Health News

The stressed brain soothed by nociceptin

Date: Jan-13-2014
Collaborating scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Camerino in Italy have published new findings on a system in the brain that naturally moderates the effects of stress. The findings confirm the importance of this stress-damping system, known as the nociceptin system, as a potential target for therapies against anxiety disorders and other stress-related conditions.

Infant cognition study offers new evidence that babies make inferences about social relationships

Date: Jan-13-2014
Even before babies have language skills or much information about social structures, they can infer whether others are likely to be friends by observing their likes and dislikes, a new U Chicago study on infant cognition has found. The results offer a new window into humans' earliest understanding of the social world around them and suggest that even nine-month-old infants can engage in reasoning about whether the people they observe are friends."This is some of the first evidence that young infants are tracking other people's social relationships," said Amanda L.

Possible key to drug resistance in Crohn's disease identified

Date: Jan-13-2014
Two-thirds to three-quarters of the estimated 700,000 Americans living with Crohn's disease, an autoimmune condition that can disrupt the entire gastrointestinal tract, will require surgery at some point during their life. Patients and physicians often turn to this surgical intervention after a patient develops resistance to current treatments, such as steroids.

New method established for studying RNA's regulatory 'footprint'

Date: Jan-13-2014
Increasingly, biologists have come to realize that RNA is not merely a transitional state between DNA and proteins but plays a major role in determining whether and how genes are turned into a protein product. Gaining a deeper understanding of RNA regulation can help scientists shed light on diseases that arise when this function goes awry.Biologists at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have teamed up to offer a new method for elucidating RNA regulation.

Messages designed to encourage weight loss may actually have the opposite effect

Date: Jan-13-2014
If you're one of the millions of people who count losing weight among their top New Year's resolutions, you might want to pay careful attention to some new findings by UC Santa Barbara psychology professor Brenda Major.It turns out that the weight-stigmatizing messages presented by the media - the ones that characterize overweight individuals as lazy, weak-willed, self-indulgent and contributing to rising health care costs - may be tipping the scales in the wrong direction. Designed to encourage weight loss, they may actually have the opposite effect.

NHS could save £12 million per year by controlling blood sugar levels in critically ill children

Date: Jan-13-2014
A major UK-wide study (The CHiP trial) led by Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has found that the NHS could reduce the length of hospital stay for critically ill children and save around £12 million a year, by changing the way paediatric intensive care units (PICU) commonly control blood sugar levels for some patients.During the stress of severe illness or major surgery, blood glucose levels often rise to high levels, resulting in so-called 'stress hyperglycaemia'.

Bed bug hotspots found in Philadelphia, seasonal trends identified

Date: Jan-12-2014
A new study from Penn Medicine epidemiologists that looked at four years of bed bug reports to the city of Philadelphia found that infestations have been increasing and were at their highest in August and lowest in February. The findings, published ahead of print in the Journal of Medical Entomology, point to two possible peak times to strike and eliminate the bugs."There is surprisingly very little known about seasonal trends among bed bug populations," said Michael Z.

Cholera's early evolution and identification of strain responsible for early pandemics

Date: Jan-12-2014
Working with a nearly 200-year-old sample of preserved intestine, researchers at McMaster University and the University of Sydney have traced the bacterium behind a global cholera pandemic that killed millions - a version of the same bug that continues to strike vulnerable populations in the world's poorest regions.Using sophisticated techniques, the team has mapped the entire genome of the elusive 19th century bacterium. The findings are significant because, until now, researchers had not identified the early strains of cholera, a water-borne pathogen.

Diagnosing sports concussions via on-field blood test

Date: Jan-12-2014
A brain protein, S100B, which may soon be detected by a simple finger-stick blood test, accurately distinguishes a sports-related concussion from sports exertion, according to a study of college athletes in Rochester, N.Y., and Munich, Germany, and published in PLOS ONE by Jeffrey J. Bazarian, M.D., professor at the University of Rochester.For years Bazarian and others have been investigating the use of S100B for on-field diagnoses of head injuries.

Detecting cervical cancer using simple test

Date: Jan-12-2014
Researchers at the University of Louisville have confirmed that using the heat profile from a person's blood, called a plasma thermogram, can serve as an indicator for the presence or absence of cervical cancer, including the stage of cancer.The team, led by Nichola Garbett, Ph.D., published its findings in PLOS ONE."We have been able to demonstrate a more convenient, less intrusive test for detecting and staging cervical cancer," Garbett said.