Health News

Children have skewed view of gender segregation

Date: Jan-13-2014
Children believe the world is far more segregated by gender than it actually is, implies a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar.Jennifer Watling Neal and colleagues examined classroom friendships in five U.S. elementary schools. Their findings, published in the journal Child Development, found boys and girls had no problems being friends together but for some reason had a perception that only boys played with boys and girls played with girls."Kids believe gender plays a larger role in friendship that it actually does," said Neal, assistant professor of psychology.

New study sheds light on most common and deadly form of brain cancer

Date: Jan-13-2014
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and deadly form of primary malignant brain cancer accounting for approximately 15% of all brain tumours and occurring mostly in adults between the ages of 45 and 70. The aggressive recurrent nature of this cancer is only temporarily contained by combined surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. The recurrence of GBM is usually fatal, resulting in an average patient survival time of less than two years.

Type 1 diabetes in mice averted with cancer drug

Date: Jan-13-2014
A new international study led by the University of Copenhagen in Denmark has taken a significant step toward the prevention of type 1 diabetes, by showing how low doses of a cancer drug stopped it developing in disease-prone mice.The treatment also protected the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas from being destroyed.Dr. Dan Ploug Christensen, of the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues, report their findings in a recent online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Improved Regulations to Protect Human Research Subjects Would Reduce Burden on IRBs While Better Protecting Study Participants

Date: Jan-13-2014
Proposed updates to federal regulations that protect human research subjects need additional clarification when applied to the social and behavioral sciences, says a new report from the National Research Council. The report reviews an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) from the U.S.

Comparing long-term outcomes between diastolic and systolic heart failure patients

Date: Jan-13-2014
A new study by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) found comparable long-term outcomes between congestive heart failure patients with preserved ejection fraction commonly known as "diastolic heart failure" and congestive heart failure with reduced ejection fraction also known as "systolic heart failure." The findings are published online in The American Journal of Cardiology.Patients with normal percentage of blood leaving the heart each time it contracts and symptoms of heart failure are considered to have diastolic heart failure.

Drug shortages still have major impact on patient care

Date: Jan-13-2014
According to newly published results from a survey of pharmacy directors, drug shortages remain a serious problem for patient safety. Nearly half of the responding directors reported adverse events at their facilities due to drug shortages, including patient deaths.The survey was conducted by Northwestern Medicine® researchers in partnership with MedAssets, as part of the MedAssets Pharmacy Coalition to better understand how drug shortages affect patient outcomes.

Advanced radiation therapy for head and neck cancer may be better than traditional radiation at preventing side effects and cancer recurrence

Date: Jan-13-2014
Patients with head and neck cancer who are treated with an advanced form of radiation therapy may experience fewer side effects and be less likely to die from their disease than patients who receive standard radiation therapy. That is the finding of an analysis published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study establishes so-called intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) as both a safe and beneficial treatment for patients with head and neck cancer.

Caffeine may boost long-term memory

Date: Jan-13-2014
Numerous studies have suggested that caffeine has many health benefits. Now, new research suggests that a dose of caffeine after a learning session may help to boost long-term memory. This is according to a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.The research team, led by Daniel Borota of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, notes that although previous research has analyzed the effects of caffeine as a cognitive enhancer, whether caffeine can impact long-term memory has not been studied in detail.

Socioeconomic status is predictor of higher risk of disease and death after heart attack

Date: Jan-13-2014
As people get older, their bodies wear down and become less resilient. In old age, it's common for people to become "clinically frail," and this "frailty syndrome" is emerging in the field of public health as a powerful predictor of healthcare use and death.Now researchers Vicki Myers and Prof. Yariv Gerber of the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the School of Public Health at Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and colleagues have found that poor people are more than twice as likely as the wealthy to become frail after a heart attack.

Negative feedback makes cells 'sensitive'

Date: Jan-13-2014
New research has shown that negative feedback loops in cell signalling systems can be essential for a cell's ability to perceive the strength of a growth stimulus. Cells lacking the feedback loop became insensitive to the level of the stimulus in a manner similar to a cancerous cell displaying unrestrained growth.Living cells need to sense changes in their environment reliably in order to make appropriate decisions. The biomolecular machinery they use to perform these tasks is surprisingly noisy.