, a subclass of cartilaginous fishes, lack a cluster of genes, HoxC, formerly thought to be essential for proper development.

A generally accepted 44-year-old assumption about how certain kinds of bacteria make energy and synthesize cell materials has been shown to be incorrect by a team of scientists led by Donald Bryant, the Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State University and a research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Montana State University.

Any multicellular animal, from a blue whale to a human being, poses a special difficulty for the theory of evolution. Most of the cells in its body will die without reproducing, and only a privileged few will pass their genes to the next generation.

How could the extreme degree of cooperation multicellular existence requires ever evolve? Why aren't all creatures unicellular individualists determined to pass on their own genes?

Boston, MA — A new study led by Harvard School of Public (HSPH) researchers provides a novel explanation as to why some tuberculosis cells are inherently more difficult to treat with antibiotics. The discovery, which showed that the ways mycobacteria cells divide and grow determine their susceptibility to treatment with drugs, could lead to new avenues of drug development that better target tuberculosis cells.

The study appears December 15, 2011 in an advance online edition of Science.

PHILADELPHIA - Steve Reiner, MD, professor of Medicine, and Burton Barnett, a doctoral student in the Reiner lab at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, have shown how immune cells, called B lymphocytes, are able to produce daughter cells that are not equal, a finding that might explain how lifelong antibodies are made after vaccination.

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- A new study co-authored by the University of Kentucky's Dr. John O'Brien found that applying vaginal progesterone to women who are at a high risk of preterm birth significantly decreased the odds of a premature delivery.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The cancer-causing potential of fetal exposure to carcinogens can vary substantially, a recent study suggests, causing different types of problems much later in life depending on the stage of pregnancy when the fetus is exposed.

The research sheds further light on the way in which toxic damage early in life can later manifest itself as cancer, due to "epigenetic" changes in cells. It was done by scientists in the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, and other institutions, in laboratory studies with mice.