Brain

Rape in war is common, devastating, and too often ignored, says a new editorial in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. The staggering toll of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 1991—5.5 million deaths, 1.5 million displaced people, and up to half a million victims of sexual violence—demands attention be paid to the unconscionable use of rape as a weapon of war, which has also been documented for conflicts in Burma, Sudan, and the former Yugoslavia, among others.

MADISON — Stressful experiences in early childhood can have long-lasting impacts on kids' health that persist well beyond the resolution of the situation.

The conclusion comes from a study revealing impaired immune function in adolescents who, as youngsters, experienced either physical abuse or time in an orphanage, when compared to peers who never experienced such difficult circumstances. The report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison appears online the week of Jan. 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Drugs known as glucocorticoids are used clinically to reduce the chance that a fetus at risk of premature delivery will develop respiratory distress syndrome, a serious complication of preterm birth and a significant cause of early neonatal death. They are also used postnatally to treat infants with life-threatening lung conditions.

EDITOR'S PICK: Aspirin counteracts new mechanisms of acetaminophen-induced liver damage

St. Louis, Jan. 23, 2009 — Half of the immune system has a hidden talent, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered.

They found the innate immune system, long recognized as a specialist in rapidly and aggressively combating invaders, has cells that can learn from experience and fight better when called into battle a second time. Scientists previously thought any such ability was limited to the immune system's other major branch, the adaptive immune system.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People with a particular gene variant may be more likely to develop brain tumors, and at an earlier age, than people without the gene, according to a study published in the January 27, 2009, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The study involved 254 people with brain tumors and 238 people with no cancers. All those with tumors had glioblastoma multiforme, the most common type of brain cancer. People with this type of tumor survive an average of 12 to 15 months.

Omega-6 fatty acids – found in vegetable oils, nuts and seeds – are a beneficial part of a heart-healthy eating plan, according to a science advisory published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Improvements to the "chain of survival" increased survival and decreased residual neurological damage in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients in Japan, researchers report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

January 26, 2008 — (BRONX, NY) — School children who receive more recess behave better and are likely to learn more, according to a large study of third-graders conducted by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

The study, published in Pediatrics, suggests that a daily break of 15 minutes or more in the school day may play a role in improving learning, social development, and health in elementary school children. The study's principal investigator is Romina M. Barros, M.D., assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Einstein.

Not all breast cancers are the same, and not all will have fatal consequences. But because clinicians find it difficult to accurately determine which tumors will metastasize, many patients do not receive the therapy fits their disease.

Tel Aviv University has now refined breast cancer identification so that each course of treatment is as individual as the woman being treated.

It is no secret that you know more (that is, have expertise) about things you are interested in. If you hate baseball, you are not going to spend your spare time reading up homerun statistics and debating who the best pitcher is. On the other hand, if you inadvertently tell a wine connoisseur, that you enjoy a particular wine "just because it tastes good," it will not be long before you are being lectured on different grape varietals and schooled in the different soil compositions of neighboring vineyards.

SALT LAKE CITY – In a finding that could save thousands of lives a year, University of Utah School of Medicine researchers have shown that a blood vessel disorder leading to unpredictable, sometimes fatal, hemorrhagic strokes, seizures, paralysis or other problems is treatable with the same statin drugs that millions of people take to control high cholesterol.

New Haven, Conn. - January 26, 2009 - A study published in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggested that the use of certain medications in elderly populations may be associated with cognitive decline. The study examined the effects of exposure to anticholinergic medications, a type of drug used to treat a variety of disorders that include respiratory and gastrointestinal problems, on over 500 relatively healthy men aged 65 years or older with high blood pressure.

When we use a mental shortcut to decide which product we want, we don't always end up with our ideal choice, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In the United States, nearly 13 percent of adults age 20 and older have diabetes, but 40 percent of them have not been diagnosed, according to epidemiologists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose study includes newly available data from an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT). Diabetes is especially common in the elderly: nearly one-third of those age 65 and older have the disease. An additional 30 percent of adults have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by elevated blood sugar that is not yet in the diabetic range.