Health News

Too-low diastolic blood pressure can be deadly for CKD patients

Date: Aug-20-2013
Having too-low diastolic blood pressure (DBP) may be deadly for patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Blood pressure (BP) recommendations are stricter for patients with CKD than for the general population and focus on lowering actual BP (the measurement of both systolic BP [SBP] and DBP) without consideration for achieving a DBP that is too low. Researchers reviewed health records for 651,749 U.S. veterans with CKD to assess the association between BP and death. Both actual BP and measurements of SBP and DBP considered separately were assessed...

Home-based interventions ease depression in elderly African Americans

Date: Aug-20-2013
Home-based care interventions delivered by social workers can reduce depressive symptoms and enhance quality of life in older African Americans. Depression is common among older adults and African Americans are at greater risk than white persons for not receiving standard depression care or treatment. Improving access to depression care for this group is a public health concern. Researchers hypothesized that a home-based intervention could alleviate depressive symptoms and improve quality of life in older African Americans...

Adding tofacitinib to treatment with DMARDs improves pain and function in patients with active RA

Date: Aug-20-2013
Adding tofacitinib to treatment with disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) may help improve symptoms in patients with active rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Nonbiologic DMARDs, including methotrexate, are commonly used to treat RA. However, DMARDs alone do not always adequately treat the disease. Tofacitinib is a novel, oral, Janus kinase inhibitor that treats RA. Researchers sought to determine the safety and efficacy of tofacitinib taken in combination with nonbiologic DMRDs...

A new biomarker for chronic stress: Hair Cortisol

Date: Aug-20-2013
Cortisol is a well-known stress hormone and until recently, we have only been able to understand how stressed a person has been for about the past 20 minutes or the past day. Now, with about 100 strands of hair clipped from the scalp, we can get a biological indicator of stress over the past three months. Since hair growth approximately 1 cm per month, with 3 cms, we capture cortisol retrospectively, so we can measure "chronic" or accumulated stress...

Link between viral infection, specialized lung cells and COPD

Date: Aug-20-2013
Investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have described another link in the chain of events that connect acute viral infections to the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Their discovery points to a new therapeutic target for COPD, an extremely common disease of the lower airways that is seen in chronic bronchitis and emphysema. COPD affects about 12 million people in the United States, where it is the third leading cause of death. Worldwide, it is the fifth leading cause of death...

The will to win forms at the age of four

Date: Aug-20-2013
New research suggests children don't understand competitive behaviour until around the age of four. A team of researchers from the University of Warwick and University of Salzburg found most children under 4 did not have a developed understanding of other people's perspectives - specifically, of the fact that what someone intentionally does depends on their take on the situation...

Exploring trends in perinatally infected HIV patients now approaching adulthood

Date: Aug-20-2013
The advent of antiretroviral therapy (ART) has transformed HIV from a death sentence into a chronic disease. In one of the largest studies of perinatally infected HIV (PHIV) patients to date, Agwu, et al, found that the proportion of patients on ART has increased and rates of viremia and advanced immunosuppression have decreased. But the rates of both markers in older patients are higher, according to an article in the Fall issue of The Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (JPIDS)...

Personalized drug dosing necessary for older heart patients

Date: Aug-20-2013
Older heart patients present unique challenges for determining the optimal dosages of medications, so a new study from researchers at Duke Medicine offers some rare clarity about the use of drugs that are used to treat patients with heart attacks. For certain heart patients older than age 75, a half-dose of the anti-platelet drug prasugrel works about as well as the typical dosage of clopidogrel, according to a team led by the Duke Clinical Research Institute that looked at a sub-study of a large clinical trial...

Research shows how females choose the 'right' sperm

Date: Aug-20-2013
University of East Anglia scientists have revealed how females select the 'right' sperm to fertilize their eggs when faced with the risk of being fertilized by wrong sperm from a different species. Researchers investigated salmon and trout, which fertilize externally in river water. The two species occasionally hybridize in the wild, but since hybrid offspring become reproductive dead-ends, females of both species are under selection to avoid hybrid fertilizations, and instead promote external fertilization by their own species' sperm...

High cholesterol riskier for middle-aged men than women

Date: Aug-20-2013
High cholesterol levels are much more risky for middle-aged men than middle-aged women when it comes to having a first heart attack, a new study of more than 40,000 Norwegian men and women has shown. The study, just published in the September issue of Epidemiology, shows that being a middle-aged male and having high cholesterol levels results in a negative synergistic effect that the researchers did not observe in women. However, current clinical guidelines for treating high cholesterol levels do not differentiate between men and women...