Body

Researchers from Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, Australia have found that the soil bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes the emerging infectious disease melioidosis in humans and animals, is associated with land management changes such as livestock husbandry or residential gardening. The study, published January 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, sheds light on the environmental occurrence of this bacterium in the soil.

Data collected from HIV surveillance are crucial to guide public health interventions, planning, and prevention efforts. But developing countries face several challenges to implementing surveillance programs says a team of researchers from the US and the Democratic Republic of Congo in this week's PLoS Medicine.

A study published next week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine suggests that elderly people with damaged kidneys are at greater risk of cardiovascular disease, such as heart failure and stroke, and other causes of mortality. The findings indicate that greater efforts should be made to encourage elderly people who have impaired kidney function alongside other risk factors—such as high blood cholesterol and high blood pressure, which are often a result of smoking and diet—to make lifestyle changes to avoid developing cardiovascular problems.

Headache sufferers can benefit from acupuncture, even though how and where acupuncture needles are inserted may not be important. Two separate systematic reviews by Cochrane Researchers show that acupuncture is an effective treatment for prevention of headaches and migraines. But the results also suggest that faked procedures, in which needles are incorrectly inserted, can be just as effective.

Placing vulnerable children with relatives is a viable option, a new study by Cochrane Researchers suggests. In view of several recent high profile child abuse cases, the study may have important policy implications.

"We don't know what type of out-of-home care is best for children. But our research suggests that children placed with relatives do as well or better than those placed with foster parents," says lead researcher Marc Winokur, who works at the Social Work Research Center at Colorado State University in the US.

Trials showing a positive treatment effect, or those with important or striking findings, were much more likely to be published in scientific journals than those with negative findings, a new review from The Cochrane Library has found.

"This publication bias has important implications for healthcare. Unless both positive and negative findings from clinical trials are made available, it is impossible to make a fair assessment of a drug's safety and efficacy," says lead researcher, Sally Hopewell of the UK Cochrane Centre in Oxford, UK.

Medication and psychotherapy may be beneficial for patients suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). But a new Cochrane Review found that much more research is required to determine the most effective treatment and whether both approaches should be used in combination.

New research supports a modest beneficial effect of anakinra for rheumatoid arthritis patients, but warns against potential risks for serious infections and its use with other biologic medications.

Family-based lifestyle interventions that not only modify diet and physical activity but also include behaviour therapy programs can help obese children lose weight and maintain that loss for at least six months. This Cochrane Review also found that in adolescents the effect lasts for at least 12 months. Adding weight controlling drugs orlistat or sibutramine to behaviour change programs for adolescents may provide additional benefits.

School-based health and exercise programs have positive outcomes despite having little effect on children's weight or the amount of exercise they do outside of school, say Cochrane Researchers who carried out a systematic review of studies on physical activity programs in schools.

Using a robotic assistant to remove a patient's gallbladder by key-hole surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy) is as safe as working with a human assistant, a Cochrane Review has concluded. Comparisons between robot- and human-assisted surgery showed that there were no differences in terms of morbidity, the need to switch to open surgery, total operating time, or length of stay in hospital.

Trainee surgeons who add virtual reality (VR) training to standard 'apprenticeship' training in key-hole surgery learn more quickly, work with greater accuracy and have less errors than those with no VR training, and perform as well as those who use additional video training. The finding of this Cochrane Systematic Review is important because training surgeons is time-consuming and costly, and surgeons have to develop new skills while working within the hour-limits set by European legislation.

A formula used to measure kidney function in children with chronic kidney disease has been revised to make it more precise, according to a study published online January 21 in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. This study is based on data collected by the Chronic Kidney Disease in Children (CKiD) clinical trial, funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Children in Niger who received a daily nutritional supplement for three months had a lower rate of weight loss and a reduced risk of wasting compared to children who did not receive the supplementation, according to a study in the January 21 issue of JAMA.

Preliminary research suggests that use of the drug escitalopram provided some improvement in symptoms for older adults with generalized anxiety disorder, although the overall benefits were diminished because of nonadherence to the drug by some patients, according to a study in the January 21 issue of JAMA.