Health News
Date: Jul-26-2012
Birds in the crow family can figure out how to extract a treat from a half-empty glass surprisingly well, and young children show similar patterns of behavior until they reach about eight years old, at which point their performance surpasses that of the birds. The full report is published July 25 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. In the current study, led by Nicola Clayton of the University of Cambridge, researchers used a version of the riddle commonly referred to as "Aesop's fable" to test associative learning and problem-solving ability...
Date: Jul-26-2012
Modern lifestyles are generally quite different from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, a fact that some claim as the cause of the current rise in global obesity, but new results published in the open access journal PLoS ONE find that there is no difference between the energy expenditure of modern hunter-gatherers and Westerners, casting doubt on this theory. The research team behind the study, led by Herman Pontzer of Hunter College in New York City, along with David Raichlen of the University of Arizona and Brian M...
Date: Jul-26-2012
The scientific community has always wanted to know why people who eat high-salt diets are prone to developing medical problems such as kidney stones and osteoporosis. Medical researchers at the University of Alberta may have solved this puzzle through their work with animal lab models and cells. Principal investigator Todd Alexander and his team recently discovered an important link between sodium and calcium. These both appear to be regulated by the same molecule in the body...
Date: Jul-26-2012
A study from researchers in Switzerland found that colonoscopy with polypectomy significantly reduces colorectal cancer incidence and colorectal cancer-related death in the general population. A total of 12 colorectal cancer cases were identified in the screening group of 1,912 patients and 213 cases of colorectal cancer were found in the non-screened group of 20,774 patients. One of the 12 persons of the screened individuals with a colorectal cancer and 51 of the 213 persons of the non-screened individuals with a colorectal cancer died because of their cancers...
Date: Jul-26-2012
Just like populations of human beings, clusters of living cells are made up of individuals possessing unique qualities. Traditional analytic techniques however evaluate cells in tissue aggregates, often overlooking single-cell nuances that can offer valuable clues concerning health and disease. ASU Senior Scientist and Professor, Deirdre Meldrum, and her colleagues at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute are pioneering a kind of miniaturized laboratory for the investigation of single cells...
Date: Jul-26-2012
A Global Scientific Strategy Towards an HIV Cure, developed by a group of 34 leading HIV scientists and clinicians on behalf of the International AIDS Society (IAS), was launched in Washington DC on 19th July, 2012, ahead of the XIX International AIDS Conference amid renewed optimism that prospects for finding an HIV cure are increasing. The vision for the IAS strategy is that a safe, affordable and scalable cure for HIV will improve the health and quality-of-life for those with living with the infection, and reduce the risk of transmission of virus to those not infected...
Date: Jul-26-2012
A 500-year-old frozen Incan mummy suffered from a bacterial lung infection at the time of its death, as revealed by a novel proteomics method that shows evidence of an active pathogenic infection in an ancient sample for the first time. The full report is published in the open access journal PLoS ONE. Detecting diseases in ancient remains is often fraught with difficulty, especially because of contamination...
Date: Jul-26-2012
Chronic exposure to dim light at night can lead to depressive symptoms in rodents -- but these negative effects can be reversed simply by returning to a standard light-dark cycle, a new study suggests. While hamsters exposed to light at night for four weeks showed evidence of depressive symptoms, those symptoms essentially disappeared after about two weeks if they returned to normal lighting conditions. Even changes in the brain that occurred after hamsters lived with chronic light at night reversed themselves after returning to a more normal light cycle...
Date: Jul-26-2012
The traditional approach to psychiatric diagnosis is based on grouping patients on the basis of symptom clusters. This approach to diagnosis has a number of problems, as symptoms are not necessarily specific to a single diagnosis. Symptoms may vary among patients with a particular diagnosis, and there are no clear diagnostic biomarkers or tests for psychiatry as there are for other areas of medicine. With this in mind, Steve Chang, along with colleagues from Duke University, introduces a new classification scheme for psychiatric symptoms based on the state of a dysfunctional neural circuit...
Date: Jul-26-2012
Population-wide levels of HIV virus dropped substantially between 2011 and May 2012 in a rural part of southwestern Uganda, the site of two community health campaigns led by doctors at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (SFGH) and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The campaign, which was part of the Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health (SEARCH) Collaboration, involved free counseling, testing for HIV and other diseases, linkage to care and treatment...