Health News

High blood pressure risk and playing college football linked

Date: Jul-30-2013
College football players, especially linemen, may develop high blood pressure over the course of their first season, according to a small study in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation. Researchers documented higher blood pressure levels among 113 first-year college players. Only one player had already been diagnosed with hypertension before the season and 27 percent had a family history of hypertension. At post-season, researchers noted:  47 percent of players were considered pre-hypertensive, while   14 percent had stage 1 hypertension...

Mathematical biologists study how to best prevent bullet deaths

Date: Jul-30-2013
Aiming to quell heated national debate about gun control with factual answers, two UC Irvine mathematicians have designed parameters to measure how to best prevent both one-on-one killings and mass shootings in the United States. Their paper appears in the journal PLOS ONE. "It's time to bring a scientific framework to this problem," said lead author Dominik Wodarz, a mathematical biologist who works on disease and evolutionary dynamics...

Hope for motion sickness victims: Key neurons identified that sense unexpected movement

Date: Jul-30-2013
It happens to all of us at least once each winter in Montreal. You're walking on the sidewalk and before you know it you are slipping on a patch of ice hidden under a dusting of snow. Sometimes you fall. Surprisingly often you manage to recover your balance and walk away unscathed. McGill researchers now understand what's going on in the brain when you manage to recover your balance in these situations. And it is not just a matter of good luck. Prof...

Research shows that people are remaining healthier later in life

Date: Jul-30-2013
A new study, conducted by David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics, shows that, even as life expectancy has increased over the past two decades, people have become increasingly healthier later in life. "With the exception of the year or two just before death, people are healthier than they used to be," Cutler said. "Effectively, the period of time in which we're in poor health is being compressed until just before the end of life. So where we used to see people who are very, very sick for the final six or seven years of their life, that's now far less common...

Our perception affects how damaging we deem willful acts to be

Date: Jul-30-2013
How harmful we perceive an act to be depends on whether we see the act as intentional, reveals new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The new research shows that people significantly overestimate the monetary cost of intentional harm, even when they are given a financial incentive to be accurate. "The law already recognizes intentional harm as more wrong than unintentional harm," explain researchers Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske of Princeton University...

Novel mechanism identified in host-pathogen gastroenteritis interactions

Date: Jul-30-2013
A seafood contaminant that thrives in brackish water during the summer works like a spy to infiltrate cells and quickly open communication channels to sicken the host, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center report. Vibrio parahaemolyticus bacteria, which cause gastroenteritis, inject proteins called effectors into host cells. One of those effectors, VopQ, almost immediately starts to disrupt the important process of autophagy via a novel channel-forming mechanism, the scientists report in the investigation available online at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

Tracking variability in a bacterial population means looking beyond averages

Date: Jul-30-2013
As a result of the variable nature of gene expression, genetically identical cells inhabiting the same environment can vary significantly in their numbers of key enzymes, which in turn results in strikingly different cellular behaviors. This cell-to-cell variability can manifest in the form of anything from differences in growth rate, to the specific biochemical pathways used and the types of metabolic byproducts produced by each cell...

Researchers uncover evolutionary pathway of monogamy in humans

Date: Jul-30-2013
The threat of infants being killed by unrelated males is the key driver of monogamy in humans and other primates. The study by academics from UCL, University of Manchester, University of Oxford and University of Auckland, is the first to reveal this evolutionary pathway for the emergence of pair living. The team also found that following the emergence of monogamy males are more likely to care for their offspring. Where fathers care for young, not only can they protect infants from other males, but they can also share the burden of childcare...

The recession hits those with mental health problems harder

Date: Jul-30-2013
Since the start of the recession, the rate of unemployment for people with mental health problems has risen more than twice as much than for people without mental health problems, according to new research from King's College London. The authors warn that, across Europe, people with mental health problems have been disproportionately affected by the economic crisis, further increasing social exclusion amongst this vulnerable group. Published in PLOS ONE, the study also found that this gap in employment rates was even greater for men and for those with low levels of education...

Teens' kidney transplants more likely to fail

Date: Jul-30-2013
Adolescents who have their first kidney transplant between 14 and 16 years of age could have a higher risk of transplant failure, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers from the University of Florida, Gainesville, analyzed 168,809 patients between 1987 and 2010. All participants had their first kidney transplant and their ages ranged up to 55. Data was analyzed from the Organ Procurement Transplantation Network Standard Transplant Analysis and Research Database...