Curated News: Featured: MedWire

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Each sneeze, cough or burp generates a cloud of invisible gas that propels droplets of infectious material farther than originally thought, and smaller droplets actually travel farther than larger ones. A new study from MIT researchers published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics says this gas cloud extends the reach of droplets by 5 to 200 times. “Colds, flu, measles, TB and other airborne diseases can be transmitted through the air by a simple sneeze,” says Sylvia Suarez-Ponce, RN, infection control practitioner at Loyola University Health System. “The new study reinforces that sick people need to stay home for the sake of the community.”

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A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has uncovered a new aspect of autism, revealing that proteins involved in autism interact with many more partners than previously known.

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Long-term results are reported for the first patients to receive laboratory-engineered vaginal organs.

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Researchers have found that women on antidepressants are more successful at breastfeeding their babies if they keep taking the medication.

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Binge drinking by teenagers and young adults is strongly associated with liking, owning, and correctly identifying music that references alcohol by brand name according to a study by the University of Pittsburgh and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center.

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Four people with paraplegia are able to voluntarily move previously paralyzed muscles as a result of a novel therapy involving electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, according to a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.

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Researchers at the University of Montreal and the INRS-Institut-Armand-Frappier have shown that men circumcised after the age of 35 were 45% less at risk of later developing prostate cancer than uncircumcised men.

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Conflicts between work and home—in both directions—are an important contributor to the risk of burnout, suggests a study in the April Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).

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By studying nerve cells that originated in patients with a severe neurological disease, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher has pinpointed an error in protein formation that could be the root of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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The first major study of color blindness in a multi-ethnic group of preschoolers has uncovered that Caucasian male children have the highest prevalence among four major ethnicities, with 1 in 20 testing color blind. Researchers also found that color blindness, or color vision deficiency, in boys is lowest in African-Americans, and confirmed that girls have a much lower prevalence of color blindness than boys. The study will be published online April 3 in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

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Nearly 4 million children under 5 die from vaccine-preventable diseases worldwide each year, and two University of Michigan doctoral ecology students are working to change that.

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Study signals that young men may be more vulnerable to becoming sedentary later on than women are if they are depressed at a young age.

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Children who viewed TV ads for Kids Meals were commonly unable to recall milk or apples, items added to make the meals healthier. Instead many kids thought apples were french fries.

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Wounds may heal more quickly if exposed to low-intensity vibration, report researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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A derivative of vitamin A, known as retinoic acid, found abundantly in sweet potato and carrots, helps turn pre-cancer cells back to normal healthy breast cells, which may help explain why some clinical studies have been unable to see a benefit of vitamin A on cancer: the vitamin doesn’t appear to change the course of full-blown cancer, only pre-cancerous cells, and only works at a very narrow dose.

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Spouses who regulate their emotions together in a satisfactory manner are more fulfilled sexually, psychologically, and relationally, among couples in which the woman has provoked vestibulodynia (PVD), also known as “vulvar vestibulitis".

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A simple cognitive test may be able to predict how well an individual struggling with addiction will respond to certain treatments, according to a study led by an addiction expert at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.

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Muscle-strengthening activities may be important to kids' heart health.

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A new study by researchers at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School indicates that statin medication prescribed to lower cholesterol and decrease the chance of having a heart attack and stroke, also improves a man’s erectile function.

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A systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies of the effect of child obesity intervention programs on blood pressure has found that whether such programs prevented obesity or not, many of them reduced blood pressure in children.

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Men suffering from sexual dysfunction can be successful at reversing their problem, by focusing on lifestyle factors and not just relying on medication, according to research at the University of Adelaide.

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Migraine sufferers who experienced reduced stress from one day to the next are at significantly increased risk of migraine onset on the subsequent day.

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What makes a person bipolar, prone to manic highs and deep, depressed lows? Why does bipolar disorder run so strongly in families, even though no single gene is to blame? And why is it so hard to find new treatments for a condition that affects 200 million people worldwide? New stem cell research may help scientists find answers to these questions.

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New research shows that for some women, a high-protein meal followed by 30 minutes of moderate exercise is an effective way of burning calories, especially when compared to exercising on an empty stomach.

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As stem cells continue their gradual transition from the lab to the clinic, a research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has discovered a new way to make large concentrations of skeletal muscle cells and muscle progenitors from human stem cells.

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RNA encodes the proteins that play a key role in cellular reproduction, but the manner in which cells regulate its removal once these proteins are synthesized remains a mystery. One piece of this mystery has been solved as researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who have identified the steps by which a cell removes RNA from the cytoplasm.

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Youth are not merely mimicking the alcohol brand choices of adults, suggesting that other factors may influence their drinking preferences. This is the conclusion of a new report comparing the alcohol brand preferences of underage drinkers and adults from the Boston University School of Public Health and the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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New guidelines for using statins to treat high cholesterol and prevent cardiovascular disease are projected to result in 12.8 million more U.S. adults taking the drugs, according to a research team led by Duke Medicine scientists.

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People who develop diabetes and high blood pressure in middle age are more likely to have brain cell loss and other damage to the brain, as well as problems with memory and thinking skills, than people who never have diabetes or high blood pressure or who develop it in old age, according to a new study published in the March 19, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Middle age was defined as age 40 to 64 and old age as age 65 and older.

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An Indiana University and Regenstrief Institute study of nearly 10,000 average-risk, asymptomatic men and women from 90 sites across the United States reports that a multi-target stool DNA test detects 92.3 percent of colon cancers.

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The Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at the Université de Montréal (UdeM), in collaboration with the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital’s Quebec Leukemia Cell Bank, recently achieved a significant breakthrough thanks to the laboratory growth of leukemic stem cells, which will speed up the development of new cancer drugs.

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One in eight visits to a a doctor for a headache or migraine end up with the patient going for a brain scan, at a total cost of about $1 billion a year, a new University of Michigan Medical School study finds. And many of those MRI and CT scans – and costs – are probably unnecessary, given the very low odds that serious issues lurk in the patients’ brains.

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A new pre-clinical study by researchers at Temple University found that people who experience chronic sleep disturbance could face an earlier onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

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Mindfulness-based meditation could lessen some symptoms associated with cancer in teens, according to the results of a clinical trial intervention led by researchers at the University of Montreal and its affiliated CHU Sainte-Justine children’s hospital.

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A husband’s agreeable personality and good health appear crucial to preventing conflict among older couples who have been together a long time, according to a study from University of Chicago researchers.

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A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher has detected a higher rate of seizures among children with autism who were fed infant formula containing soy protein rather than milk protein. The study found excess seizures among girls and in the total sample of 1,949 children. The soy-seizure link reached borderline significance among boys, who comprised 87 percent of the children described in the database under study.

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Preliminary studies point to adherent stromal cells derived from human placenta appear promising as a readily available cell source to aid tendon healing and regeneration.

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It has been more than 10 years since the clinical battle began with community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and doctors are still grappling with how to diagnose, treat and prevent this virulent form of staph infection, which is immune to many antibiotics. As MRSA cases have increased dramatically over the decade, so have the number of skin abscesses — generally pus-filled boils or pimples with discharge — that characterize these infections. A New England Journal of Medicine report features updated guidelines outlining the best ways to treat and manage these abscesses - authored by emergency room doctors on the front lines of treating these infections. Also included are tips to help prevent MRSA from spreading.

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CHORI Scientists Rhonda Patrick, PhD and Bruce Ames, PhD, find causal link between Vitamin D, serotonin and autism. The findings point towards possible prevention and treatment options.

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Researchers have found that decision-making accuracy can be improved by postponing the onset of a decision by a mere fraction of a second. The results could further our understanding of neuropsychiatric conditions characterized by abnormalities in cognitive function and lead to new training strategies to improve decision-making in high-stake environments. The study was published in the March 5 online issue of the journal PLoS One.

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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that FDA-approved anti-psychotic drugs possess tumor-killing activity against the most aggressive form of primary brain cancer, glioblastoma.

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E-cigarettes, promoted as a way to quit regular cigarettes, may actually be a new route to conventional smoking and nicotine addiction for teenagers, according to a new UC San Francisco study.

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Scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified an important step toward potentially shutting down the growth of prostate cancer cells.

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Researchers at New York University have identified the nature of brain activity that allows us to bridge time in our memories. Their findings offer new insights into the temporal nature of how we store our recollections and may offer a pathway for addressing memory-related afflictions.

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In the largest, most comprehensive, nationwide study to examine the prevalence of allergies from early childhood to old age, scientists from the National Institutes of Health report that allergy prevalence is the same across different regions of the United States, except in children 5 years and younger.

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Does having a television in the bedroom contribute to youth weight gain? In a recent national study, researchers from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center found that having a bedroom television was a significant predictor of adolescent weight gain

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Doctors in the U.S. and Japan have devised a way to treat atrial fibrillation by adding a little alcohol to minimally invasive therapies that target a cluster of misbehaving nerves known to trigger arrhythmia, dulling or stopping the transmission of electrical impulses that cause atrial fibrillation.

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Children’s food allergies are gradually increasing, but they may be as much as doubling among black children. According to a study published in the March issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the scientific publication of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), self-reported food allergy nearly doubled in black children over 23 years.

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Johns Hopkins researchers report that people with chronic insomnia show more plasticity and activity than good sleepers in the part of the brain that controls movement.

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Real-time social media like Twitter could be used to track HIV incidence and drug-related behaviors with the aim of detecting and potentially preventing outbreaks