Health News

High Filtration Fitted Face Masks Protect Health Care Workers Who Work In High Risk Settings Or During A Pandemic

Date: Feb-27-2013
Health care workers who consistently wear special fitted face masks while on duty are much less likely to get clinical respiratory and bacterial infections, according to new research led by University of New South Wales (UNSW) academics. The results, published in The American Journal of Critical Care Medicine, are particularly significant with the threat of possible pandemics and severe flu seasons, such as the current outbreak in the United States...

Iron Intake May Help To Protect Women Against PMS

Date: Feb-27-2013
Women who reported eating a diet rich in iron were 30 to 40 percent less likely to develop pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) than women who consumed lower amounts, in a study reported this week by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences and Harvard. It is one of the first to evaluate whether dietary mineral intake is associated with PMS development...

Eat Too Much? Maybe It's In The Blood

Date: Feb-27-2013
Bone marrow cells that produce brain-derived eurotrophic factor (BDNF), known to affect regulation of food intake, travel to part of the hypothalamus in the brain where they "fine-tune" appetite, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Shiga University of Medical Science in Otsu, Shiga, Japan, in a report that appears online in the journal Nature Communications. "We knew that blood cells produced BDNF," said Dr...

Screening Method Created To Expedite The Development Of New Drugs In The Fight Against Tropical Diseases

Date: Feb-27-2013
A novel tool exploits baker's yeast to expedite the development of new drugs to fight multiple tropical diseases, including malaria, schistosomiasis, and African sleeping sickness. The unique screening method uses yeasts which have been genetically engineered to express parasite and human proteins to identify chemical compounds that target disease-causing parasites but do not affect their human hosts. Parasitic diseases affect millions of people annually, often in the most deprived parts of the world...

Bariatric Surgery Restores Pancreatic Function By Targeting Belly Fat

Date: Feb-27-2013
In a substudy of the STAMPEDE trial (Surgical Therapy And Medications Potentially Eradicate Diabetes Efficiently), Cleveland Clinic researchers have found that gastric bypass surgery reverses diabetes by uniquely restoring pancreatic function in moderately obese patients with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes. The two-year substudy evaluated the effects of bariatric surgery and intensive medical therapy on blood sugar levels, body composition, and pancreatic beta-cell function...

Atrial Fibrillation Risk Prediction Model For Women

Date: Feb-27-2013
Atrial fibrillation is the most common type of abnormal heart rhythm, affecting 2.5 million Americans. If left undetected or untreated, atrial fibrillation can lead to stroke. Determining who is at increased risk for atrial fibrillation has been difficult, especially among individuals without established heart disease. But now, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital have devised and tested a simple atrial fibrillation risk prediction model, based on six easily obtained factors: a woman's age, height, weight, blood pressure, alcohol consumption and smoking history...

New Mouse Research May Lead To Liver Stem Cell Therapy For Chronic Liver Disease In Humans

Date: Feb-27-2013
For decades scientists around the world have attempted to regenerate primary liver cells known as hepatocytes because of their numerous biomedical applications, including hepatitis research, drug metabolism and toxicity studies, as well as transplantation for cirrhosis and other chronic liver conditions. But no lab in the world has been successful in identifying and growing liver stem cells in culture -- using any available technique - until now...

AIDS Impairs The Ability To Recognize Emotions In Others

Date: Feb-27-2013
People with HIV are less able to recognise facial emotion than non-infected people finds a study published in the launch edition of BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Psychology. Reduction in their ability to recognise fear in others is linked to a similar loss in immediate recall, while those with a lower general neurocognitive performance also had a reduced ability to recognise happiness. The mechanism behind recognition of facial emotion is complex, involving many different areas of the brain, including the frontostriatal pathway and amygdala...

Researchers Identify Forerunners Of Inner-Ear Cells That Enable Hearing

Date: Feb-27-2013
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a group of progenitor cells in the inner ear that can become the sensory hair cells and adjacent supporting cells that enable hearing. Studying these progenitor cells could someday lead to discoveries that help millions of Americans suffering from hearing loss due to damaged or impaired sensory hair cells. "It's well known that, in mammals, these specialized sensory cells don't regenerate after damage," said Alan Cheng, MD, assistant professor of otolaryngology...

People Substantially Under-Estimate Their Alcohol Consumption In England

Date: Feb-27-2013
Alcohol consumption could be much higher than previously thought, with more than three quarters of people in England drinking in excess of the recommended daily alcohol limit, according to a new paper in the European Journal of Public Health. The study, conducted by researchers in the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, is the first to investigate the potential public health implications related to the under-reporting of alcohol consumption. International studies have shown that self-reported alcohol consumption only accounts for between 40 and 60 per cent of alcohol sales...