Health News

Safeguarding children in England: primary care needs to 'wake-up' to domestic abuse

Date: Mar-10-2014
Researchers looking at how healthcare professionals deal with domestic violence cases have identified that GPs, practice nurses and practice managers are uncertain about how to respond to the exposure of children to domestic violence.With at least 1.2 million women and 784,000 men experiencing domestic violence and abuse in England and Wales each year, the negative effect on families and children can be far-reaching. Childhood exposure to domestic violence and abuse can result in long-term behavioural, mental health and education problems.

Iron deficiency important to assess in children adopted from institutional settings

Date: Mar-10-2014
Iron deficiency predicts lower IQ scores and poor higher-order thinking skills in children adopted from institutional settings like orphanages, according to a new longitudinal study.The study analyzed data on 55 children adopted from international institutions, with a focus on nutritional status. Conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota, the research appears in the journal Child Development.

Ludwig researchers show that infecting just 1 tumor with a virus could boost the systemic effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy

Date: Mar-09-2014
A Ludwig Cancer Research study suggests that the clinical efficacy of checkpoint blockade, a powerful new strategy to harness the immune response to treat cancers, might be dramatically improved if combined with oncolytic virotherapy, an investigational intervention that employs viruses to destroy tumors.

Genetic cause found for premature ovarian failure

Date: Mar-09-2014
The results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Human and Molecular Genetics journals, demonstrate for the first time that mutation in STAG3 gene is the major cause of human fertility disorders as it provokes a loss of function of the protein it encodes.STAG3 encodes a meiosis-specific subunit of the cohesin ring, the biological process through which, from a diploid somatic cell, a haploid cell or gamete is produced.

Biomarkers of cell death in Alzheimer's reverse course after symptom onset

Date: Mar-09-2014
Three promising biomarkers being studied to detect Alzheimer's disease in its early stages appear to undergo a surprising shift as patients develop symptoms of dementia, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report.Scientists use the biomarkers to assess brain changes linked to the disease in research volunteers.

New software automates and improves phylogenomics from next-generation sequencing data

Date: Mar-09-2014
To reconstruct phylogenetic trees from next-generation sequencing data using traditional methods requires a time-consuming combination of bioinformatic procedures including genome assembly, gene prediction, orthology identification and multiple alignment. As a consequence, more recently, scientists have relied on a simpler method where short sequence reads from each species are aligned directly to the genome sequence of a single reference sequence.The authors, Bertels, et. al.

Testis size matters for genome evolution

Date: Mar-09-2014
In many primates, females mate with multiple partners, causing an often-intense competition amongst males to pass along their DNA to be king of the genome as well as the jungle.In the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, author Alex Wong used a published sequence dataset from 55 species of primates to test for a correlation between molecular evolutionary rates across a genome (substitution rates) and testes weights, used in the study as a proxy for increased sperm production and competition.

Livestock can produce food that is better for the people and the planet

Date: Mar-09-2014
With one in seven humans undernourished, and with the challenges of population growth and climate change, the need for efficient food production has never been greater. Eight strategies to cut the environmental and economic costs of keeping livestock, such as cows, goats and sheep, while boosting the quantity and quality of the food produced have been outlined by an international team of scientists.

South Pacific island's earliest inhabitants relied primarily on foraging, not horticulture

Date: Mar-09-2014
Early Lapita inhabitants of Vanuatu, a South Pacific Island, ate fish, marine turtles, and wild or domestic animals, rather than relying on horticulture during early colonization, according to a study published March 5, 2014, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rebecca Kinaston from University of Otago in New Zealand and colleagues.

How does meeting on Facebook affect meeting face to face?

Date: Mar-09-2014
Studies have shown that individuals who are socially anxious prefer to communicate with others online rather than face to face. Social networking sites, such as Facebook, give them the opportunity to do just that. But how does this initial virtual interaction impact face-to-face interaction later on? A new study investigates.Researchers from Benedictine University at Mesa, AZ, and the Providence College in Rhode Island published their findings in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.