Body

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have created and confirmed the accuracy of a mathematical model that predicts how weight and body fat in children respond to adjustments in diet and physical activity. The results will appear online July 30 in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology.

While the model may help to set realistic expectations, it has not been tested in a controlled clinical trial to determine if it is an effective tool for weight management.

WASHINGTON – Men who decide to be screened for prostate cancer and those who forgo PSA screening stick with their decisions after receiving materials explaining the risks and benefits of the test. The decision aids greatly increased their knowledge about screening and reduced their conflict about what to do, but did not have an impact on their screening decision when measured a year later.

College football players, especially linemen, may develop high blood pressure over the course of their first season, according to a small study in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.

Researchers documented higher blood pressure levels among 113 first-year college players. Only one player had already been diagnosed with hypertension before the season and 27 percent had a family history of hypertension. At post-season, researchers noted:

Patients who received their first kidney transplant at ages 14 to 16 years appear to be at increased risk for transplant failure, with black adolescents having a disproportionately higher risk of graft failure, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.

Both web-based and print-based decision aids appear to improve patients' informed decision making about prostate cancer screening up to 13 months later, but does not appear to affect actual screening rates, according to a study by Kathryn L. Taylor, Ph.D., of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and colleagues.

BOSTON – Patient care could be enhanced and the health care system could see significant cost savings if health care professionals followed published clinical guidelines to manage and treat back pain, according to researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and published in the July 29 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

As a result of the variable nature of gene expression, genetically identical cells inhabiting the same environment can vary significantly in their numbers of key enzymes, which in turn results in strikingly different cellular behaviors. This cell-to-cell variability can manifest in the form of anything from differences in growth rate, to the specific biochemical pathways used and the types of metabolic byproducts produced by each cell.

Every time one of your cells divides, it exposes its most essential component to great danger: its genome, the sum total of all its genetic information, embodied in the double-stranded helix of DNA. Prior to cell division, this DNA splits into two single strands, each bearing sequences of biochemical bases that form templates for the genomes of the daughter cells. These single strands are particularly vulnerable to assaults by reactive oxygen species — toxic byproducts of respiration — that could cause changes in the genetic information they contain.

HOUSTON (July 29, 3013) – When you sprint, the "fast" muscle fibers give you that winning kick. In a marathon or just day-to-day activity, however, the "slow," or type 1 fibers, keep you going for hours.

A team led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health has overcome a major biological hurdle in an effort to find improved treatments for patients with a rare disease called methylmalonic acidemia (MMA). Using genetically engineered mice created for their studies, the team identified a set of biomarkers of kidney damage—a hallmark of the disorder—and demonstrated that antioxidant therapy protected kidney function in the mice.

In 2011, Nature announced that scientists had discovered a single-celled organism that is a primitive farmer. The organism, a social amoeba called Dictyostelium discoideum, picks up edible bacteria, carries them to new locations and harvests them like crops.

D. discoideum enjoyed a brief spell in the media spotlight, billed as the world's smallest farmer.

Now a collaboration of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University has taken a closer look at one lineage, or clone, of a D. discoideum farmer.

In perhaps the most comprehensive and definitive effort to date, scientists have explained the processes that drove male mammals to adopt social monogamy as a breeding strategy.

Because male mammals have a much higher potential to produce offspring in a single breeding season than do their female counterparts (who must endure long gestation periods), it would seem that mating with one female per cycle would be limiting. Yet a percentage of mammalian males do this -- and researchers have debated why, seeking to identify selective advantages social monogamy offers, for decades.

The chemical components crucial to the start of life on Earth may have primed and protected each other in never-before-realized ways, according to new research led by University of Washington scientists.

It could mean a simpler scenario for how that first spark of life came about on the planet, according to Sarah Keller, UW professor of chemistry, and Roy Black, UW affiliate professor of bioengineering, both co-authors of a paper published online July 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Boston, Mass.—A new method of vaccine design, called the Multiple Antigen Presentation System (MAPS), may result in vaccines that bring together the benefits of whole-cell and acellular or defined subunit vaccination. The method, pioneered by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, permits rapid construction of new vaccines that activate mulitple arms of the immune system simultaneously against one or more pathogens, generating robust immune protection with a lower risk of adverse effects.

Scientists studying an aggressive form of leukaemia have discovered that rather than displacing healthy stem cells in the bone marrow as previously believed, the cancer is putting them to sleep to prevent them forming new blood cells.

The finding offers the potential that these stem cells could somehow be turned back on, offering a new form of treatment for the condition, called Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). The work was led by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London with the support of Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute.