Health News

Increased Sleep Could Reduce Rate Of Adolescent Obesity: Each Additional Hour Of Sleep Is Associated With A Lower BMI

Date: Apr-10-2013
Increasing the number of hours of sleep adolescents get each night may reduce the prevalence of adolescent obesity, according to a new study by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Results of the study show that fewer hours of sleep is associated with greater increases in adolescent body mass index (BMI) for participants between 14 and 18-years-old. The findings suggest that increasing sleep duration to 10 hours per day, especially for those in the upper half of the BMI distribution, could help to reduce the prevalence of adolescent obesity...

Risk For Diabetes Increases With Higher Mercury Levels

Date: Apr-10-2013
A new study found that higher levels of mercury exposure in young adults increased their risks for type 2 diabetes later in life by 65 percent. The study, led by Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington epidemiologist Ka He, is the first to establish the link between mercury and diabetes in humans. The study paints a complicated nutritional picture because the main source of mercury in humans comes from the consumption of fish and shellfish, nearly all of which contain traces of mercury...

Altering Calcium Build-Up In Blood Vessels May Be New Treatment Method For Heart Disease

Date: Apr-10-2013
The cells responsible for creating calcium build-up in vessel walls - resulting in heart disease - have now been identified in a new study published in PLOS Biology. Atherosclerosis - or hardening of the arteries - is the main cause of heart disease. It occurs because of calcium build-up in the blood vessels - resulting in hard and narrow arteries. This then leads to problems such as blood flow obstruction and heart issues...

Metabolic Syndrome Prevented, Treated In Mice By The Addition Of Intestinal Enzyme To Their Diets

Date: Apr-10-2013
Feeding an intestinal enzyme to mice kept on a high-fat diet appears to prevent the development of metabolic syndrome - a group of symptoms associated with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and fatty liver - and to reduce symptoms in mice that already had the condition. In their report published online in PNAS Early Edition, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators describe how dietary supplementation with intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP) reduced the inflammation believed to underlie metabolic syndrome by blocking a toxic molecule found on the surface of many bacteria...

Patients Follow Doctors Who Follow Preventive Health Practices

Date: Apr-10-2013
Patients are more likely to follow preventive health practices like getting a flu shot or mammography if their doctors do likewise, researchers at the University of British Columbia and in Israel have discovered. New research conducted at the University of British Columbia reveals that patients are more likely to follow recommended vaccination practices if their doctors also follow, compared to those who don't. Dr...

Alarm Fatigue Is Putting Patients' Lives At Risk

Date: Apr-10-2013
The constant beeping of medical devices in hospitals is causing "alarm fatigue" and putting patients' lives at risk. Hospital workers have become desensitized to the noise, which sometimes causes them to ignore the alarms, and has resulted in at least two dozen deaths each year, according to a new report by the Joint Commission, the national organization that accredits hospitals...

Researchers Identify Abnormally Expressed LincRNAs In Breast Cancer Patients

Date: Apr-10-2013
Once considered part of the "junk" of our genome, much of the DNA between protein-coding genes is now known to be transcribed. New findings by scientists at Fox Chase Cancer Center have identified several dozen transcripts known as lincRNAs, or long intergenic non-coding RNAs, that are dysregulated in breast cancer. The results, presented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013, offer both a new research path for better understanding of how breast cancer works and a new method for identifying lincRNAs that may contribute to tumorigenesis or regulation of other cancers...

The Social Nature Of Imitation Is Very Important And Challenging For Children With Autism

Date: Apr-10-2013
When a child with autism copies the actions of an adult, he or she is likely to omit anything "silly" about what they've just seen. In contrast, typically developing children will go out of their way to repeat each and every element of the behavior even as they may realize that parts of it don't make any sense. The findings, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, are the first to show that the social nature of imitation is very important and challenging for children with autism, the researchers say...

Stillbirth Rates Have Increased Significantly, Although Spontaneous Stillbirth Rates Have Not

Date: Apr-10-2013
The rate of stillbirths in British Columbia, Canada, increased by 31% over a decade, although the rate of spontaneous stillbirths did not increase, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Stillbirth rates, which had been declining for decades, have increased or plateaued in several industrialized countries. For example, rates in Australia have increased from 7.0 per 1000 total births in 2000 to 7.8 per 1000 in 2009 and in Canada, rates have increased from 6.0 per 1000 total births in 2000 to 7.1 per 1000 in 2009...

Combined HER2 Targeted Therapy Without Chemotherapy Will Likely Benefit Certain Breast Cancer Patients

Date: Apr-10-2013
Is the era of targeted therapy for breast cancer at hand? It could be, said experts at the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center at Baylor College of Medicine - at least for a certain population of women. In a report that appears online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the researchers have shown that a subset of breast cancer patients who have tumors overexpressing a protein called the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2 positive) may benefit from a combination of targeted treatments that zero in on the breast cancer cells themselves...