Body

(San Diego, CA) April 25, 2014 – More research is needed to better understand the important role that dietary fats play in optimal health, said a panel of leading food and nutrition scientists Friday at an American Society for Nutrition (ASN) pre-annual meeting session.

Philadelphia, PA, April 28, 2014 – The adhesion molecule CD146 plays a vital role in inflammation and offers a promising therapeutic target for treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) as well as preventing colitis-associated colorectal cancer, say scientists. Targeting CD146 with anti-CD146 antibody AA98, especially in combination with an anti-TNF-alpha antibody, showed promising results in mice. Their report is published in The American Journal of Pathology.

New research indicates that hormone disrupting pollutants are affecting the health and development of wild birds nesting along the urban rivers of South Wales.

Scientists from The University of Manchester have discovered that 'lonely' microbes are more likely to mutate, resulting in higher rates of antibiotic resistance.

The study, published today in Nature Communications and jointly funded by The Wellcome Trust and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, explored the mutation rates of E. coli.

Researchers found out that the rate of mutation varied according to how many of the bacteria there were. Surprisingly, they discovered that more bacteria gave fewer mutations.

New oral anticoagulant drugs that treat and prevent clots offer a much-needed alternative to warfarin, which has been used for more than 6 decades and has serious shortcomings. A new article published in BJS (British Journal of Surgery) gives an overview of the major clinical trials and recommendations related to these new agents and will serve as a practical guide for their use in patients who require planned or emergency surgery.

There is new, more definitive evidence implicating camels in the ongoing outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS. Scientists at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, King Saud University, and EcoHealth Alliance extracted a complete, live, infectious sample of MERS coronavirus from two camels in Saudi Arabia. The sample matched MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV) found in humans, indicating that the virus in camels is capable of infecting humans and that camels are a likely source of the outbreak.

PITTSBURGH, April 29, 2014 – People infected with HIV whose immune cells have low cholesterol levels experience much slower disease progression, even without medication, according to University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health research that could lead to new strategies to control infection.

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have identified why some HIV-infected people experience much slower disease progression, even without medication, and it has to do with cholesterol levels in specific immune cells. They report their findings in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

When it comes to luxury brands, the ruder the sales staff the better the sales, according to new research from the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business.

The forthcoming Journal of Consumer Research study reveals that consumers who get the brush-off at a high-end retailer can become more willing to purchase and wear pricey togs.

New research looking at the success of clinical trials of stem cell therapy shows that trials appear to be more successful in studies where there are more discrepancies in the trial data.

Researchers from Imperial College London conducted a meta-analysis of 49 randomised controlled trials of bone marrow stem cell therapy for heart disease. The study, published today in the British Medical Journal, identified and listed over 600 discrepancies within the trial reports.

Untreated chronic viral hepatitis affects between 3.5 and 5.3 million Americans and continues to fuel rising incidences of progressive liver disease, liver failure, and liver cancer. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) unveiled the nation's first coordinated national approach to tackling viral hepatitis with the Action Plan for the Prevention, Care and Treatment of Viral Hepatitis in the United States. Priorities set by the action plan represent a call to action to advance both the prevention and treatment of viral hepatitis.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. April 28, 2014 – A morning and evening ritual of tart cherry juice may help you sleep better at night, suggests a new study presented today at the Experimental Biology 2014 meeting. Researchers from Louisiana State University found that drinking Montmorency tart cherry juice twice a day for two weeks helped increase sleep time by nearly 90 minutes among older adults with insomnia.

WHAT: National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers have developed an animal model of human hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) in rhesus macaques, an advance that may lead to treatments, vaccines and improved methods of diagnosing the disease. The study, conducted by researchers at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

AMHERST, Mass. – The hormone oxytocin appears to increase social behaviors in newborn rhesus monkeys, say researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Parma, Italy, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Findings suggest that oxytocin is a promising candidate for new treatments for developmental disorders affecting social skills and bonding.

A study led by Michael Worobey at the University of Arizona in Tucson provides the most conclusive answers yet to two of the world's foremost biomedical mysteries of the past century: the origin of the 1918 pandemic flu virus and its unusual severity, which resulted in a death toll of approximately 50 million people.