Body

San Diego, CA, June 5, 2012 – It's estimated that almost 23% of women enter pregnancy as smokers and more than half continue to smoke during pregnancy, leading to excess healthcare costs at delivery and beyond. In one of the first studies to assess smoking bans and taxes on cigarettes, along with the level of tobacco control spending, researchers have found that state tobacco control policies can be effective in curbing smoking during pregnancy, and in preventing a return to smoking within four months on average, after delivery.

San Antonio, Texas, June 5, 2012 – Three patients with chronic kidney failure treated at a dialysis center in Los Angeles County, California contracted a bacterial infection in the blood (sepsis) caused by improper cleaning and disinfection of a reusable medical device called a dialyzer – an artificial kidney.

San Antonio, Texas, June 5, 2012 – The introduction of daily bathing with disposable, germ-killing cloths resulted in a sustained, significant decrease in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) incidence at a Canadian geriatric facility, according to a poster presented at the 39th Annual Educational Conference and International Meeting of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

PASADENA, Calif., June 5, 2012 — People who have had an episode of herpes zoster, also known as shingles, face a relatively low short-term risk of developing shingles, according to a Kaiser Permanente Southern California study published online in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. These findings suggest that among people with immune systems that have not been compromised, the risk of a second shingles episode is low.

Survivors of childhood cancers are at an increased risk of another battle with cancer later in life, according to new research published online June 4 by the Annals of Internal Medicine. In the largest study to date of risk for gastrointestinal (GI) cancers among people first diagnosed with cancer before the age of 21, researchers found that childhood cancer survivors develop these malignancies at a rate nearly five times that of the general population.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Scientists have designed a screening tool that provides a fast, easy and relatively inexpensive way to predict levels of a specific toxin in lakes that are prone to blue-green algal blooms.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Skin cancer patients whose childhood included periods of neglect or maltreatment are at a much greater risk for their cancers to return when they face a major stressful event, based on a new study.

The research suggests that such experiences during a person's youth can set a lower level of immune response for life, which in turn might make them more susceptible to the kind of cancers that are often successfully fought by the immune system, so-called immunogenic tumors.

CHICAGO – A 38-year longitudinal study of New Zealanders suggests that individuals with higher genetic risk scores were more likely to be chronically obese in adulthood, according to a report published in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.

Family members of children with a staph infection often harbor a drug-resistant form of the germ, although they don't show symptoms, a team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found.

The results are published in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

It's well known that a relatively small percentage of chronically ill patients accounts for a disproportionate amount of health care dollars. Now, a multicenter study led by Johns Hopkins researcher Bruce Leff, M.D., might provide insights into how to cut Medicare costs while improving health care for older adults suffering from chronic health conditions.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Religious practices that strongly control female sexuality are more successful at promoting certainty about paternity, according to a study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study analyzed genetic data on 1,706 father-son pairs in a traditional African population—the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa—in which Islam, two types of Christianity, and an indigenous, monotheistic religion are practiced in the same families and villages.

DALLAS – June 4, 2012 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have taken a major step toward understanding the cellular clock, mapping for the first time the atomic-level architecture of a key component of the timekeeper that governs the body's daily rhythms.

Roughly 100,000 years ago, human evolution reached a mysterious bottleneck: Our ancestors had been reduced to perhaps five to ten thousand individuals living in Africa. In time, "behaviorally modern" humans would emerge from this population, expanding dramatically in both number and range, and replacing all other co-existing evolutionary cousins, such as the Neanderthals.

The cause of the bottleneck remains unsolved, with proposed answers ranging from gene mutations to cultural developments like language to climate-altering events, among them a massive volcanic eruption.

BOSTON -- June 4, 2012 -- Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center have shown that while a type of "good" fat found in the body can be activated by cold temperatures, it is not able to be activated by the drug ephedrine.

The finding, published in today's issue of PNAS USA Early Edition, may lead to drugs or other methods aimed at activating the good fat, known as brown fat. When activated, brown fat burns calories and can help in the battle against obesity.