Health News

Overthinking can be detrimental to human performance

Date: Aug-09-2013
Trying to explain riding a bike is difficult because it is an implicit memory. The body knows what to do, but thinking about the process can often interfere. So why is it that under certain circumstances paying full attention and trying hard can actually impede performance? A new UC Santa Barbara study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, reveals part of the answer...

Tamoxifen for prevention in high-risk breast cancer

Date: Aug-09-2013
The global study was led by University of Melbourne and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The study involved about 2,500 women from Europe, North America and Australia who have inherited mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2, the breast cancer susceptibility genes, and who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. About one-third of these women were placed on tamoxifen. Tamoxifen has been used for decades to treat breast cancer and has recently been shown to prevent breast cancers in many women...

Overweight children have higher risk of asthma

Date: Aug-09-2013
Children who are overweight or obese are more likely to develop asthma compared with children of a healthy weight, according to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Researchers from Kaiser Permanente in California examined electronic health records of 623,358 children between the ages of 6 and 19. The children were divided into four groups based on their measured height and weight...

Standardizing Guidelines for Penile Cancer Treatment

Date: Aug-09-2013
Penile cancer is rare, with an average of 1,200 new cases per year in the United States, but it can be debilitating and lethal. Without evidenced-based treatment approaches, outcomes have varied widely. Philippe E. Spiess, M.D., an associate member in the Department of Genitourinary Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center, presented new National Comprehensive Cancer Network Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology to standardize care for penile cancer in an article that appeared in the July issue of the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network...

Researchers develop quick survey to assess risk for disturbances in mental cognition

Date: Aug-09-2013
UC San Francisco researchers have developed a two-minute assessment tool to help hospital staff predict a patient's risk of delirium, a change in mental cognition characterized by severe confusion and disorientation that can prolong hospital stays. The condition, which occurs in as many as one in five hospitalized patients, tends to develop rapidly and can lead to higher death rates and increased health care costs. The new tool is designed to be simple, efficient and accurate in helping to assess and treat patients at risk of developing delirium, the scientists said...

Compared to open bypass, stenting keeps circulation flowing longer in some patients

Date: Aug-09-2013
New Johns Hopkins research suggests that people who undergo minimally invasive placement of stents to open clogged leg arteries are significantly less likely than those who have conventional bypass surgery to need a second treatment for the condition within two years. For now, bypass surgery remains the gold standard for treating symptoms of peripheral artery disease (PAD), but the Johns Hopkins researchers are hopeful that further study will confirm the advantage their study shows for the stents...

A call for more opioid dependence treatment

Date: Aug-09-2013
A new report from Simon Fraser University researcher Bohdan Nosyk calls for the expansion of heroin and opioid medical treatment to stem the increase of overdose deaths. "Prescription opioid abuse and overdose is on the rise throughout North America," says the SFU Health Sciences associate professor and lead author of the study that was published in Health Affairs. "Opioid overdose is now the second-leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., behind only motor-vehicle accidents...

Biomarker identified to predict immune response risk after stem cell transplants

Date: Aug-09-2013
Researchers from Indiana University, the University of Michigan, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified and validated a biomarker accessible in blood tests that could be used to predict which stem cell transplant patients are at highest risk for a potentially fatal immune response called graft-versus-host disease...

Personalized DNA tests identify patients at risk for adverse side effects from statins

Date: Aug-09-2013
Statins, a class of drugs used to lower cholesterol, are among the best selling drugs in North America and around the world. However, statin myopathy, which results in muscle pain and weakness, is a common side effect affecting up to 10 percent of statin users. A recent study led by Dr. Richard Kim of the Lawson Health Research Institute, in collaboration with Dr. Robert Hegele of Robarts Research Institute, and researchers from Vanderbilt University, found that commonly occurring genetic variations in a person's genes could put them at risk for statin-associated muscle injury...

Keeping kids under observation in the ER reduces need for CT scans

Date: Aug-09-2013
The longer a child with minor blunt head trauma is observed in the emergency department, the less likely the child is to require computed tomography (CT) scan, according to the results of a study published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Impact of the Duration of Emergency Department Observation on Computed Tomography Use in Children with Minor Blunt Head Trauma")...