Health News

Once daily injection of teduglutide offers hope for short-bowel syndrome patients

Date: Jul-22-2013
A new drug, teduglutide, offers significant relief for patients with short-bowel syndrome intestinal failure who are reliant on intravenous nutrition, according to a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Patients with this relatively rare condition experience massive bowel loss and are unable to absorb nutrients, vitamins and water from digested foods. They rely on parenteral nutrition, or intravenous feeding, to deliver their daily nutrients...

New way to measure cumulative effect of head hits in football

Date: Jul-22-2013
Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have developed a new way to measure the cumulative effect of impacts to the head incurred by football players. The metric, called Risk Weighted Cumulative Exposure (RWE), can capture players' exposure to the risk of concussion over the course of a football season by measuring the frequency and magnitude of all impacts, said senior author of the study Joel Stitzel, Ph.D., chair of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest Baptist and associate head of the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences...

Gut microbes influence host species evolution

Date: Jul-22-2013
There was a time when we thought the sum of the all the cells in our body, as mapped in our DNA, is what defines our living, breathing bodies. Then we discovered that inside us, mostly in our guts, live huge colonies of microbes, that are essential partners in keeping us alive and well. The mutually beneficial partnership is known as symbiosis. And now scientists in the US reveal further astonishing evidence that runs contrary to current understanding...

The malignant march of cancer cells slowed by thwarting protein production

Date: Jul-22-2013
Protein production or translation is tightly coupled to a highly conserved stress response that cancer cells rely on for survival and proliferation, according to Whitehead Institute researchers. In mouse models of cancer, targeted therapeutic inhibition of translation disrupts this survival response, dramatically slowing tumor growth and potentially rendering drug-resistant tumors vulnerable to other therapies...

Workplace bullying rife for unattractive people

Date: Jul-22-2013
It's common knowledge that high school can be a cruel environment where attractive students are considered "popular," and unattractive kids often get bullied. And, while that type of petty behavior is expected to vanish with adulthood, new research proves it does not. Colleagues can be just as immature as classmates. The study by Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, and Brent Scott from Michigan State University, is the first to link attractiveness to cruelty in the workplace...

Nicotine exposure contributes to a greater vulnerability to alcohol abuse

Date: Jul-22-2013
Smoking is a well-known risk factor for subsequent alcohol abuse, but the mechanisms underlying this link are unknown. Now researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Neuron show in a study conducted in rats that even a single exposure to nicotine temporarily changes how the brain's reward system responds to alcohol and increases the reinforcing properties of alcohol via stress hormones...

Honeybees adversely affected by widely used pesticides

Date: Jul-22-2013
Forthcoming research in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry analyzes the physiological effects of three separate pesticides on honey bees (Apis mellifera). An international research team - Drs. Stephan Caravalho, Luc Belzunces and colleagues from Universidade Federal de Lavras in Brazil and Institut Nationale de la Recherche Agronomique in France - concludes that the absence of mortality does not always indicate functional integrity...

The stroke-lowering benefits of regular physical activity

Date: Jul-22-2013
Breaking a sweat while working out regularly may reduce your risk of stroke, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. str In a study of more than 27,000 Americans, 45 years and older who were followed for an average of 5.7 years, researchers found:  One-third of participants reported being inactive, exercising less than once a week.   Inactive people were 20 percent more likely to experience a stroke or mini-stroke than those who exercised at moderate to vigorous intensity (enough to break a sweat) at least four times a week...

The phenomenon of symmetric cell division

Date: Jul-22-2013
Writing in his journal about the scientists of his era, Henry David Thoreau bemoaned their blindness to significant phenomena: "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." More than 150 years later, his words still ring true. For more than a century, scientists have been peering through microscopes, carefully watching cells divide. Until now, however, none has actually seen how human cells manage to divide into two equally-sized daughter cells during mitosis...

Stronger bonds often formed in long-distance relationships compared to face-to-face relationships

Date: Jul-22-2013
The long-distance relationship has plagued college students and people relocated for work for ages. These relationships are seen as destined to fail, but are they actually creating stronger bonds than a geographically closer relationship? A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that people in long-distance relationships often have stronger bonds from more constant, and deeper, communication than normal relationships...