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Prenatal Exposure to Two Common Chemicals Linked to Lower IQ

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A new research has revealed that prenatal exposure to elevated levels of two common chemicals found in the home, di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP) and di-isobutyl phthalate (DiBP), are associated with substantial reductions in the IQ of children. The study at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health is the first to report a link between prenatal exposure to phthalates and IQ in school-age children. DnBP and DiBP are found in a wide variety of ...

Racial Gaps in Medicare Advantage Persist Across U.S, Except in West

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Wide gaps among older people of different ethnic backgrounds with high blood pressure, heart disease or diabetes getting their blood pressure, cholesterol and sugar under control, is reported in a study. Despite years of effort to help American seniors, a new research shows wide gaps in these key health measures. Black seniors in Medicare Advantage health plans are still much less likely than their white peers to have each of the three measures in check, according ...

Corneal Injuries can be Treated With Stem Cells

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Corneal injuries can be treated by growing stem cells from a tiny biopsy of the patient's undamaged eye and then placing them on the injury site, according to a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine. Damage to the cornea leads to cloudiness or haziness and makes it hard or impossible to see. The body usually responds to corneal injuries by making scar tissue. Scientists found that delivery of stem cells initiates regeneration ...

One in 6 Ontario Adults Reveal They've Had a Traumatic Brain Injury in Their Lifetime

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Nearly seventeen per cent of adults surveyed in Ontario said they have suffered a traumatic brain injury that left them unconscious for five minutes or required them to be hospitalized overnight, according to new research. These same adults also reported more substance use, smoking and recent psychiatric distress. Researchers compared the prevalence of reported TBI with current substance use, cigarette smoking and psychological distress among 1,999 Ontario adults. ...

Hypofractionated Radiation Should be Used to Treat Breast Cancer

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Penn Medicine researchers have found that two-thirds of women treated for early-stage breast cancer in the U.S. receive longer radiation therapy than necessary. Conventional whole breast radiation, given daily over five to seven weeks, has been the mainstay of treatment in the U.S. for decades. It reduces local recurrence and improves overall survival after breast conserving surgery. Hypofractionated radiation involves higher doses of radiation given over just three ...

Progesterone Shows No Benefit to Severe TBI Patients: Study

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After five days of treatment with a novel formulation of progesterone acutely administered to patients with severe traumatic brain injury, the study concluded that it showed no clinical benefits. The paper entitled, "A Clinical Trial of Progesterone for Severe Traumatic Brain Injury," will be published online in emThe New England Journal of Medicine/em, December 10, 2014. This trial, referred to as SyNAPSe, reports on a large prospective randomized ...

Two-Week Lockdown in Eastern Sierra Leone Mining District Due to Ebola

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A two-week lockdown on the eastern diamond mining district of Kono was imposed on Wednesday after eight cases of Ebola were confirmed in one day. According to Sierra Leone's health ministry, Tuesday's spate of Ebola reports increased the cumulative total of confirmed cases in the region to 119. The lockdown will limit residents' movements until December 23. Sierra Leone, along with Guinean and Liberia, is at the epicentre of the worst Ebola ...

Scientists Still Trying to Find Lifespan of Ebola Virus

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The scientists in US seem to be working on a tough task, to find out the life span of Ebola virus. The Ebola virus travels from person to person through direct contact with infected body fluids, but how long can it live in waste water when liquid wastes from a patient end up in the sewage system? Reviewing the latest research, Kyle Bibby at the University of Pittsburgh said that the World Health Organization has been saying you can put (human waste) ...

Myelin Linked to Speedy Recovery of Human Visual System After Tumor Removal

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The spontaneous healing of human brain in just a few weeks following surgical removal of brain tumor has been shown using a new imaging technique. The imaging technique was developed by an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists and neurosurgeons from the University of Rochester. In a study featured on the cover of the current issue of the journal iScience Translational Medicine/i, the team found that recovery of vision in patients with pituitary tumors is ...

Natural Home Remedies for Fatigue

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Fatigue is the lack of energy and inability to perform daily activities. It is caused by infections, medications, and stress among others. Chronic fatigue syndrome is an extreme form of fatigue.

How Much Plastic Is Floating In Our Oceans?

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A research has found that nearly 269,000 tons of plastic pollution may be floating in the world's oceans. Microplastic pollution is found in varying concentrations throughout the oceans, but estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics, both micro and macroplastic, lack sufficient data to support them. To better estimate the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world's oceans, scientists from six countries ...

Homelessness Strikes Hard in Washington

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Philana Hall vividly remembers the day, one year ago this month, when she was homeless in Washington and overwhelmed with despair. "That was the morning when we just didn't know where we were going to be that night," the 23-year-old recalled. "We were both out until about 12 o'clock that night - making calls, asking people - and no one would take us in as a family." Hall and her three-year-old Gabriel eventually found refuge at a homeless ...

Resin-like Material from Beehive Promotes Hair Growth

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Millions of men and women around the world get upset with hair loss. Propolis, a resin-like material found in beehives may have clues to developing a prospective therapy. Propolis, encouraged hair growth in mice. The study appears in ACS' iJournal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry/i. Ken Kobayashi and colleagues note that propolis is a resin-like material that honeybees use to seal small gaps in their hives. Not only does it work as a physical barrier, but ...

'Electronic Skin' - The Latest on Research

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Skin is the largest organ in the body and communicates even the most subtle touch. This helps in making quick reaction from time-to-time. For the first time, scientists report the development of a stretchable "electronic skin" closely modeled after our own that can detect not just pressure, but also what direction it's coming from. The study on the advance, which could have applications for prosthetics and robotics, appears in the journal iACS Nano/i. Hyunhyub ...

Better Lifestyle Will Help Manage Cardiac Risk Factors

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Researchers reveal that aggressive management of cardiac risk factors can help heart rhythm disorder patients significantly improve their long-term outcomes. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is increasingly responsible for dementia, stroke and death, and has a significant impact on healthcare costs. With electrical "short circuits" believed to be responsible for the abnormal beating of the heart in AF patients, one currently used treatment is to burn the tissue surrounding ...

Mechanism Enabling Storage of Vitamin A Revealed: CWRU

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The mechanism enabling enzyme Lecithin: retinol acyltransferase (LRAT) to store Vitamin A has been revealed by researchers at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine and this is vital for vision. "Without this information, our knowledge was inadequate to understand the molecular mechanisms of blindness caused by mutations in the enzyme," said Marcin Golczak, assistant professor of pharmacology at Case Western Reserve and an author of the study. ...

WHO Head Admits to the UN Body Being Slow in Ebola Response

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The UN body was slow in responding to the outbreak of Ebola that has now killed more than 6,300 people in West Africa, conceded the head of the World Health Organization. "It is fair to say the whole world, including WHO, failed to see what was unfolding, what was going to happen in front of our eyes," WHO director general Margaret Chan told the BBC in an interview. "An old disease like Ebola, when we put it in a new context, we were slow. All of us ...

Electrocardiogram / ECG / EKG

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An ECG is a diagnostic test that records the electrical activity of the heart and helps to detect cardiac abnormalities.

Tumor-infiltrating Lymphocytes (S-TILs) Irrelevant to Trastuzumab Usage in HER-2+ Breast Cancer

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Immune function marker used for better prediction of outcomes in patients undergoing chemotherapy for triple negative breast cancer is also linked to improved prognosis in patients treated with chemotherapy for HER2-positive breast cancer. But that marker, the quantity of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (S-TILs) in a biopsy, appears irrelevant when trastuzumab is used. And since trastuzumab, and not chemotherapy alone, is the standard of care for the HER2-positive ...

Medical Emergency Visits Predictable Using Internet Data

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Internet data may in future be useful in predicting next-day visits to regional emergency departments. The first study to use Internet data to predict emergency department visits in either a region or a single hospital was published online Friday in iAnnals of Emergency Medicine/i ("Forecasting Emergency Department Visits Using Internet Data"). "Website visits may be used to predict ER visits for a geographic region as well as for individual hospitals," said ...

Gout Attack: Risk Two Times Higher at Nighttime Than in the Daytime

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A new research reveals that the risk of acute gout attacks is more than two times higher during the night or early morning hours than it is in the daytime. The study published in Arthritis (and) Rheumatology, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), confirms that nocturnal attacks persist even among those who did not consume alcohol and had a low amount of purine intake during the 24 hours prior to the gout attack. The body ...

Poor Sleep and Dementia - Are They Linked?

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Changes in the brain associated with dementia is more likely in people who have sleep apnea or spend less time in deep sleep, found a new study published in the December 10, 2014, online issue of iNeurology/i (Regd) , the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study found that people who don''t have as much oxygen in their blood during sleep, which occurs with sleep apnea and conditions such as emphysema, are more likely to have tiny abnormalities ...

2014's Facebook Discussions Center Ebola Outbreak and FIFA WC

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Social media platform 'Facebook' has released a list of most talked about topics for 2014 which reveals that 'FIFA World Cup 2014' and 'Ebola' outbreak top the list. The presidential election in Brazil occupied the third spot as 48 million people had 647 interactions in the form of status updates, photos, videos, comments and likes about the highly contested event, reported News 24. The list, released on Tuesday, showcased Facebook's global outreach, ...

Alcohol Dependence can be Treated With Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor

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Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors, the nuclear receptor proteins that regulate the expression of genes, can be activated by the PPAR agonists. These PPAR agonists are used to treat diabetes and elevated blood lipids.Mouse and human data suggest that PPAR agonists may be repurposed for treating alcohol dependence in humans. /ulPeroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are nuclear receptor proteins that regulate the expression of genes. Drugs ...

Safe Healing of Open Bone Breaks Without Surgery is Possible in Kids

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Open bone fractures in the forearm or lower leg can, and do, heal safely without surgery in most children, reveal the results of a small study led by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. Open fractures occur when the broken bone protrudes through the skin, causing a puncture wound. The study, published ahead of print in the iJournal of Children's Orthopaedics/i, shows that when the wound is small -- less -inch in diameter -- and ...

Cell Division Controlling Molecular Tag Revealed

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Three protein complexes act in relay to regulate cell division, the reactivation of one leads to the second cell becoming active. This information is found in a ground-breaking paper published in emNature/em. Cells rely on control systems to make sure that each aspect of the cell division cycle occurs in the correct order. Following successful segregation of the genomes in mitosis, each must return to its pre-division state in a process called mitotic exit. ...

Next-Gen Urinary Tract Infection Treatment to Focus on Fitness Genes

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The occurrence of urinary tract infections without an apparent cause and its resistance to antibiotics makes the treatment outcomes less predictable. University of Michigan Medical School researchers have identified bacterial genes that help the infections spread, providing a potential new target for treating UTIs, a global public health concern mostly affecting women. UTIs lead to lost work time, emergency room visits and health care spending of (Dollar) 3.5 billion in ...

Important Ebola Protein Examined by New Notre Dame Study

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The mechanism of the most abundant protein that composes the Ebola virus, VP 40, mediating replication of a new viral particle has been investigated by a team of scientists. The team consists of Robert Stahelin, an adjunct associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame and an associate professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine-South Bend, as well as a member of Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health. "In brief, ...

Mechanism of Gut Bacterial Resources Hijacking to Promote Intestinal Illnesses

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A key bacteria in the gut has been identified whose resources are hijacked to spread harmful foodborne iE. coli/i infections and other intestinal illnesses, by the Southwestern Medical Center microbiologists. Though many iE. coli/i bacteria are harmless and critical to gut health, some iE. coli /ispecies are harmful and can be spread through contaminated food and water, causing diarrhea and other intestinal illnesses. Among them is enterohemorrhagic ...

WHO Efforts Insufficient to Contain Ebola Virus

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The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that the deadly Ebola virus is still continuing to spread and the global health watchdog's efforts are proving insufficient to contain it. The death toll in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone from Ebola is estimated to be around 6,331. WHO's figures reveal that more than 17,800 people have been infected with the Ebola virus. BBC Director General Margaret Chan said, "The situation had improved in some parts of the worst-affected ...

New Drug, Pembrolizumab, Shows Promising Results for Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Patients

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Infusion of pembrolizumab (MK-3475) produced durable responses in almost one out of five patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. The disease has no approved targeted therapies. The multi-center, non-randomized phase-Ib clinical trial was designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability and antitumor activity of bi-weekly infusions of pembrolizumab. 27 patients, aged 29-72 years, with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer that had either relapsed after ...

Potato Extract Helps Limit Weight Gain

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Unlike the popular belief that potatoes cause weight gain, scientists from McGill University have found that a simple potato extract may help limit weight gain. Researchers fed mice an obesity-inducing diet for 10 weeks, after which they put on weight. Mice that consumed the same diet but with a potato extract gained much less weight- only 7 more grams, while mice who had the diet without the potato extract put on about 16 grams. The benefits of the potato extract are ...

Ebola Fighters are Time's 2014 Person of the Year

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Paying tribute to the courage and mercy of the medicos, paramedics and volunteers who have helped treat Ebola patients, the Time magazine named them as its 'Person of the Year 2014'. Time editor Nancy Gibbs said, "Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease. The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight. For tireless acts of ...

Revolution in the Diagnosis of Epilepsy

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By using computer algorithms and mathematical models, the Scientists from University of Exeter, were able to develop systems to analyze EEG recordings gathered while the patient is at rest, and reveal subtle differences in dynamic network properties that enhance susceptibility to seizures in people with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). Professor Terry who led the research team said, "Our research offers the fascinating possibility of a revolution in diagnosis for ...