Health News

Patterns of cancer screening in Appalachian women examined

Date: Jan-24-2014
A new study by University of Kentucky researchers shows that women who never or rarely screen for breast cancer are also unlikely to receive screening for cervical cancer. The study also identified four key barriers independently associated with the lack of these cancer screenings in Appalachian women.Published in Women & Health, the study focused on six rural counties in Appalachian Kentucky. Researchers conducted in-person interviews with 222 women to assess their adherence (or lack thereof) to cancer screening guidelines.

Adults still think about numbers like kids

Date: Jan-24-2014
Children understand numbers differently than adults. For kids, one and two seem much further apart then 101 and 102, because two is twice as big as one, and 102 is just a little bigger than 101. It's only after years of schooling that we're persuaded to see the numbers in both sets as only one integer apart on a number line.Now Dror Dotan, a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University's School of Education and Sagol School of Neuroscience and Prof.

Health disparities among U.S. African-American and Hispanic men cost economy more than $450 billion over four years

Date: Jan-24-2014
African-American men incurred $341.8 billion in excess medical costs due to health inequalities between 2006 and 2009, and Hispanic men incurred an additional $115 billion over the four-year period, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study, published this week in the International Journal of Men's Health, looks at the direct and indirect costs associated with health inequalities and projects the potential cost savings of eliminating these disparities for minority men in the U.S.

Survival of patients with interleukin-2 treated metastatic melanoma may be improved by personalized tumor vaccines

Date: Jan-24-2014
Metastatic melanoma has a poor prognosis, but treatment with high-dose interleukin-2 (IL2) can extend survival. Now, a combination of IL2 therapy and activation of patients' immune systems using personalized vaccines made from their own tumor cells has been shown to improve survival rates even more than IL2 alone, according to a new article in Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals website.

Dangerous neighborhoods breed aggressive children

Date: Jan-24-2014
Children around the world who grow up in dangerous neighborhoods exhibit more aggressive behavior, says a new Duke University-led study that is the first to examine the topic across a wide range of countries.Many U.S. studies have described a link between dangerous neighborhoods and children's aggressive behavior. Authors of the new study wanted to determine whether the pattern held true in other cultures.

Blocking NMDA receptors to limit neurotoxicity

Date: Jan-24-2014
Structural biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and collaborators at Emory University have obtained important scientific results likely to advance efforts to develop new drugs targeting NMDA receptors in the brain.NMDA (N-methyl D-aspartate) receptors are found on the surface of many nerve cells and are involved in signaling that is essential in basic brain functions including learning and memory formation. Problems with their function have been implicated in depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, as well as brain damage caused by stroke.

Improved protein capture a boon for drug manufacturers

Date: Jan-24-2014
Rice University scientists have created a way to fine tune a process critical to the pharmaceutical industry that could save a lot of time and money.A combination of the Rice technique that provides pinpoint locations for single proteins and a theory that describes those proteins' interactions with other molecules could widen a bottleneck in the manufacture of drugs by making the process of isolating proteins five times more efficient.The work by Rice chemist Christy Landes and her team will be reported online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The dangers of texting whilst walking

Date: Jan-24-2014
Texting on your phone while walking alters posture and balance according to a study published in PLOS ONE by Siobhan Schabrun and colleagues from the University of Queensland.Sending text messages has become an increasingly popular form of communication, but little is known about how sending text messages impacts our lives. Scientists studied the effect of mobile phone use on body movement while walking in 26 healthy individuals. Each person walked at a comfortable pace in a straight line over a distance of approximately 8.

Synthetic marijuana likely to result in more illness

Date: Jan-24-2014
The U.S. should prepare for more outbreaks of illness and possible deaths from designer drugs including synthetic marijuana, according to the new research from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, illustrates a wide range of dangers associated with these increasingly popular drugs.In the fall of 2013, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment learned of an unusually large increase in emergency department visits related to synthetic marijuana use in the Denver metro area. Between Aug. 21 and Sept.

Blood-forming stem cell function promoted by estrogen

Date: Jan-24-2014
Scientists have known for years that stem cells in male and female sexual organs are regulated differently by their respective hormones. In a surprising discovery, researchers at the Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) and Baylor College of Medicine have found that stem cells in the blood-forming system - which is similar in both sexes - also are regulated differently by hormones, with estrogen proving to be an especially prolific promoter of stem cell self-renewal.