Health News

Guilt, innocence and last meals on death row

Date: Jan-27-2014
Can last meals reveal more about individuals on death row than their taste preference? Some have argued there is significance embedded in death row last meal decisions. Famously, Ricky Ray Rector asked to save his untouched pecan pie for after his execution. This request sparked significant discussion about Rector's competency - on the basis of his food request. Similarly, in a documentary film about last suppers, artists Bigert and Bergstrom have claimed a connection between whether or not an individual choses to have a last meal and his or her guilt.

Donors should have access to their own raw data provided to biobanks

Date: Jan-27-2014
Scientists have called for data held in biobanks to be made accessible to the people donating material and data to them. In a paper published in Science, Jeantine Lunshof and George Church from Harvard Medical School and Barbara Prainsack from King's College London write that donors should have unrestricted access to data derived from their own material and that advanced technology means allowing such access is today a question of will rather than feasibility.Databanks containing information and biological materials from individuals are a crucial resource for medical and other research.

Novel approach to stay a step ahead of breast cancer

Date: Jan-27-2014
Cancer isn't a singular disease, even when talking about one tumor. A tumor consists of a varied mix of cells whose complicated arrangement changes all the time, especially and most vexingly as doctors and patients do their best to fight it. Researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports have now developed a tool to help them predict which direction a tumor is most likely to go and how it might respond to chemotherapy.

Sexual selection enhances ability of offspring to cope with infection

Date: Jan-27-2014
Offspring from female mice who mate with their preferred male are better able to cope with an experimental infection compared to those of females mated with non-preferred males, according to new results just published. The findings by scientists at the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology at the Vetmeduni Vienna have been published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

How will the Affordable Care Act affect cancer survivors?

Date: Jan-27-2014
In 2010, the total cost of cancer care in the United States reached $125 billion. Globally, the economic toll from cancer is nearly 20 percent higher than the leading cause of death, heart disease. Cancer patients are also living longer today, which is further increasing the cost of their continued care. As the health insurance exchanges have opened and heated debate about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continues, many questions remain, including the $125 billion question: "How will the ACA affect the most expensive disease: cancer?

New genes spring and spread from non-coding DNA

Date: Jan-27-2014
"Where do new genes come from?" is a long-standing question in genetics and evolutionary biology. A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, published in Science Express, shows that new genes are created from non-coding DNA more rapidly than expected."This shows very clearly that genes are being born from ancestral sequences all the time," said David Begun, professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis and senior author on the paper.Geneticists have long puzzled about how completely new genes appear.

How age affects our views of anti-social behavior

Date: Jan-27-2014
A study of interpretations of anti-social behaviour (ASB) found a significant gap between the views of different age groups - with older people more likely than younger people to interpret public behaviour as anti-social, particularly when associated with young people.More than 80% of adults thought swearing in a public place was ASB compared with less than 43% of young people, and more than 60% of adults listed cycling or skateboarding on the street compared with less than 8% of young people.40% of adults saw young people hanging around as ASB compared with 9% of teenagers.

Feelings of guilt may be eased by telling the whole truth

Date: Jan-27-2014
People feel worse when they tell only part of the truth about a transgression compared to people who come completely clean, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.Cheaters who confessed just part of their wrongdoing were also judged more harshly by others than cheaters who didn't confess at all, according to five experiments involving 4,167 people from all over the United States. The article appears in the February issue of APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Targeting symptoms, rather than disorders, might help to lessen work impact of mental health issues

Date: Jan-27-2014
Symptoms such as insomnia and emotional distress account for much of the work impact of mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, reports a study in the February issue of Medical Care. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.Many adults who don't have a formal psychiatric diagnosis still have mental health symptoms that interfere with full participation in the workforce, according to the new research by Kajal Lahiri, PhD, Pinka Chatterji, PhD, and graduate student Souvik Banerjee of University at Albany, SUNY.

Research into timing mechanisms for memory formation

Date: Jan-27-2014
Neuroscientists from the University of Leicester, in collaboration with the Department of Neurosurgery at the University California Los Angeles (UCLA), are to reveal details of how the brain determines the timing at which neurons in specific areas fire to create new memories.This research exploits the unique opportunity of recording multiple single-neurons in patients suffering from epilepsy refractory to medication that are implanted with intracranial electrodes for clinical reasons.