Health News

Impaired new learning identified in patients with Parkinson disease

Date: Mar-23-2014
Kessler Foundation scientists collaborated with colleagues in Spain to study memory and learning in patients with Parkinson Disease (PD). They found that the Parkinson group's ability to learn new information was significantly poorer when compared with the control group. The article was published ahead of print in Movement Disorders.Lead author Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD, is the Foundation's director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience & Traumatic Brain Injury Research; John DeLuca, PhD, is senior VP of Research & Training.

Exercise and occasional drinking may protect against visual impairment

Date: Mar-23-2014
You stay physically active, but you are also fond of the occasional drink? Not to worry, you may be doing your eyes a favor, according to new research in the journal Ophthalmology."Visual impairment" - loss of sight caused by eye disease, trauma or a congenital or degenerative condition that cannot be corrected by glasses - is on the rise.Projections estimate that by 2020 there will be at least 4 million people in the US with visual impairment - a 70% increase from 2000.

Language development aided by social feedback loop

Date: Mar-23-2014
Verbal interactions between parents and children create a social feedback loop important for language development, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. That loop appears to be experienced less frequently and is diminished in strength in interactions with autistic children."This loop likely has cascading impacts over the course of a child's development," says psychological scientist and study author Anne S. Warlaumont of the University of California, Merced.

New DNA test offers miscarriage clues

Date: Mar-23-2014
New research shows an alternative DNA test offers clinically relevant genetic information to identify why a miscarriage may have occurred years earlier. Researchers were able to identify chromosomal variants and abnormalities in nearly 50 percent of the samples. This first-of-its-kind study was conducted by researchers from Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The results were published in the March issue of Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology.

Social groups alleviate depression

Date: Mar-23-2014
Building a strong connection to a social group helps clinically depressed patients recover and helps prevent relapse, according to a new study.For the paper, (CIFAR) Senior Fellow Alexander Haslam, lead author Tegan Cruwys and their colleagues at the University of Queensland conducted two studies of patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety. The patients either joined a community group with activities such as sewing, yoga, sports and art, or partook in group therapy at a psychiatric hospital.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia: Editorial published by North Shore-LIJ Cancer Institute doctors

Date: Mar-23-2014
Two North Shore-LIJ Cancer Institute doctors, world-renowned for their research in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), weigh in on a German study of a new drug therapy for CLL in the New England Journal of Medicine, the North Shore-LIJ Health System has announced.CLL is one of the most common forms of blood cancers, usually affecting those later in life.

Study identifies gene fusion as likely cause of rare type of thyroid cancer

Date: Mar-23-2014
In a scientific first, the fusion of two genes, ALK and EML4, has been identified as the genetic driver in an aggressive type of thyroid cancer, according to a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen).These groundbreaking findings are based on genetic sequencing of tumor cells from a 62-year-old patient with an aggressive tall cell variant of papillary thyroid cancer, according to the study published in the World Journal of Surgery, the official journal of the International Society of Surgery.

Evaluating and monitoring participants' reactions to learning of higher Alzheimer's disease risk status

Date: Mar-23-2014
A new clinical trial will soon begin testing whether early medical intervention in people at risk for Alzheimer's can slow down progression of disease pathology before symptoms emerge, as outlined in Science Translational Medicine. For the first time, people with no Alzheimer's disease symptoms will be told of their risk status before being asked to join the randomized controlled trial. As part of the overall prevention trial, Penn Medicine neurodegenerative ethics experts will monitor how learning about their risk of developing Alzheimer's impacts trial participants.

Vitamin D supplements 'do not reduce depression'

Date: Mar-23-2014
Past studies have suggested that vitamin D deficiency may lead to depression. In response, other studies propose that increasing vitamin D levels with supplements may reduce depressive symptoms. But new research, published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, has found no evidence that vitamin D supplements reduce depression.The research team, led by Dr. Jonathan A. Schaffer of the Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) in New York, NY, conducted a systematic review of clinical trials that looked at how vitamin D supplementation affected depression.

Improved understanding of antibodies that may cut risk of HIV infection

Date: Mar-23-2014
What immune response should a vaccine elicit to prevent HIV infection? Two studies published online bring scientists closer to answering this question by identifying previously unrecognized attributes of antibodies that appear to have reduced the risk of HIV infection in the only clinical trial to show efficacy, albeit modest, of an experimental vaccine regimen in people.Earlier analyses of the results of that trial, known as RV144, suggested that antibodies to sites within a part of the HIV envelope called V1V2 correlated with reduced risk of HIV infection.