Health News

Smoking during pregnancy affected by feelings of attachment to fetus

Date: Aug-08-2013
A small new study suggests that pregnant smokers with low scores on a scale that rates emotional attachment to their fetuses may be inclined to smoke more than pregnant smokers who feel more attached to their future babies. "It would make sense psychologically that women who feel less attached to their fetus are going to smoke more, because they aren't necessarily thinking about the repercussions," said Dr. Susanna Magee, lead author of the study published online recently in the Maternal and Child Health Journal...

Tumor resistance to anti-angiogenic therapy promoted by immune system molecule

Date: Aug-08-2013
A team of scientists, led by Napoleone Ferrara, MD, has shown for the first time that a signaling protein involved in inflammation also promotes tumor resistance to anti-angiogenic therapy. The findings by Ferrara - professor of pathology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and senior deputy director for basic science at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center - and colleagues at Genentech, a biotechnology firm based in South San Francisco, are published in a recent Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature Medicine...

Angry opponents seem bigger to tied up men

Date: Aug-07-2013
A physical handicap like being tied down makes men over-estimate an opponent's size and under-estimate their own, according to research published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Daniel Fessler and Colin Holbrook from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Participants who were tied down in a chair envisioned an angry man in a picture as being taller than when they made the same type of guess while simply sitting in the chair without being restrained...

Five-year olds choose to 'play nice' based on other kids' reputations

Date: Aug-07-2013
Five-to-six-year olds are more likely to be kind to peers after observing them interacting with other children in positive ways, suggesting that children establish a sense of their peers' 'reputation' early in life. The results are published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Kenji Onishi and colleagues from Osaka University, Japan.  The researchers observed kindergarteners' day-to-day behavior and found that bystanders in a playground were more likely to offer an object or help a child whom they had seen being helpful to another child...

Belief in precognition increases sense of control over life

Date: Aug-07-2013
People given scientific evidence supporting our ability to predict the future feel a greater sense of control over their lives, according to research published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Katharine Greenaway and colleagues from the University of Queensland, Australia.  One group of study participants read a paragraph stating that researchers had found evidence supporting the existence of precognition, while another group read a related paper that refuted these findings. Both papers were published in the same issue of a scientific journal...

Dogs yawn more often in response to owners' yawns than strangers

Date: Aug-07-2013
Dogs yawn contagiously when they see a person yawning, and respond more frequently to their owner's yawns than to a stranger's, according to research published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Teresa Romero and colleagues from the University of Tokyo.   Pet dogs in the study watched their owner or a stranger yawn, or mimic a yawning mouth movement, but yawned significantly more in response to their owners' actions than to the strangers' yawns. The dogs also responded less frequently to the fake movements, suggesting they have the ability to yawn contagiously...

Geriatric Safe Medicines Summit taking place on 16th & 17th September 2013, London�

Date: Aug-07-2013
Focus on the EMA Geriatric medicines strategy at Geriatric Safe Medicines Summit 2013 Geriatric Safe Medicines Summit is a content packed two day event addressing benefit-risk in this patient population and how clinical trials could be better designed to facilitate the participation of the elderly in clinical trials...

Simple math sheds new light on a long-studied biological process

Date: Aug-07-2013
One of the most basic and intensively studied processes in biology - one which has been detailed in biology textbooks for decades - has gained a new level of understanding, thanks to the application of simple math to a problem that scientists never before thought could benefit from mathematics...

Throbbing pain 'surprisingly not linked to pulse'

Date: Aug-07-2013
Toothaches, migraines and a number of other afflictions are often accompanied by that ever-present throbbing pain that seems to follow the beat of an unwelcome drum. Though many patients and physicians alike have long thought the pounding is associated with the heart beating, researchers have found that brain waves are to blame. The finding comes from neurologists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, led by Dr. Andrew Ahn. They first noticed that the palpitations associated with some forms of pain did not synchronize with those of the heart rate they monitored...

Obesity link to lack of sleep suggested by brain scans

Date: Aug-07-2013
Brain scans of people who have had a sleepless night versus those who slept well have revealed an effect on decision making about food - sleeplessness makes you want junk food. The researchers decided to look into areas of the brain they knew were related to decision making and reward. So they took powerful pictures - using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - to reveal activity in: The frontal lobe - governs decision making Deep-brain reward centres - involved in response to food...