Health News

Correctional Staff Burnout Less Likely When Management Trusted

Date: Aug-21-2012
Correctional facility employees who trust supervisors and management are less likely to experience job burnout, a Wayne State University researcher has found. "Trust builds commitment and involvement in the job," said Eric Lambert, Ph.D., professor and chair of criminal justice in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, "but lack of trust leads to burnout and stresses people out...

Development Of 'All-Natural' Method For Studying Pancreatic Islets Aids Diabetes Research And Is Translatable To Other Diseases

Date: Aug-21-2012
Food isn't the only thing going organic these days. An 'all-natural' method for studying pancreatic islets, the small tissues responsible for insulin production and regulation in the body, has recently been developed by researchers at the University of Toronto's Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) to try to track metabolic changes in living tissues in 'real time' and without additional chemicals or drugs. It's an organically-minded approach that could lead to big changes in our understanding of diabetes and other diseases. Assistant Professor Jonathon V...

UPMC/Pitt Researchers Find PTSD-Concussion Link In Military

Date: Aug-21-2012
UPMC and University of Pittsburgh researchers this week announced an important finding: residual symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and concussions may be linked in military personnel who endure blast and/or blunt traumas. Anthony Kontos, Ph.D., assistant research director for the UPMC Sports Medicine Concussion Program, announced the concussion/PTSD study conclusions this week at the Military Health System Research Symposium held in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. With 27,169 participants from the U.S...

DNA - The Book: Next-Generation Sequencing Technology And A Novel Strategy To Encode 1,000 Times The Largest Data Size Previously Achieved In DNA

Date: Aug-21-2012
Although George Church's next book doesn't hit the shelves until Oct. 2, it has already passed an enviable benchmark: 70 billion copies - roughly triple the sum of the top 100 books of all time. And they fit on your thumbnail. That's because Church, the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a founding core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University, and his team encoded the book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, in DNA, which they then read and copied...

Study Reveals The Brain's Mysterious Switchboard Operator

Date: Aug-21-2012
A mysterious region deep in the human brain could be where we sort through the onslaught of stimuli from the outside world and focus on the information most important to our behavior and survival, Princeton University researchers have found. The researchers report in the journal Science that an area of our brain called the pulvinar regulates communication between clusters of brain cells as our brain focuses on the people and objects that need our attention...

From Functional Food To Modified-Risk Tobacco Products: Regulatory Science For Public Health

Date: Aug-21-2012
Consumers face a barrage of product claims each day. These claims create consumer expectation of safety and product performance and, assuming they are accurate, facilitate well informed choice. But increased scrutiny of claims, especially where the claim involves potential health outcomes, means that claim substantiation and the science behind it are more important than ever...

For Veterans With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, War Is Not Necessarily The Cause

Date: Aug-21-2012
Recent research carried out at Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University shows that surprisingly, the majority of soldiers exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome were suffering from poor mental health before they were posted to a war zone. A large-scale survey of the mental condition of military personnel before, during and after their posting to Afghanistan has proved thought-provoking. In total, 746 Danish soldiers took part in the survey...

Can Obesity Be Treated With Deep Brain Stimulation? Researchers Say Yes

Date: Aug-20-2012
A review article in the August issue of Neurosurgery, the official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, suggests that scientific advances in understanding the "addiction circuitry" of the brain could effectively treat obesity using deep brain stimulation (DBS). DBS is currently a successful treatment for Parkinson's disease, and could potentially be a new way to treat obesity by electrical brain stimulation targeting the "dysregulated reward circuitry", Dr. Alexander Taghva of Ohio State Univeristy and University of Southern California and colleagues revealed...

U.S. Physicians Commonly Have Symptoms Of Burnout

Date: Aug-20-2012
At least 45.8% of physicians have one symptom of burnout, according to a national survey of burnout in physicians from all specialty disciplines. The study is published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine. According to other studies, burnout may have an impact on the quality of care and elevate the risk for medical errors in addition to having adverse effects on physicians, such as problem drinking, broken relationships and thoughts of suicide. For their study, Tait D. Shanafelt, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn...

Psoriasis Treatments May Protect The Heart

Date: Aug-20-2012
A study published Online First in JAMA's journal Archives of Dermatology reveals that using tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors for treating psoriasis is linked to a considerably lower risk for heart attacks or myocardial infarction compared to other forms of treatment. Background information in the article states: "The effect of systemic treatment for psoriasis on cardiovascular disease has been largely unexplored...