RxPG News : Latest Research

Belatacept may preserve renal function better than calcineurin inhibitors in kidney transplantation

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:29:51 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Initial results of a study conducted at 100 centers worldwide indicate that belatacept, a first-in-class costimulation blocker can prevent the immune system rejecting new organs. The results also suggest that it may provide similar patient and graft survival to cyclosporine but with fewer side effects and superior kidney function after 12 months. The study, published in the American Journal of Transplantation, provides the first findings to come from BENEFIT (Belatacept Evaluation of Nephroprotection and Efficacy as First-line Immunosuppression Trial).

Although advances in transplantation have reduced rates of organ rejection and improved outcomes after one-year, corresponding improvements in long-term survival rates have not been observed. The kidney allograft (transplant from another human donor with different genes) survival rate is 95% for transplants from living donors and 89% for transplants from deceased donors during the first year. BENEFIT is a three-year, randomized, active-controlled, parallel-group, set up to evaluate the efficacy of belatacept for post-transplant maintenance immunosuppressive management.

"Our findings show that this will be a novel and more specific way of suppressing the immune system with less toxicity," said lead researcher Dr. Flavio Vincenti, of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. "It will target the specific responses that cause rejection of transplanted organs with less damage to other systems of the body."

Belatacept is different from calcineurin inhibitors (CNI), such as cyclosporine, which is the class of drugs most commonly used to suppress the immune system in transplant patients, because it does not cause the toxicities associated with CNI – such as nephrotoxicity and aggravating cardiovascular risk factors. Belatacept selectively blocks T-cell activation (which plays a key part in immune response) and the results suggest that this selectivity allows effective immunosuppression, better preservation of renal function and an improved cardiovascular/metabolic risk profile.

The researchers found that treatment with belatacept was generally safe, although there was a higher incidence of post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder in belatacept patients with known risk factors.

686 patients 18 years or older who were expected to receive a kidney transplant from a standard criteria donor were included in BENEFIT, and were randomized into three groups; more or less intensive regimens of belatacept, or cyclosporine. 666 patients eventually received a transplant and of these, 527 patients completed the initial 12 month treatment phase, with an even spread of discontinuation between the groups.

"Although belatacept was associated with a higher early rejection rate than patients treated with cyclosporine, it was also associated with better kidney function and thus has the potential of extending the life of the renal graft," added Vincenti. "Of course, only time will tell how many patients may benefit from this new drug."

Alongside the BENEFIT study is BENEFIT-EXT, which included 543 recipients of extended criteria donors (defined as donors over 60 years old, over 50 years and with two other risk factors, or donation after cardiac death, or more than 24 hours with no blood supply to the organ). 394 patients completed the initial 12 months of this trial with similar results. The initial results of this study are also published in the American Journal of Transplantation.

K-State professor finds link between low oxygen levels in body and cancer-aiding protein

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) What began as research into how diabetics could possibly preserve their eyesight has led to findings that could prolong the vision of children afflicted with retinoblastoma.

Dolores Takemoto, a Kansas State University professor of biochemistry who was researching protein kinase C gamma in the lens of the human eye, found her work taking a fascinating turn when she discovered a correlation between the protein Coonexin46 and hypoxia -- a deficiency of oxygen which kills normal tissue cells.

According to the data, Coonexin46, or Cx46, appears in the body during these levels of low oxygen. Besides the eye, which is one of the body's only naturally occurring hypoxic tissue, Cx46 also is present in cancer cells since the cells seal themselves off from the oxygen carried by the blood vessels, thus creating a hypoxic environment.

Takemoto believes the findings will lead to serious advancements in treating retinoblastoma, a cancer that forms in the tissue of the retina -- the light-sensitive layers of nerve tissue on the back of the eye. It occurs in 300 U.S. children under the age of 5 each year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

When a child comes in with retinoblastoma in one eye it's usually too late in the process to save that eye, and, it will spread to the other eye, Takemoto said.

Once an eye becomes cancerous, it has to be removed to prevent the tumor from spreading. Too often, though, Takemoto said, by the time the tumor is noticed in one eye, it has already spread to the second, resulting in a child being permanently blind.

Through her research, Takemoto believes a siRNA medication can be invented which can be injected monthly into the noncancerous eye, preventing tumor growth. siRNA, or small interfering ribonucleic acid, is a class of double-stranded RNA molecules that can be used to interfere with the expression of a specific gene. In this case, the siRNA would suppress Cx46, which allows a tumor to exist in a hypoxic environment. In this manner, the tumor can be prevented from growing at the early hypoxic stage.

Using a mouse model for retinoblastoma, the Takemoto lab has found that use of siRNA to lower the levels of Cx46 will prevent tumor formation.

An international application has been filed with the Patent Cooperation Treaty regarding the findings.

During her trials with Cx46, Takemoto collaborated with Thu Annelise Nguyen, associate professor of toxicology at K-State. The two examined biopsies of MCF-7 breast cancer, where they also found Cx46 present. Takemoto said the same was true for samples of colon cancer.

Any time there's a drop in oxygen within the body, Cx46 appears, Takemoto said.

While Takemoto's research into Cx46 is focused on the eye, Nguyen is studying Cx46 in breast cancer. She is currently exploring drug discovery and drug testing related to breast cancer.

Besides treating tumors, Takemoto said she believes these findings could help with treatment in acute or chronic heart disease, heart attacks, retinal ischemia, ischemia of the brain, blood pressure problems and glaucoma, as well as for health applications in animals.

HHMI's Gilliam Fellowships aim to increase diversity in the sciences

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has selected five exceptional individuals to receive the 2010 Gilliam Fellowships for Advanced Study. These students will join a dynamic group of 30 Gilliam fellows, who share a passion for science and a commitment to increasing diversity in the sciences.

It's been very gratifying to see the impact of the Gilliam fellows program, says Peter J. Bruns, HHMI's vice president for grants and special programs. In some ways, this is a special year for the program because we anticipate that some of the first Gilliam fellows will receive their Ph.D. degrees this spring.

The Gilliam fellows program aims to enrich science research and increase the diversity of college and university faculty members. Fellows, who come from groups underrepresented in the sciences or from disadvantaged backgrounds, have worked in the labs of top HHMI scientists as undergraduates and are committed to pursuing a doctoral degree in science.

HHMI established the fellowships in 2004 in honor of the late James H. Gilliam Jr., a charter Trustee of the Institute who spent his life nurturing excellence and diversity in education and science. Each Gilliam fellow receives $44,000 in graduate school support annually for up to five years to help move them toward a career in science research and teaching.

Prior to being named Gilliam fellows, each student participated in HHMI's Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), an initiative that nurtures the scientific curiosity, imagination, and dreams of some of this nation's most talented aspiring scientists. This program is open to high-achieving undergraduate students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds or groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. The students are nominated by colleges and universities that receive HHMI education grants. Since 2003, the EXROP Program has placed 359 students from 97 colleges and universities in the labs of 130 researchers. Of the students who have finished their baccalaureate degree, 93 percent are still in science, either teaching, working in a research lab, or pursuing an advanced degree.

Alumni of EXROP are eligible to apply for Gilliam fellowships. Four of the five new fellows are currently applying to Ph.D. granting programs, while the fifth student is already enrolled in an M.D./Ph.D. program. This program is providing opportunities to an outstanding group of highly talented individuals who have a demonstrated interest in and aptitude for research, says William R. Galey, who oversees the Gilliam program as HHMI's director for graduate and medical education programs.

The five new Gilliam fellows, chosen from 26 applicants, came to science from different paths, and their scientific interests are just as diverse. For example,

Saving lives one breath at a time

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has completed a project to help a UK company diagnose medical conditions through monitoring patients' breath.

Bedfont Scientific Ltd is one of the market leaders in developing personal diagnostic gas sensors for the medical market. Its sensors can continuously monitor levels of certain gases in human breath, and could potentially be used in place of certain invasive blood tests.

In order to extend their position in this market, and confirm their reputation for quality and accuracy, Bedfont required its instruments to be independently evaluated.

To achieve this, Managing Director Trevor Smith, was seconded to NPL under a scheme called Measurement for Innovators. This gave Bedfont direct access to NPL's scientific expertise and state-of-the-art facilities.

NPL helped Bedfont determine key performance parameters for two types of electrochemical breath sensors, one for measuring carbon monoxide and the other for measuring hydrogen. Bedfont tested their instruments against the concentrations of these gases that are relevant to the medical market.

The presence of certain levels of these gases in human breath is medically extremely important. One sensor, for example, shows whether a patient has been smoking, allowing healthcare workers to demonstrate potentially harmful carbon monoxide levels to smokers. Another detects if a patient is suffering from gut disorder, indicated by increased levels of hydrogen in a patient's breath.

NPL confirmed that the sensors measured these gases within their technical specification, had linear response characteristics, and had negligible interferences from certain breath gases, which may cause false positives.

The results of the tests carried out at NPL provided Bedfont with the necessary independent verification of its sensors giving it a potential edge over international competitors, and the opportunity to expand within the UK's National Health Service and into other global markets.

Nick Martin, Senior Research Scientist at NPL, said: Measurement is critical to many areas of the medical industry and can assist in an improved understanding of some diseases. Personalised breath sensors can provide additional diagnostic information for making medical decisions. As the trend for their use widens it will be necessary to establish performance standards and to independently verify equipment using traceable gas mixtures. Companies that meet the standards will find it easier to penetrate the target markets of the future.

Following the secondment, Trevor Smith of Bedfont commented: It was very important for us to be able to show that our instruments are fit for purpose, and scientifically sound. NPL helped us demonstrate this by revealing the close agreement between analytical techniques of gas analysis, traceable calibration standards and our breath monitoring equipment.

Working with NPL has been an excellent experience and one we would like to develop in the future with more of our products

Improvements needed in genomic test result discussions

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A new study has found that one in three early-stage breast cancer patients who received genomic testing when deciding about treatment options felt they did not fully understand their discussions with physicians about their test results and their risk of recurrence. About one in four experienced distress when receiving their test results.

Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings suggest there is room for improvement in communicating cancer recurrence risks and treatment decisions with patients.

Genomic testing is an increasingly important part of care for patients after they are diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. The test, which looks at 21 genes in breast tumors removed during surgery, can indicate the chance the patient's cancer will recur. Such information can help guide decisions by physicians and patients about chemotherapy treatments. Patients with a high risk of recurrence may opt for more aggressive treatment, while those with lower risk may safely avoid over-treatment and its potential side effects. It can be challenging, however, for physicians to determine the best way to talk to patients about their test results and to use the results to make important treatment decisions with patients. Currently, there is little consensus regarding the most effective method to communicate risk information to patients.

Noel Brewer, PhD, assistant professor of health behavior and health education at University of North Carolina's Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Janice Tzeng, MPH, who worked on this study as a graduate student at the school, led a team that examined how women with breast cancer received and understood cancer recurrence risk information after receiving a genomic diagnostic test called Oncotype DX, that is gaining widespread acceptance by oncologists and insurers.

To find out more about women's reactions, investigators mailed surveys to 77 women with early-stage, estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer who received Oncotype DX between 2004 and 2009. The study was funded by a five-year grant from the American Cancer Society.

Almost all women agreed that having the test gave them a better understanding of their treatment options' chances of success, said Brewer. Most women said that they would have the test if they had to decide again today, and that they would recommend the test to other women in their same situation, he added. Also, most women accurately recalled their genomic-based recurrence risk results, he said. These findings suggest that patients have a positive attitude about genomic testing, and testing helps them better understand their treatment options.

While many women understood discussions about their genomic test results, a third reported not fully understanding these discussions. Although 87 percent of women received a low or intermediate breast cancer recurrence risk score, about a quarter of the women experienced distress when receiving their test results. The authors concluded that their findings suggest a need to improve risk communication and treatment decision making after patients undergo genomic testing.

Occupational sunlight exposure and kidney cancer risk in men

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) According to a new study, men employed in occupations with potential exposure to high levels of sunlight have a reduced risk of kidney cancer compared with men who were less likely to be exposed to sunlight at work. The study did not find an association between occupational sunlight exposure and kidney cancer risk in women. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study is the largest case-control study of kidney cancer to investigate the association with occupational sunlight exposure. The study, however, did not include information on non-occupational sunlight exposure and does not address directly whether sunlight exposure can help prevent kidney cancer.

Research suggests that vitamin D, which is obtained from sun exposure, some foods, and from supplements, may help prevent some cancers. Vitamin D is metabolized and most active within the kidneys. Because both the incidence of kidney cancer and the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency have increased over the past few decades, Sara Karami, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, MD, and her colleagues designed a study to explore whether occupational sunlight exposure is associated with kidney cancer risk.

The study included 1,097 patients with kidney cancer and 1,476 individuals without cancer from four Central and Eastern European countries. Demographic and lifetime occupational information was collected through in-person interviews and occupational sunlight exposure indices were estimated based on industry and job titles. The investigators observed a 24 percent to 38 percent reduction in kidney cancer risk with increasing occupational sunlight exposure among male participants in the study. No association between occupational sunlight exposure and kidney cancer risk was observed among females in the study.

The findings suggest that sunlight exposure may affect kidney cancer risk, although the authors have no explanation for the apparent differences in risk between men and women. They offer several hypotheses for the observed differences. Biological or behavioral differences between men and women may play a role. For example, hormonal differences may influence the body's response to sunlight exposure, females may have a higher tendency to use sunscreen on a regular basis, and men may be prone to working outdoors while shirtless. It is also possible that the observed gender differences in risk were due to confounding by other unmeasured kidney cancer risk factors, such as recreational sunlight exposure and physical activity levels.

While this study's findings raise the possibility of a link between sunlight exposure and kidney cancer risk, they clearly need to be replicated in other populations and in studies that use better estimates of long-term ultraviolet exposure and vitamin D intake, said Dr. Karami.

The life and death of online communities

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The more heterogeneous the community of an online chat channel, the more chances the channel has to survive over time. This has been concluded in a new joint study carried out by researchers of the University of Haifa and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This study has shown that an essentially social characteristic significantly influences the survival chances of an online community, says Dr. Daphne Raban of the University of Haifa who took part in the study.

The study, headed by Dr. Quentin Jones of the New Jersey Institute of Technology with Dr. Mihai Moldovan of NJIT and Dr. Raban, aimed to examine what factors could best predict the chances of an online community to survive over time. Researchers have previously claimed that there are too many variables influencing the survival or demise of such channels and that there is therefore no way of testing it, and earlier studies have primarily focused on group size and activity.The current study included an analysis of social characteristics, such as the group's homogeneity and heterogeneity. A group is considered homogeneous when its member turnover is small - namely, when the members who established the group are still the main members after some time. A group is considered heterogeneous when it has turnover and new members are continuously joining it.

A sample 282 chat channels all born on the same month was used for survival analysis which explored the relationship between the overall user activity in each channel at its inception and the channel's life expectancy. The researchers carried out the survival analysis over the course of six months after birth. A chat channel was considered born when at least three members had exchanged at least four messages in 20 minutes. It was considered dead when it had zero activity for four weeks.

The researchers observed the influences of variables at four points of time: two hours after birth; on the channel's first day of activity; over its first week of activity; and over its first two weeks of activity.

Results show that the variable that best predicts the chances of a community to survive is its level of heterogeneity: the greater the member turnover, the higher the chances that the group will sustain itself over time. On the other hand, the number of members and the number of actual message posters do not predict the chances of survival.

According to the current study, another reliable predictor is the number of messages that are posted between members of an online community. This number does not have much significance over the first two hours of the group's existence, but the higher the number of messages between members over the following three time phases, the higher the chances of the community's survival over time. The study also revealed that if the ratio between the number of messages and the number of members in a group remains the same after two weeks of the community's activity, the chances of death are higher, while an irregular ratio predicts survival. It should be noted that neither an increasing ratio of messages between members nor a decreasing ratio were found to influence the chances of survival.

The present study shows that prediction of an online community's survival chances cannot be based on quantitative data relating to the size of the group or even to its growth rate alone. A social predictor, on the other hand, can much better predict its chances, concludes Dr. Raban.

Deep sedimentation of acantharian cysts -- a reproductive strategy?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Spore-like reproductive cysts of enigmatic organisms called acantharians rapidly sink from surface waters to the deep ocean in certain regions, according to new research. Scientists suspect that this is part of an extraordinary reproductive strategy, which allows juveniles to exploit a seasonal food bonanza.

The research shows that deep sedimentation of cysts during the spring delivers significant amounts of organic matter to the ocean depths, providing a potential source of nutrients for creatures of the deep.

Although acantharians are known to contribute to organic matter transport at shallower depths, we were amazed to discover a high flux of their spore-like reproductive cysts in the deep ocean, says PhD student Patrick Martin of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Cysts were found in sediment trap samples recovered from a depth of 2000 metres in the Iceland Basin, a deep region of the Atlantic Ocean south of Iceland. The traps were deployed in 2006 from the Royal Research Ship Discovery to collect sinking organic-rich particles. Such particles comprise part of the biological carbon pump, whereby carbon 'fixed' from carbon dioxide by photosynthetic organisms in sunlit surfaces waters is exported to the deep ocean.

Although single celled and known mainly to specialists, acantharians are globally distributed and often very abundant. Adults are found mainly in the top 300 metres, where symbiotic algae living within them contribute to primary productivity through photosynthesis.

Uniquely, the spiny skeletons and cyst shells of acantharians are composed of crystalline strontium sulphate, known as celestite, precipitated from seawater in the upper ocean. Celestite is the densest known marine biomineral, but it readily dissolves in seawater, thereby releasing strontium back into the seawater.

Celestite ballast causes rapid sinking. The cysts we found in the Iceland Basin are larger than reported from other regions, up to a millimetre long, and thus sink faster. We believe that this allows them to reach considerable depths before their celestite shells dissolve, says Patrick Martin.

This is consistent with changes in seawater strontium concentration with depth, measured by other scientists in the Iceland Basin. Similar measurements suggest that acantharian cysts in the subarctic Pacific may also sink to great depths.

Acantharian cyst flux in the Iceland Basin was restricted to April and May. It contributed up to around half the particulate organic matter found in the traps during the two weeks of highest cyst flux, albeit with considerable variation between samples.

Evidence suggests that, at high latitudes, rapid, deep sedimentation of acantharian cysts recurs each spring. The cysts sink to depth to release gametes and then die. Juveniles may then descend to the seafloor before ascending to the surface as they mature.

The deep flux of cysts coincides with the spring bloom of phytoplankton, the tiny marine algae that dominate primary production in sunlit surface waters.

We speculate that this is part of a reproductive strategy allowing juveniles to feed off the remains of phytoplankton, 'phytodetritus', that rapidly sinks to the seafloor following the spring bloom, says Patrick Martin.

In that case, deep sedimentation of cysts could be regarded as an adaptation to life in highly seasonal environments, leading to the expectation that the phenomenon should occur in other high-latitude ocean regions.

Adele Boskey 2010 recipient of ORS/AOA award for lifetime contributions to orthopedics

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Biomineralization and osteoporosis investigator Adele L. Boskey, Ph.D., the Starr Chair in Mineralized Tissue Research at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, has been selected the 2010 recipient of the Orthopaedic Research Society/American Orthopaedic Association Alfred R. Shands, Jr. Award. The award will be presented to Dr. Boskey on Monday, March 8, at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Orthopaedic Research Society in New Orleans.

The award is given annually by the Alfred R. Shands, Jr. Award Committee in recognition of contributions to orthopaedics and the devotion of a significant portion of a professional lifetime to furthering knowledge in the field of musculoskeletal disease.

I can't think of a more deserving recipient, said Regis J. O'Keefe, M.D., Ph.D., president of the Orthopaedic Research Society. I am pleased and honored to have a part in this recognition of Dr. Boskey's distinguished work, Dr. O'Keefe continued.

Dr. Boskey is director of the Mineralized Tissue Laboratory and the program director of the Musculoskeletal Integrity Program at Hospital for Special Surgery. Additionally, as the first female president of the Orthopaedic Research Society, her mentoring of other women researchers was recognized in 2008 with an award from the Orthopaedic Research Society Women's Leadership Forum (WLF).

Dr. Boskey's research focuses on bone quality, a measurement of both the bone matrix and the mineral of bone. The current measure relied on to identify osteoporosis and its possibility of fractures is bone density, but Dr. Boskey believes that measuring bone quality promises greater accuracy and could significantly decrease the number of patients that are at high risk for fracture because the quality, not quantity, of their bones puts them in danger.

To better define bone quality, Dr. Boskey has repurposed the use of infrared spectroscopy to approach the quality of bone when biopsies are available. Her laboratory, the Musculoskeletal Repair and Regeneration Core Center at Hospital for Special Surgery, which is one of only five national core centers funded by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, is using this to understand how mineral size and content are tied into osteoporosis and fracture risk.

Biology will become more important in the study and treatment of orthopaedic disease in the future, predicts Dr. Boskey. In the case of arthroscopy she stated, I foresee less of an emphasis on metals and devices and more on understanding the biology that leads to the need for a total joint or revision.

Osteoporosis is responsible for more than 1.5 million fractures annually, a number Dr. Boskey hopes to decrease through her research into a deeper understanding of the biology and makeup of the bone itself and her analyses of the effects of different commonly used osteoporotic therapeutics on the quality of bone.

National Jewish Health receives grant to learn how families cope with food allergy

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Families with food-allergic children face a life of constant vigilance and the looming fear of life-threatening allergic reactions. This fear can have a huge impact on an entire family's life, from heightened anxiety to severe limits on their daily activities. Some families cope well with this situation, while others find it extremely stressful and difficult to manage. Mary Klinnert, PhD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at National Jewish Health, has received a $450,000 grant from the NIH to study how different families adapt to life with food allergies, and to discover what helps the best-adapted families cope well.

Families with food-allergic children must live with the high likelihood that their child will someday be rushed to the hospital to treat a sudden and severe allergic reaction, said Dr. Klinnert. Although the actual number of food-allergy deaths is low, it can still be very frightening. We believe this grant will help us find ways to help families better cope with this difficult situation.

An estimated 3 million children in the United States have food allergies. More than 50,000 people suffer severe, anaphylactic reactions to food every year. Almost 10,000 children are hospitalized, and about 150 to 200 die.

Families have a range of responses to their children's food allergies. Available data suggest that half of parents with food-allergic children experience a pervasive fear for their child's safety, and a sizable subgroup restrict normal child and family activities because of food allergies. Others do not appreciate the potential severity of a food-allergy reaction and are casual about their precautions and preparations. Previous research by Dr. Klinnert suggests that balanced responders successfully incorporate necessary precautions into their lives without undue anxiety. They realistically understand that their child's chance of having a severe food-allergy reaction is 'very likely,' but that the chance of dying is 'very unlikely.'

The goal of Dr. Klinnert's research is to better understand the various coping strategies these different groups use.

Dr. Klinnert and her colleagues will seek to develop an interview-based measure of families' food-allergy management and adaptation. They will study 60 families of children age 6-12 with confirmed food allergies. Parents will complete a questionnaire about the impact of the child's food allergy on the family. Parents and children will also complete a self-evaluation on general anxiety levels. All families will participate in a video-recorded interview discussing how they handle food-allergy management at home. Doctors will individually and collaboratively review and create a scale based on responses.

With this tool it will be possible to evaluate families' adaptation to their children's food allergies, to determine how many families have significant distress or difficulty managing, and to develop services for families with difficulties coping, said Dr. Klinnert.

NYU dental professor Dr. Timothy Bromage selected to receive the 2010 Max Planck Research Award

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New York University College of Dentistry's Dr. Timothy Bromage has been selected to receive the 2010 Max Planck Research Award. Dr. Bromage will collaborate with Dr. Friedemann Schrenk of Frankfurt's Senckenberg Research Institute to research the microanatomical structure of bones and teeth, and the links between metabolic states, growth rates, life spans, and biological features such as sex and body size.

The award, given by the Max Planck Society and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, includes a stipend of 750,000 Euros ($1.02 million USD). The 2010 award, given annually to two researchers, will be presented during the Annual Meeting of the Max Planck Society on June 17th in Hanover, Germany. This year's other recipient is psychologist Michael Tomasello, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

In citing Dr. Bromage's qualifications for receiving the award, the selection committee noted that his research on the microanatomical structure of ancestral human teeth and bones has established the modern fields of human evolution growth, development, and life history -- the pace by which an organism grows. Moreover, noted the committee, his research has shown a relationship between bone and tooth microstructure and body size, metabolic rate, age, and other biological features.

Dr. Bromage, a professor of basic science and craniofacial biology and of biomaterials and biomimetics, was the first researcher to use biologically based principles of craniofacial development to reconstruct early hominid skulls. His computer-generated reconstruction of a 1.9 million-year-old skull originally discovered in Kenya in 1972 by renowned paleontologist and archeologist Richard Leakey showed that Homo rudolfensis, modern man's earliest-known close ancestor, looked more apelike than previously believed. Dr. Bromage's reconstruction had a surprisingly smaller brain and more distinctly protruding jaw than the reconstruction that Dr. Leakey assembled by hand, suggesting that early humans had features approaching those commonly associated with more apelike members of the hominid family living as long as four million years ago.

In human evolution fieldwork, Dr. Bromage's 1992 discovery of a 2.4-million-year-old jaw in Malawi unearthed the oldest known remains of the genus, Homo. The discovery, made in collaboration with Dr. Schrenk, director of Paleoanthropology at the Senckenberg Research Institute, marked the first time that scientists discovered an early human fossil outside of established early human sites in eastern and southern Africa.

In experimental biology approaches to human evolution research, Dr. Bromage discovered a new biological clock, or long-term rhythm, which controls many metabolic functions. Dr. Bromage discovered the new rhythm while observing incremental growth lines in tooth enamel, which appear much like the annual rings on a tree. He also observed a related pattern of incremental growth in skeletal bone tissue -- the first time such an incremental rhythm has ever been observed in bone. The findings suggest that the same biological rhythm that controls incremental tooth and bone growth also affects bone and body size and many metabolic processes, including heart and respiration rates.

In fact, Dr. Bromage said, the rhythm affects an organism's overall pace of life, and its life span. So, a rat that grows teeth and bone in one-eighth the time of a human also lives faster and dies younger.

Dr. Bromage has fundamentally altered the field of human evolution by prompting paradigm shifts in morphology, fieldwork, and experimental biology, thereby establishing the modern field of growth, development, and life history in paleoanthropology, said Dr. Charles N. Bertolami, dean of the NYU College of Dentistry.

A portion of the award will be dedicated to training junior scientists in the United States and Germany to assist on this research. Dr. Bromage has been honored for his academic achievements by the National Science Foundation (2009, 2007), the National Geographic Society (2008), and the National Institute of Health.

NIAID media availability: Food allergy-related disorder linked to master allergy gene

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WHAT:Scientists have identified a region of a human chromosome that is associated with eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), a recently recognized allergic disease. People with EoE frequently have difficulty eating or may be allergic to one or more foods. This study further suggests that a suspected so-called master allergy gene may play a role in the development of this rare but debilitating disorder.

EoE is characterized by inflammation and accumulation of a specific type of immune cell, called an eosinophil, in the esophagus. Symptoms of EoE vary with age: In young children a major symptom is spitting up food, while in older children and adults, the condition may cause food to become stuck in the esophagus. These symptoms may improve when a person with EoE is restricted to a liquid formula diet that contains no protein allergens or is placed on a diet that lacks six highly allergenic foods (milk, soy, eggs, wheat, peanut and seafood). EoE is not the same as more common food allergies, which also have serious consequences. Little is known about what causes EoE, but the disease runs in families suggesting that specific genes may be involved.

Investigators led by Marc Rothenberg, M.D., Ph.D., at Cincinnati Children's Medical Center Hospital, and supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, both part of the National Institutes of Health, performed a genome-wide association analysis in children with EoE and healthy children. This type of study detects markers of genetic variation across the entire human genome and allows researchers to zero in on a region of a chromosome to identify genes that influence health and the development of disease.

In this study, the investigators identified changes in genes within a region on chromosome 5 that were highly associated with EoE. One of the genes in this region encodes a protein called thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP). When the investigators measured the expression levels of this gene in children with EoE, they found it was more highly expressed than in children without the disorder. This result suggests that TSLP plays some role in EoE.

TSLP is made by epithelial cells, which line internal and external surfaces of the body. It has already been described as a master switch that may turn on other allergic diseases, such as asthma and atopic dermatitis (eczema).

Future research is needed to determine if these findings might lead to a genetic test for TSLP and whether drugs that block the production or function of TSLP might be useful in treating EoE.

Electromagnetic pulses provide pain relief for osteoarthritis

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Electromagnetic pulses significantly decrease pain and inflammation associated with osteoarthritis of the knee, according to Henry Ford Hospital researchers.

In the double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled study, 34 patients used a portable battery-operated device that emits a low-intensity pulsating electromagnetic frequency and experienced more than 40 percent pain relief on their first day.

Our results show pulsed electromagnetic fields caused a significant decrease in pain says Fred Nelson, M.D., associate program director for research and director of the Osteoarthritis Center, Department of Orthopaedics, Henry Ford Hospital.

Dr. Nelson will present the results this week at the Orthopaedic Research Society's annual meeting in New Orleans.

Dr. Nelson explains that in the laboratory, electromagnetic signals have been shown to decrease calcium in cartilage cells. This sets off a series of chemical events that can lead to reduced inflammation. Previously, the electromagnetic fields have been used to control pain related to cosmetic surgery.

We are really fine-tuning what we are doing to the cell environment with a very specific pulse sequence and frequency, says Dr. Nelson.

Patients strapped the small, ring-shaped plastic device around their knees for 15 minutes, twice daily for six weeks. The device was lightweight and patients could position the device directly over clothing. All participants were given a device with a coil that appeared to work but some were assigned active coils and others were given non-active coils. The electromagnetic device was developed by Ivivi Health Sciences of Montvale, New Jersey.

Osteoarthritis of the knee is a leading cause of disability and loss of independence. It is a slow, progressively degenerative disease in which the joint cartilage gradually wears away due to trauma, aging or infection. As the cartilage thins, the surrounding bone thickens and often bones rub against one another, causing additional wear. Normal activity becomes painful and difficult.

Current treatments include drug therapies like anti-inflammatory medication or pain relievers; physical therapy; support devices; health and behavioral modifications such as weight loss; surgery and joint replacement.

Dr. Nelson explains that medications often have variable success and can produce considerable side effects such as changes in kidney and liver function, a reduction in the ability of blood to clot as well as abdominal pain, nausea and indigestion.

The exciting thing about this new approach is that it has been found to have no side effects, it is relatively low-cost in the long-run and the onset of pain relief is immediate, says Dr. Nelson. We look at electromagnetic pulses as a potential way to improve quality of life and independence for those who suffer from osteoarthritis of the knee.

Dr. Nelson says researchers will continue to look at the consistency of the relief, how long the pain relief lasts and if electromagnetic pulses might affect other joints.

New 'hearing' maps are real conversation starters

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Innovative sound-mapping software based on human hearing has been developed to help architects design out unwanted noise.

The new software generates audibility maps of proposed room designs.

The EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) project has been developed at Cardiff University.

These maps show hotspots where conversations would not be intelligible if the room were busy. Architects can then adjust their designs to reduce reverberation until the hotspots are eliminated and audibility is maximised.

Software already exists to help architects predict how a building will perform acoustically for an audience in places like theatres and concert halls. This new software is specifically designed to improve the acoustic design of indoor spaces where a large number of people meet, chat and interact. It could be used for business as well as social purposes, for example, in designing open-plan offices, cafes and reception areas.

A lot of work has been done to understand acoustics in places used for public performances, says Professor John Culling, project leader. But little has been done to improve the acoustics of day-to-day meeting-places, even though this would help all of us in our working and social lives. A podcast featuring Professor Culling can be heard on our Pioneer Podcast page on iTunes or watch it on our Pioneer Video section.

The new software also produces results much more rapidly than other acoustic software. The key to its capabilities is the unprecedented sophistication and computational efficiency of the unique mathematical equation that underpins it.

The equation has been built up using the project team's cutting-edge research looking at how people take in sound through both ears as it travels round busy rooms and how noise sources are affected by each other. This means it can accurately predict acoustic quality at every point in an indoor space where people are likely to gather and talk.

The architect will be able to call their proposed design onto their computer screen and run the software, which will ask them to specify the locations of the main sound sources in the room. An audibility map will then automatically be produced and the architect will be able to change the room's dimensions, its shape and/or the materials to be used, until hotspots are eliminated. This means that rooms could be tailor-made to suit their purpose. The work will also make a significant difference to areas where audibility is important, such as rail and airport announcement waiting areas. In emergency situations such clarity could be vital in saving lives.

The new software is intended to be used in conjunction with standard architectural computer programs widely employed in room design.

The research will also help in the future development of hearing aids and cochlear implants.

Our objective now is to identify and work with a software company to help us develop the software further and market it, says Professor Culling. Hopefully it will be available for architects to use within the next 12 months.

Bovine respiratory disease

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A multi-disciplinary team of Oklahoma State University scientists and practitioners is riding herd on one of the most challenging concerns of Oklahoma's $4.6 billion cattle industry: Bovine Respiratory Disease.

BRD is the most common disease among feedlot cattle in the United States, accounting for approximately 75 percent of feedlot morbidity and 50 percent to 70 percent of all feedlot deaths. BRD causes between $800 million to $900 million annually in economic losses from death, reduced feed efficiency and antimicrobial treatment costs.

Immune response and morbidity issues relative to cattle growth and carcass quality affect every level of the beef industry, from the producer to the packer, all the way to the consumer as end-user, said lead-investigator Clint Krehbiel, holder of the university's Dennis and Marta White Endowed Chair in Animal Science.

A relatively recent development of research conducted by Krehbiel and his collaborators shows cattle that have three or more bouts of disease produce lower-quality meat.

As the number of antimicrobial treatments increased, average daily gain in the background phase decreased, cost-per-unit increased and net returns declined, Krehbiel said. Moreover, marbling scores, color stability and overall acceptance of the final beef product by consumers decreased as the number of antimicrobial treatments increased.

In other words, health issues on the farm or at the feedlot can have a direct relationship on the product purchased in the store. Everybody in the food chain loses dollar value.

OSU researchers have discovered that days on feed needed to reach a common 12th rib fat thickness increased by seven days for every unit increase in antimicrobial treatment required.

Increased days on feed, lower final body weight and lower carcass value resulted in an $11.36 loss in income for every time an animal was treated, Krehbiel said. Therefore, decreasing the average number of times an animal is treated for BRD by one treatment would result in a nearly $9 million savings to Oklahoma feedlot cattle producers.

Few studies have documented the economic effect of BRD from incidence of the disease through harvest, and especially the impact of BRD on acceptability of the final product as determined by consumers.

Demand for higher-quality products and an increase in value-based marketing highlight the importance of research aimed at increasing beef producers' awareness of health management practices that have the potential to increase profitability and beef product quality, said Ron Kensinger, head of OSU's department of animal science.

Kensinger added the research is representative of the importance OSU's Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources places on its land-grant mission to provide science-based solutions to concerns and issues vital to enhancing the quality of life for people throughout Oklahoma and the region.

Many of our complex problems in animal agriculture today require interdisciplinary teams to develop creative solutions, he said. Clint is a great collaborator. The research efforts he leads compliment other research and extension efforts in the department to optimize use of forage by cattle, improve reproduction efficiency, advance quality assurance programs and other projects that are meant to help Oklahoma beef producers maximize their profit potential in sustainable ways.

USGS scientists, research help Haiti reconstruction

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) USGS scientists are helping Haitians lay the groundwork for reconstruction and long-term earthquake monitoring in the wake of the Jan. 12, 2010, magnitude-7 earthquake, by providing geologic research that will assist with the establishment of new building codes in the country.

USGS research will contribute to explicit recommendations to both the Haitian government and the international community that is assisting the reconstruction efforts, said Walter Mooney, USGS research geophysicist, who recently returned from Haiti.

The most recent USGS scientists traveling to Haiti are Carol Prentice and Rich Briggs, who arrived on Feb. 24, 2010. Prentice and Briggs will work with scientists from the University of Texas to measure coastal uplift. This USGS team of scientists is part of the Earthquake Disaster Assistance Team program, a new initiative between the USGS and the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

This research follows the work of Mooney and a team with expertise in seismology and earthquake engineering from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, who were in Haiti between Jan. 26 and Feb. 3, 2010. This team, supported by the United States Southern Command, surveyed Port-au-Prince to understand the geologic and engineering factors that contributed to the greatest damage from the shaking.

Mooney says new building codes for reconstruction in Haiti will be based, in part, on USGS research on geologic conditions that make some areas more at risk for damage than others. Currently, Haiti has no such standards in place, a factor that contributed to the recent widespread devastation.

It's imperative that we move quickly, he adds, because in some areas reconstruction has already begun that may not withstand another earthquake of this magnitude.

Soil conditions, for example, play a big role in how a building fares during an earthquake. Specifically, we found that buildings on harder, more stable bedrock fared much better than buildings on softer sediments, such as those located in the center of cities like Port-au-Prince and Leogane, Mooney said.

The USGS scientists also installed seismic monitoring stations onto hard rock, as well as in the softer sedimentary basins. These monitoring stations precisely measure the location, frequency, and severity of the shaking, giving scientists the ability to assess the most dangerous and vulnerable areas.

Though an earthquake of this magnitude has not occurred since 1860, another large earthquake could strike Haiti in the near future. Beyond the immediate research following this earthquake, long-term monitoring using GPS will measure changes in the movement of the fault that runs through Haiti.

Methane releases from Arctic shelf may be much larger and faster than anticipated

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans, said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.

Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova's research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.

Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already, she said. If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.

Shakhova notes that the Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth's history. During the Earth's coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen, Shakhova said. Nobody considered this huge area.

This study is a testament to sustained, careful observations and to international cooperation in research, said Henrietta Edmonds of the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the study. The Arctic is a difficult place to get to and to work in, but it is important that we do so in order to understand its role in global climate and its response and contribution to ongoing environmental change. It is important to understand the size of the reservoir--the amount of trapped methane that potentially could be released--as well as the processes that have kept it trapped and those that control the release. Work like this helps us to understand and document these processes.

Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov's work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice.

They found that more than 80 percent of the deep water and more than 50 percent of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater. In some areas, the saturation levels reached more than 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter. They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.

These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated Arctic levels.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn't have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.

The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times, Shakhova said. The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.

Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling into the seafloor in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.

Scientists find signs of 'snowball Earth' amidst early animal evolution

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a snowball Earth event long suspected to have taken place around that time.

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by scientists at Harvard University, the team reports on its work this week in the journal Science.

The new findings--based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada--bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.

This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a 'snowball Earth' event, says lead author Francis Macdonald, a geologist at Harvard University.

Our data also suggest that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of five million years.

According to Enriqueta Barrera, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, which supported the research, the Sturtian glaciation, along with the Marinoan glaciation right after it, are the greatest ice ages known to have taken place on Earth. Ice may have covered the entire planet then, says Barrera, turning it into a 'snowball Earth.'

The survival of eukaryotes--life forms other than microbes such as bacteria--throughout this period suggests that sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on Earth's surface. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time.

Even in a snowball Earth, Macdonald says, there would be temperature gradients, and it is likely that sea ice would be dynamic: flowing, thinning and forming local patches of open water, providing refuge for life.

The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation, Macdonald says. The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?

From an evolutionary perspective, he adds, it's not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress.

The rocks Macdonald and his colleagues analyzed in Canada's Yukon Territory showed glacial deposits and other signs of glaciation, such as striated clasts, ice-rafted debris, and deformation of soft sediments.

The scientists were able to determine, based on the magnetism and composition of these rocks, that 716.5 million years ago the rocks were located at sea-level in the tropics, at about 10 degrees latitude.

Climate modeling has long predicted that if sea ice were ever to develop within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, the whole ocean would rapidly freeze over, Macdonald says. So our result implies quite strongly that ice would have been found at all latitudes during the Sturtian glaciation.

Scientists don't know exactly what caused this glaciation or what ended it, but Macdonald says its age of 716.5 million years closely matches the age of a large igneous province--made up of rocks formed by magma that has cooled--stretching more than 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) from Alaska to Ellesmere Island in far northeastern Canada.

This coincidence could mean the glaciation was either precipitated or terminated by volcanic activity.

Scientists find new form of prion disease that damages brain arteries

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WHAT:National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists investigating how prion diseases destroy the brain have observed a new form of the disease in mice that does not cause the sponge-like brain deterioration typically seen in prion diseases. Instead, it resembles a form of human Alzheimer's disease, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, that damages brain arteries.

The study results, reported by NIH scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), are similar to findings from two newly reported human cases of the prion disease Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome (GSS). This finding represents a new mechanism of prion disease brain damage, according to study author Bruce Chesebro, M.D., chief of the Laboratory of Persistent Viral Diseases at NIAID's Rocky Mountain Laboratories.

Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, primarily damage the brain. Prion diseases include mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle; scrapie in sheep; sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), variant CJD and GSS in humans; and chronic wasting disease in deer, elk and moose.

The role of a specific cell anchor for prion protein is at the crux of the NIAID study. Normal prion protein uses a specific molecule, glycophosphoinositol (GPI), to fasten to host cells in the brain and other organs. In their study, the NIAID scientists genetically removed the GPI anchor from study mice, preventing the prion protein from fastening to cells and thereby enabling it to diffuse freely in the fluid outside the cells.

The scientists then exposed those mice to infectious scrapie and observed them for up to 500 days to see if they became sick. The researchers documented signs typical of prion disease including weight loss, lack of grooming, gait abnormalities and inactivity. But when they examined the brain tissue, they did not observe the sponge-like holes in and around nerve cells typical of prion disease. Instead, the brains contained large accumulations of prion protein plaques trapped outside blood vessels in a disease process known as cerebral amyloid angiopathy, which damages arteries, veins and capillaries in the brain. In addition, the normal pathway by which fluid drains from the brain appeared to be blocked.

Their study, Dr. Chesebro says, indicates that prion diseases can be divided into two groups: those with plaques that destroy brain blood vessels and those without plaques that lead to the sponge-like damage to nerve cells. Dr. Chesebro says the presence or absence of the prion protein anchor appears to determine which form of disease develops.

The new mouse model used in the study and the two new human GSS cases, which also lack the usual prion protein cell anchor, are the first to show that in prion diseases, the plaque-associated damage to blood vessels can occur without the sponge-like damage to the brain. If scientists can find an inhibitor for the new form of prion disease, they might be able to use the same inhibitor to treat similar types of damage in Alzheimer's disease, Dr. Chesebro says.

ARSC included in $45 million Defense Department award

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has acquired new supercomputing resources under a $45 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense to Seattle-based supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc. ARSC is the sole provider of open research computing capabilities for the Defense Department's High Performance Computing Modernization Program. ARSC will receive an 11,648-computer core Cray supercomputer. ARSC also operates a 3,456-core Cray XT5 named Pingo, and a 2,312-processor Sun Opteron cluster called Midnight. In addition to ARSC, the $45 million award to Cray provides for the purchase of new high-performance computing machines at Defense Department centers in Mississippi and Ohio.

The new Cray for ARSC will be installed later this year in the National Petascale Computing Facility at the University of Illinois and remotely operated by ARSC staff from Fairbanks. The facility, now in its final phase of construction, is run by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The new ARSC supercomputer is considered by Cray to be one of its next-generation supercomputing systems, code-named Baker. It will feature a new interconnect chipset, known as Gemini, as well as enhanced system software to boost performance and productivity.

In addition to the ARSC supercomputer, the National Petascale Computing Facility will house Blue Waters, a massive supercomputer funded by the National Science Foundation that will be capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second.

We think this partnership with one of the largest academic supercomputing centers in the U.S. provides the modernization program and its users with more opportunities for collaboration and shared use of technologies co-located at NCSA, said ARSC director Frank Williams.

NCSA director Thom Dunning is also supportive of the new partnership.

This cooperative arrangement with ARSC opens up exciting opportunities for further collaboration between our two centers, and potentially between NCSA and the Department of Defense, he said. We look forward to working with ARSC to use our expertise and experience to help the scientists and engineers supported by DOD meet their research goals, Dunning said.

The partnership with NCSA is also expected to provide the Defense Department's High Performance Computing Modernization Program with a venue conducive to developing strategic opportunities with other federal agencies, and especially the National Science Foundation, according to ARSC director Williams. ARSC continues to take a leadership role in connecting academic, research, computing and defense communities with the computers, data storage systems, high-speed networks and next-generation experimental systems necessary for discovery in engineering and science, he said.

It also provides significant growth and sustainment opportunities for ARSC, Williams said. Running the new Cray remotely frees up much-needed space and high-demand power supplies so that we can install and operate new academic supercomputing systems here in Fairbanks. Earlier this year, ARSC announced that, in partnership and collaboration with researchers at UAF and the University of Hawaii, a new supercomputer and a new data storage system funded by a National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure grant will be installed in the Butrovich Building this spring. Those and related systems support more than 280 UAF researchers whose work would not be possible without the use of ARSC supercomputing resources.

Supercomputing resources at ARSC are used by a global community of researchers, within the U.S. Defense Department, the University of Alaska and other locations to advance scientific discovery for national competitiveness, global security and economic success. Projects include study of the world's oceans, which include creating models that predict the force and direction of tsunami waves, the impact of changes to the marine ecosystem on the Alaska fishing industry or the potential for ice-free summers in the Arctic.

Rush to develop stock markets has huge downside

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) France had the first one back in the 12th century. In 1980, less than 60 existed worldwide. But since then, the number had doubled.

Stock markets, once a way to manage debt and create capital for companies, have seemingly become a status symbol for some nations, or are used as a means for countries to access international funds for development.

But Michael Lounsbury, in the University of Alberta's School of Business, argues that the global rush to develop modern financial institutions-including stock markets-has had a huge downside.

Lounsbury says that, in many cases, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been an inexorable push to create markets, where they, or even countries for that matter, did not previously exist. While the creation of these markets in many underdeveloped countries has not necessarily contributed to the global economic crisis, their creation and the accompanying development of other market institutions did likely contribute to the recent global financial crisis.

In countries like the Czech Republic, for example, there was a strong need to not only create a stock-market apparatus but also to employ certain kinds of policies that mimicked U.S. economic policies, which often did not fit their societal context, said Lounsbury. The result has been disastrous for some countries.

Lounsbury cites the example of the fall of the Soviet empire and the rush by American experts to try to capitalize Russia. He says American economists parachuted into Russia, armed with plans and policies dictated by institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Under their direction, former state-controlled industries were privatized and ownership spread around the state to citizens in the form of stocks.

Most of these newly privatized companies were taken over by mafia-like organizations that ran things like oligarchs, said Lounsbury. Russia did not have a foundation to become a U.S.-style market economy.

Lounsbury also decries the purely symbolic development of markets. He notes that these markets are created for the sake of appearance, in order for the governments of these countries to access funds from groups such as the IMF or the World Bank to support their social policies. Lounsbury notes that such approaches often do little to foster real economic growth and development.

In many cases, these markets serve no important function in the societies or economies of these countries, said Lounsbury. The vast majority of stock markets have little substantive trading activity or infrastructure to support the use of a stock market to propel economic growth and development.

Lounsbury, who favours socio-economic approaches to markets, notes that the latest financial crisis has enabled new conversations about approaches to markets that account for substantive social welfare concerns, and such a shift in policy is a positive step that would serve to address many inequalities found in society. While some may cringe at the idea of more government involvement in markets, he says that more government-instilled policies are necessary to build a stable economy and a stable, equitable and productive society, as well as to prevent financial crises from having such a massive impact on all segments of society.

The economy should be conceptualized more as an appendage to the society that we want, not as a kind of unfettered dictator that unravels society, said Lounsbury. If the financial crisis taught us anything, it's important to have rules and oversight; you can't just have a market take away all the rules and let it run amok.

IWMI signs MOU with Government of LAO PDR for better management of water and land resources

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Vientiane,Lao PDR, March 3 2010. The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the Government of Lao PDR today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to formalize and establish an IWMI Southeast Asia Regional Office in Vientiane and work towards the sustainable development of land and water resources in Laos. In December 2008 IWMI established a project office in Vientiane with permission from the Government of Lao PDR. Through this office IWMI coordinated and managed its research activities in Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Yunnan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

The choice of Laos for IWMI's new regional office was for a number of reasons. Laos has significant water resources and is the largest contributing nation to the Mekong. Land and water resources are underdeveloped and there are opportunities to assist the government in developing these resources in a sustainable way for the benefit of all. There are also many opportunities for building capacity for land and water resources management and research. Dr Andrew Noble IWMI Regional Director for Southeast and Central Asia says Laos is the least populated country in the Mekong basin and annually contributes 36% of the total volume of water in the Mekong river. Although water resources are underdeveloped, there is a significant potential for generating income through agriculture, fisheries, tourism and hydropower. The Government of Lao PDR sees IWMI as a valuable partner in continuing efforts to manage the country's land and water resources in a sustainable manner.

IWMI and its partner IRD are no strangers to Laos. Over the years there has been a long and successful partnership between IWMI/IRD and the government of Lao PDR, through the Management of Soil Erosion Consortium (MSEC) which was initially funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and later by IWMI. The research carried out through MSEC gave new insights into the causes of sedimentation in uplands and their impact on water quality. The program also contributed to the development of sediment models which were useful to predict erosion from watersheds.

IWMI worked with the National Agriculture and Forestry research Institute (NAFRI) in the implementation of Conservation Farming Villages in northern Lao PDR. This project evaluated a range of land use interventions that reduced the risk of sediment generation and enhanced the livelihoods of upland communities. Model villages where successful interventions were carried out have been promoted in Lao PDR, and subsequently in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia as an approach to achieving sustainable land use management in upper watersheds.

This year IWMI celebrates 25 years of research. In the 15 years of IWMI's presence in Southeast Asia, it has established collaborative activities in research, education, training and capacity building, and information exchange in the sustainable management of land and water resources through collaboration with Government Departments, Universities, NGO's, farmer organizations and networks. The major areas of collaboration with our partners have been in the broad areas of policy and governance, land degradation and water management.

The research activities in IWMI Southeast Asia range from understanding the processes of soil erosion and its management at both individual and community level, to the development of models to identify sediment discharge from catchments; research into heavy metal contamination of rice, the rehabilitation of degraded soils of Northeast Thailand, and the development of strategies to limit conflict between fishers and rice growers in the lower Mekong delta. All these research activities have their focus on food security and human health and increasing productivity and farm incomes.

The new MOU moves IWMI from the project based MOU that it previously held to the status of an International Organization under the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It will also enable IWMI and the government to work closely together on the sustainable development of land and water resources in Laos through the introduction of best practices, and recommendations for better policies and good governance.

Nuclear physics promises earlier detection of brain tumors with just 1 scan

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Time taken to detect brain tumours could soon be significantly reduced thanks to an ongoing pioneering project led by the University of Liverpool with the Nuclear Physics Group and Technology departments at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at Daresbury Laboratory. Project ProSPECTus is developing the technology for next generation SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) imaging that is set to revolutionise the medical imaging process, improving future diagnosis of cancer and the probability of successful cancer therapy whilst enabling a higher throughput of patients in hospitals.

Project ProSPECTus is based on a form of imaging known as SPECT which detects gamma rays emitted by a tiny amount of a radioactive pharmaceutical which is injected into the body. SPECT is a widely used method of imaging in many areas of medicine providing 3D functional information about the body, which is typically presented as cross-sectional slices through the patient. It is most commonly used to test the functioning of the heart or for the detection of tumours. Conventionally, SPECT imaging uses what is known as an 'Anger Camera' which relies on a collimator, a filtering device with many small holes, which lets just some gamma rays through and relies on geometry to identify exactly where they are coming from in order to build a picture of a biological process happening inside the patient.

However, ProSPECTus has taken a fundamentally different approach and has developed its technology based on what is known as the 'Compton Camera'. This identifies the origin of the gamma rays without the use of a collimator, meaning that much less of the radiation used in the process is wasted, so the radiation is used more efficiently. It has not been possible to do this successfully before. However, using brand new, cutting edge detector systems, ProSPECTus is now building a prototype SPECT imaging system, using the Compton Camera principle, that is one hundred times more sensitive than existing clinical SPECT systems. This increased sensitivity offers two benefits- either the dose of radiation administered to the patient could be reduced or alternatively more patients could be scanned by one machine in a day if the current dose is used.

These new cutting edge detector systems, designed by the University of Liverpool's Nuclear Physics research group alongside the Nuclear Physics Group at STFC Daresbury Laboratory, are a direct spin out of AGATA (Advanced Gamma Tracking ), a nuclear physics research and development project with the aim of building the next generation gamma-ray spectrometer. ProSPECTus is funded from STFC's Particle and Nuclear Physics Applied Systems (PNPAS) programme, a scheme aimed at exploiting techniques developed in blue-skies basic research projects like AGATA so as to generate knowledge exchange into the areas of health, security and energy applications.

Earth-shaking research to predict devastation from earthquakes

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The computational science expertise at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory is playing a key role in enabling researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), to develop a tool that will make it possible to estimate the likely impact of large magnitude earthquakes at specific locations, before they happen.

Led and funded by the Institute of Engineering of UNAM, the project has closely studied the propagation of seismic waves through the earth's crust during a number of major earthquakes, including the Magnitude Scale (Ms) 8 earthquakes that heavily damaged Mexico City in 1985 and the Great Sichuan Earthquake in China in 2008. Using this background experience, Daresbury's computational scientists have been working with UNAM on the further development and optimisation of the simulation code for use on the world's leading computer systems. As well as looking at past events, the work is capable of studying ground motions from hypothetical earthquakes in vulnerable regions, and identifying where the ground shaking shocks would be at their greatest, should the earthquake occur.

Dr Mario Chavez, researcher at UNAM said: Our research means that governments, developers and planners across the world could soon have access to vital earthquake ground motion data that will enable them to assess the strength and impact of large or extreme magnitude earthquake scenarios in their own region. This kind of information could play a major role when working on the risk assessment for a facility site, such as a nuclear power station, or when designing homes, hospitals, schools, or any buildings, in determining how resilient they need to be in order to minimise the damage caused by an earthquake. It could also help to assess how adequate an area's emergency infrastructure would be in such an event. However, it is important to point out that we are not predicting that an earthquake will actually happen, or when it will happen, but to pose what if type scenarios such as, if an earthquake of a given magnitude does hit a specific area, first, how much and how fast the earth surface will move, and second, by using information of the resilience capacity of the existing or planned infrastructure in that region, what is the probable impact of the earthquake. We are very excited to be working with the computational scientists at STFC Daresbury, who are renowned world experts in engineering computing. Daresbury is one of the best computational modelling centres in the world.

Researchers find weakness in common digital security system

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ANN ARBOR, Mich.---The most common digital security technique used to protect both media copyright and Internet communications has a major weakness, University of Michigan computer scientists have discovered.

RSA authentication is a popular encryption method used in media players, laptop computers, smartphones, servers and other devices. Retailers and banks also depend on it to ensure the safety of their customers' information online.

The scientists found they could foil the security system by varying the voltage supply to the holder of the private key, which would be the consumer's device in the case of copy protection and the retailer or bank in the case of Internet communication. It is highly unlikely that a hacker could use this approach on a large institution, the researchers say. These findings would be more likely to concern media companies and mobile device manufacturers, as well as those who use them.

Andrea Pellegrini, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will present a paper on the research at the upcoming Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference in Dresden on March 10.

The RSA algorithm gives security under the assumption that as long as the private key is private, you can't break in unless you guess it. We've shown that that's not true, said Valeria Bertacco, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

These private keys contain more than 1,000 digits of binary code. To guess a number that large would take longer than the age of the universe, Pellegrini said. Using their voltage tweaking scheme, the U-M researchers were able to extract the private key in approximately 100 hours.

They carefully manipulated the voltage with an inexpensive device built for this purpose. Varying the electric current essentially stresses out the computer and causes it to make small mistakes in its communications with other clients. These faults reveal small pieces of the private key. Once the researchers caused enough faults, they were able to reconstruct the key offline.

This type of attack doesn't damage the device, so no tamper evidence is left.

RSA authentication is so popular because it was thought to be so secure, said Todd Austin, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Our work redefines the level of security it offers. It lowers the safety assurance by a significant amount.

Although this paper only discusses the problem, the professors say they've identified a solution. It's a common cryptographic technique called salting that changes the order of the digits in a random way every time the key is requested.

We've demonstrated that a fault-based attack on the RSA algorithm is possible, Austin said. Hopefully, this will cause manufacturers to make a few small changes to their implementation of the algorithm. RSA is a good algorithm and I think, ultimately, it will survive this type of attack.

The sea squirt offers hope for Alzheimer's sufferers

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Alzheimer's disease affects an estimated 27 million people worldwide. It is the most common form of age-related dementia, possibly the most feared disease of old age. There is no cure, and the available drugs only help to relieve symptoms without slowing progression of the disease. One of the characteristic changes in the brains of Alzheimer's patients is the accumulation of plaques and tangles; currently, the best hope for curing or at least slowing the disease lies in developing drugs that target this buildup. Some drugs are already in clinical trials, but there is still a pressing need for more research, and for more and better drugs directed against both known and novel targets.

One of the big problems in rapidly screening potentially useful drugs has been the lack of a good model system in which Alzheimer's plaques and tangles appear quickly. However, Mike Virata and Bob Zeller, scientists working at San Diego State University, California, have come up with a new, and perhaps unlikely candidate; the humble sea squirt, Ciona intestinalis. Sea squirts are tunicates, marine organisms protected by an outer hard tunic with a soft body inside. Adults spend their lives attached to one spot on underwater structures like the pilings of piers, sucking in water through one siphon, filtering out small plants to eat, and squirting the water back out through another siphon. However, as long ago as Darwin, it has been recognized that sea squirts may be our closest invertebrate relatives; in their immature, tadpole form, they resemble proper vertebrates, and they share about 80% of their genes with us.

Bob Zeller has been a fan of sea squirt tadpoles since starting work with them in the 1990s, when he helped develop a way of introducing foreign DNA into fertilized sea squirt eggs with almost 100% efficiency, opening the way for their use as model organisms. He and his colleague Mike Virata decided to see whether it would be possible to model Alzheimer's disease in the tiny animals, which share all the genes needed for the development of Alzheimer's plaques in humans. Incredibly, dosing the sea squirt tadpoles with a mutant protein found in human families with hereditary Alzheimer's resulted in aggressive development of plaques in the tadpoles' brains in only a day, and these, along with the accompanying behavioral defects seen in the tadpoles, could be reversed by treating with an experimental anti-plaque forming drug. This is an important breakthrough, as all other invertebrates tested have been unable to process the plaque-forming protein, and vertebrates take months or years to make plaques. These exciting results make it a real possibility that sea squirts are an excellent model for testing new drugs in the fight against Alzheimer's disease.

Study finds dirty air in California causes millions worth of medical care each year

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) California's dirty air caused more than $193 million in hospital-based medical care from 2005 to 2007 as people sought help for problems such as asthma and pneumonia that are triggered by elevated pollution levels, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

Researchers estimate that exposure to excessive levels of ozone and particulate pollution caused nearly 30,000 emergency room visits and hospital admissions over the study period. Public insurance programs were responsible for most of the costs, with Medicare and Medi-Cal covering more than two-thirds of the expenses, according to the report.

California's failure to meet air pollution standards causes a large amount of expensive hospital care, said John Romley, lead author of the study and an economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. The result is that insurance programs -- both those run by the government and private payers -- face higher costs because of California's dirty air.

While much work has been done previously to catalog the economic impact of air pollution across California, the RAND study is the first to quantify the cost of hospital-based medical care to various payers caused by the failure to meet federal clean air standards across the state. More people in California live in areas that do not meet federal clean air standards than in any other state.

Romley said the findings show that private insurers, employers and public insurance programs all have a financial stake in improving California's air quality.

These costs may not be the largest problem caused by dirty air, but our study provides more evidence about the impact that air pollution has on the state's economy, Romley said.

Researchers used records from air pollution agencies and hospitals to estimate how failing to meet federal and state standards for particulate matter and ozone would affect private and public insurer spending for hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular causes, and emergency room visits for asthma throughout California from 2005-2007.

Researchers say the most common hospital-based medical care triggered by elevated air pollution levels are emergency room visits for asthma among children aged 17 and under, with more than 12,000 visits over the three-year study period.

The most costly conditions examined by researchers were hospital admissions triggered by air pollution for acute bronchitis, pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Those conditions accounted for nearly one-third of the $193 million in health care spending documented over the study period.

Nearly three-quarters of the health events identified by researchers were triggered by high levels of fine particulate pollution -- tiny pieces of soot that can lodge deep in lungs. The health events examined in the study were concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley and the four-county South Coast Air Basin.

The cost of treating health events caused by air pollution is equal to the expense of providing flu vaccines to 85 percent of California children under age 15, according to the report.

Researchers say their study provides a conservative estimate about the costs of medical care triggered by air pollution because it does not include outpatient care provided in clinics or medical offices. Details about that type of medical care are not routinely reported to state agencies and thus could not be analyzed.

The study also includes case studies of individual hospitals in Fresno, Lynwood, Palo Alto, Riverside and Sacramento. That analysis demonstrates that costs and types of illness reported vary by region.

To conduct the study, researchers used epidemiological studies that link elevated pollution levels to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, and compared that information to pollution levels measured across the state from 2005 to 2007 by various public agencies. Researchers also reviewed detailed records hospitals report to the state about the patients they treat, the illnesses diagnosed and who pays for that care.

Bringing bison back to North American landscapes

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The next 10 to 20 years could be extremely significant for restoring wild populations of American bison to their original range, including the Canadian Rockies; but for this to happen, more land must be made available for herds to roam free, government policies must be updated and the public must change its attitude towards bison, according to a new international study on the species co-authored by University of Calgary experts.

The publication released today by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, American Bison: Status Survey and Conservation Guidelines 2010, reports on the current status of American bison in the wild and in conservation herds, and makes recommendations on how to ensure that the species is conserved for the future.

Although the effort to restore bison to the plains of North America is considered to be one of the most ambitious and complex undertakings in species conservation in North America, it will only succeed if legislation is introduced at a local and national level, with significant funding and a shift in attitude towards the animal, says Simon Stuart, Chair, IUCN Species Survival Commission.

This publication will provide important guidance for the Canadian Rockies Bison Initiative, a local effort that proposes to restore bison in the eastern slope watersheds of the Banff National Park. The guidelines will have great application to local projects such as the CRBI, looking at ecological restoration of wild bison in the mountain areas west of Calgary, says U of C Faculty of Environmental Design Professor and co-editor of the study Cormack Gates, who is also co-chair of the IUCN/SSC Bison Specialist Group.

Cliff White, research director for the Canadian Rockies Bison Initiative and an adjunct professor in EVDS says that the IUCN report provides state-of-the-art guidelines to use science and traditional knowledge to plan the return of wild bison to an important homeland in the Rocky Mountain landscape. White anticipates greater support towards the local initiative and is currently working with several governmental and non-governmental organizations such as Parks Canada and the Eleanor Luxton Historical Foundation that have an interest in restoring bison.

Harvey Locke, spokesperson for the Eleanor Luxton Foundation, said the foundation is pleased with the comprehensive review of the status and ecology of the buffalo provided in the IUCN report. We are very dedicated as an institution to the integrity of the history, culture and ecology of the Banff Bow Valley and will make every effort to support the reintroduction of bison there as a wild species, Locke says.

Even the boss doesn't follow the doctor's orders

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Only 68 percent of corporate executives took their cholesterol lowering medication as prescribed by a doctor, a new study shows.

Overall, the executives who took their medication even sporadically were twice as likely to meet their cholesterol goals. The study finding also questions the prevailing wisdom that income is a primary factor in medication adherence.

University of Michigan researchers studied 1,607 executive level managers at a major financial institution from 1995 to 2004, said Alyssa Schultz, health science research associate at the U-M School of Kinesiology Health Management Research Center, and one of the study authors.

Researchers wanted to discover the rate of medication adherence, and also what happened to cholesterol levels in executives who did or didn't take statins. Statin drugs lower the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, or the so-called bad cholesterol. Statins are proven effective and are a first-line treatment for lowering cholesterol.

Adherence was defined as taking medication as prescribed at least 80 percent of the time. Overall, statin users were twice as likely to meet the near optimal goal of 130 mg/dL or less, than non-statin users. Among executive who took statins, 70 percent achieved the near-optimal goal and 30 percent achieved the optimal goal of 100 mg/dL or less, compared to 55 percent and 21 percent, respectively, for non-statin users who weren't prescribed the drug

Even executives who took their medication sporadically did much better than the non-statin users, Schultz said. It seems to show that some medication use is better than none, however adherence is associated with the best outcome of all, she said. The executives who actually did adhere to the statin regimen were significantly more likely to achieve their cholesterol goals than those who took the medication sporadically.

Researchers in this study did not look at reasons why the executives did or didn't follow their doctor's orders, but past research on the topic suggests cost is a factor. However, this study population was predominately white male and more highly educated and compensated than more than the average person.

Many people think cost is the main reason for medication non-adherence but this doesn't appear true since these people have relatively high salaries, said Schultz.

Using statins could actually save money. Previous research on the effectiveness of statin use in a population at high risk for cardiovascular disease found that a health plan with 210,000 covered lives and 9,336 at-risk employees could yield a $1,735 reduction in costs per treated patient.

So what can employers do? Make sure statins are a covered benefit, said Schultz. Do screening to identify at-risk employees. Partner with health care and pharmacy providers to address reasons for poor medication adherence.

Aerial surveillance technology could keep soldiers safer

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New technology that enables aerial vehicles to plan and verify missions could mean there is less need for military personnel to conduct dangerous surveillance operations in war zones.

Developed for use in multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAVs), the sophisticated autonomous computer framework - the first of its kind - allows one operator to control a number of vehicles from a safe position on the ground. It would also make surveillance missions significantly cheaper.

The EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) research project has been developed by scientists from Cranfield University, based at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. They are collaborating with a research team at Imperial College London.

UAVs are used regularly in defence scenarios, but having a team of vehicles means more eyes, safer missions and more accurate results. It also means that if one vehicle is lost in action the others can carry on until the mission is complete. Launching a fleet of vehicles in crowded or dangerous skies, however, requires very sophisticated control and guaranteed performance of the vehicles.

The framework technology allows an operator to programme a mission objective, authorising the group of vehicles to decide the most efficient way to complete their task. Through a series of control algorithms the framework manages each vehicle's functions, such as navigation, guidance, path planning and decision making, and ensures the vehicles avoid colliding with one another or other objects.

Principal researcher Professor Antonios Tsourdos explains the importance of the framework's accuracy: We have to be absolutely certain of the behaviour of the UAVs if they are operating over civilian areas or in a battle situation.

Other benefits of using the framework technology with MUAVs are that it increases the chances of a mission being conducted safely and successfully. Missions sometimes have to be abandoned due to poor weather or on safety grounds, but pilotless vehicles can be used in more challenging situations and can also provide real-time feedback on current conditions, says Professor Tsourdos.

MUAVs using this framework technology can also be used by search and rescue services to look for lost people or vessels. It allows searches to be conducted without the loss of attention to detail or tiredness that occurs when humans work in challenging situations for extended periods.

Another novel use of the technology is within environmental surveillance. The team has modelled the MUAVs with chemical sensors attached to track the movements of contaminated cloud formations. The vehicles were able to successfully track a cloud and predict its movement pattern. This could revolutionise the way emergency services respond to explosions such as the Buncefield disaster in 2005, where a contaminated cloud posed a risk to the local population. The technology will give a more accurate idea of which areas are likely to be affected.

Other civil applications include mining, oil exploration, surveillance and reconnaissance for traffic control, fire extinction, oceanographic or geological surveys, and marine and border inspection.

The Cranfield researchers were part of a team that won the 2008 Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge competition and are leading the world in the development of this type of technology. Professor Tsourdos hopes the technology will be deployed regularly within five years.

Mother's milk turns on the heat

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) In newborn mice, at least, mother's milk appears to have some rather immediate and potentially far-reaching metabolic consequences. The milk intake kick-starts the liver to produce a molecule that then turns on heat-generating brown fat.

A key phenomenon required after birth is to adapt the body to a lower environmental temperature with respect to that experienced when the fetus is inside the mother's womb, said Francesc Villarroya of the University of Barcelona. We find that a key inducer of heat production in neonates is FGF21, released by the liver in response to the initiation of suckling.

FGF21 (short for fibroblast growth factor 21) has recently emerged as a novel regulator of metabolism, Villarroya explained. Scientists knew that FGF21 is produced primarily in the liver, where it is induced after fasting in adult rodents and humans. FGF21 can also correct metabolic disorders of obese and diabetic mice.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to know whether FGF21 also has a role in metabolic shifts as newborn animals transition to life in the world. It appears that it does.

Plasma FGF21 levels and FGF21 gene expression in the liver rise dramatically after birth in mice, the researchers report. That increase is initiated by suckling and depends on the intake of lipid-rich milk. When the researchers mimicked the FGF21 postnatal rise by injecting FGF21 into fasting neonates, they found that the treatment enhanced the expression of genes involved in heat generation, or thermogenesis, within brown fat, to increase body temperature. Brown fat cells treated with FGF21 showed increased expression of thermogenesis genes. The cells also expended more energy and burned more glucose.

Villarroya's team thinks what happens in those first hours of life may have consequences for the individual that carry over into adulthood, noting that FGF21 is a powerful antidiabetic agent.

There are many evidences that alterations of dietary, genetic, environmental, or other origin in the metabolic performance during the fetal and early neonatal life can make an individual prone to develop diabetes and obesity in adulthood, he said. The precise mechanisms by which this happens are not fully understood. We observe that a 'natural' event in the postnatal life is a burst in FGF21 levels in response to suckling. It will be important to know whether any disturbance in the intensity of this naturally occurring event may have negative consequences in adulthood.

Villarroya said that there has been something of a revolution in thinking about brown fat in recent years. That's because scientists have found active brown fat in adult humans and have reported evidence that greater activity within brown fat can lend an individual greater resistance to obesity.

He says he suspects the pathways observed in neonatal mice do play similar roles in newborn humans, and maybe in adults, too. It remains to be demonstrated if FGF21 is also an activator of brown fat in adult humans, but this would be of utmost importance for studies on complex metabolic diseases in adult humans, he says.

Research: How you think about your age may affect how you age

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The saying You're only as old as you feel really seems to resonate with older adults, according to research from Purdue University.

How old you are matters, but beyond that it's your interpretation that has far-reaching implications for the process of aging, said Markus H. Schafer, a doctoral student in sociology and gerontology who led the study. So, if you feel old beyond your own chronological years you are probably going to experience a lot of the downsides that we associate with aging.

But if you are older and maintain a sense of being younger, then that gives you an edge in maintaining a lot of the abilities you prize.

Schafer and co-author Tetyana P. Shippee, a Purdue graduate who is a research associate at Purdue's Center on Aging and the Life Course, compared people's chronological age and their subjective age to determine which one has a greater influence on cognitive abilities during older adulthood. Nearly 500 people ages 55-74 were surveyed about aging in 1995 and 2005 as part of the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States.

In 1995, when people were asked what age do you feel most of the time, the majority identified with being 12 years younger than they actually were.

We found that these people who felt young for their age were more likely to have greater confidence about their cognitive abilities a decade later, Schafer said. Yes, chronological age was important, but the subjective age had a stronger effect.

What we are not sure about is what comes first. Does a person's wellness and happiness affect their cognitive abilities or does a person's cognitive ability contribute to their sense of wellness. We are planning to address this in a future study.

Schafer also said that the current study's findings have both positive and negative implications.

There is a tremendous emphasis on being youthful in our society and that can have a negative effect for people, Schafer said. People want to feel younger, and so when they do inevitably age they can lose a lot of confidence in their cognitive abilities.

But on the other hand, because there is such a desire in America to stay young, there may be benefits of trying to maintain a sense of youthfulness by keeping up with new trends and activities that feel invigorating. Learning new technologies is one way people can continue to improve their cognitive abilities. It will be interesting to see how, or if, these cultural norms shift as the Baby Boomer generation ages.

Other studies have shown that women are prone to aging stereotypes, so Schafer expected to see that women who felt older about themselves would have less confidence in their cognitive abilities.

There is a slight difference between men and women, but it's not as pronounced as we expected, Schafer said. This was surprising because of the emphasis on physical attractiveness and youth that is often disproportionately placed on women.

Schafer also is studying how stressful events, such as family members' health issues, affect aging, as well as how happiness and aging relate.

Researchers issue outlook for a significant New England 'red tide' in 2010

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Today, scientists from the NOAA-funded Gulf of Maine Toxicity project issued an outlook for a significant regional bloom of a toxic alga that causes 'red tides' in the spring and summer of this year, potentially threatening the New England shellfish industry.

The outlook is based on a seafloor survey of the seed-like cysts of Alexandrium fundyense, an organism that causes harmful algal blooms, sometimes referred to as 'red tides'. Cysts deposited in the fall hatch the following spring; last fall the abundance of cysts in the sediment was 60 percent higher than observed prior to the historic bloom of 2005, indicating that a large bloom is likely in the spring of 2010.

The cyst bed also appears to have expanded to the south, so the 2010 bloom may affect areas such as Massachusetts Bay and Georges Bank sooner than has been the case in past years.

Although the algae in the water pose no direct threat to human beings, toxins produced by Alexandrium can accumulate in filter-feeding organisms such as mussels and clams, which can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning in humans who consume them. In order to protect public health, shellfish beds are monitored by state agencies and closed when toxin concentrations rise above a quarantine level. There have been no illnesses from legally harvested shellfish in recent years despite some severe blooms.

Scientists are reluctant to make a forecast of precisely where and when the bloom will make landfall because bloom transport depends on weather events that cannot be predicted months in advance.

Our research has shown that cyst abundance in the fall is an indicator of the magnitude of the bloom in the following year, said Dennis McGillicuddy, a senior scientist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and member of the Gulf of Maine Toxicity project, or GOMTOX. Even if there is a large bloom offshore, certain wind patterns and ocean currents in the late spring and summer are needed to transport it onshore where it can affect coastal shellfish.

This year's bloom could be similar to the major blooms of 2005 and 2008, according to Don Anderson, a biologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and principal investigator of the GOMTOX study. The 2005 bloom shut down shellfish beds from Maine to Martha's Vineyard for several months and caused an estimated $20 million in losses to the Massachusetts shellfish industry alone.

Government agencies and researchers believe that the regional-scale, seasonal outlook can be useful in preparing for contingencies. NOAA's goal is to provide tools to prevent, control, or mitigate the occurrence of harmful algal blooms and their impacts, said David M. Kennedy, acting assistant administrator for NOAA's National Ocean Service. This advanced warning, along with updates during the season, can help state agencies prepare for monitoring harmful algal blooms and assessing public health risks.

Early warnings can give shellfish farmers and fishermen the opportunity to shift the timing of their harvest or postpone plans for expansion of aquaculture beds. Area restaurants may also benefit from advance warnings by making contingency plans for supplies of seafood during the summer.

GOMTOX researchers regularly share their field observations and models with more than 80 coastal resource and fisheries managers in six states as well as federal entities like NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

'Red tide' is a chronic problem in the Gulf of Maine and states have limited resources to handle it, said Darcie Couture, director of Biotoxin Monitoring for the Maine Department of Marine Resources. When we get this information about the potential severity of a bloom season and the dynamics of the bloom once the season has started, then it gives us an advantage in staging our resources during an otherwise overwhelming environmental and economic crisis.

Ruoying He, associate professor at North Carolina State University and GOMTOX member, will present data and models on the projected bloom at the 2010 Ocean Sciences Meeting today in Portland, Ore.

Coffee drinkers less likely to be hospitalized for heart rhythm disturbances

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Coffee drinkers may be less likely to be hospitalized for heart rhythm disturbances, according to a report presented at the American Heart Association's 50th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.

Researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, Calif., found that men and women who reported drinking four or more cups of coffee each day had an 18 percent lower risk of hospitalization for heart rhythm disturbances. Those who reported drinking one to three cups each day had a 7 percent reduction in risk.

The large, long-term observational study involved 130,054 men and women, 18 to 90 years old, with the majority less than 50 years old. About 2 percent (3,317) were hospitalized for rhythm disturbances; 50 percent of those were for atrial fibrillation, the most common heart rhythm problem.

The 18 percent reduction in risk was consistent among men and women, different ethnic groups, smokers and nonsmokers.

In the study, 14 percent reported drinking less than one cup of coffee a day; 42 percent reported drinking one to three cups; and 17 percent reported drinking four cups or more each day. Only 27 percent were not coffee drinkers.

Coffee drinking is related to lower risk of hospitalization for rhythm problems, but this association does not prove cause and effect, said Arthur Klatsky, M.D., study lead investigator and senior consultant in cardiology at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program. These data should be reassuring to people who drink moderate amounts of coffee that their habit is not likely to cause a rhythm disturbance.

The researchers examined hospitalization data by elapsed time after the initial examination. For hospitalization within 10 years, the reduction in hospitalizations for people who consumed four cups of coffee or more each day reached 28 percent.

In another subgroup analysis, the researchers studied persons with and without symptoms or history of heart and respiratory disease. For both groups, four cups of coffee daily appeared to be associated with fewer hospitalizations for rhythm disturbances.

This study does not mean that people should drink coffee to prevent rhythm problems, Klatsky said. It supports the idea that people who are at risk for rhythm problems or who have rhythm problems do not need to abstain from coffee.

Because patients frequently report palpitations after drinking coffee, the public may be surprised at the study findings, Klatsky said.

This study was supported by a grant from the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Co-authors are: Amatul Hasan, M.D..; Cynthia Morton, M.D.; Mary Anne Armstrong, M.A., biostatistician; and Natalia Udaltsova, Ph.D., programmer. Author disclosures are on the abstract.

Contact information: Dr. Klatsky can be reached at (510) 752-6538 and

(Note: Actual presentation time is 5:15 p.m., PT/8:15 p.m. ET, Friday, March 5, 2010.)

Click here to download audio clips offering perspective on this research from American Heart Association spokesperson, Kenneth Ellenbogen, M.D., Director, Electrophysiology and Pacing Lab; Kontos Professor of Cardiology; Vice-Chairman, Division of Cardiology - Virginia Commonwealth University Health Systems.

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ALL FOR RELEASE AT: 3 p.m. PT/ 6 p.m. ET, Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Frequent napping associated with an increased prevalence of type 2 diabetes

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:24:24 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A study in the March 1 issue of the journal Sleep shows that frequent napping is associated with an elevated prevalence of type 2 diabetes and impaired fasting glucose in an older Chinese population.

Results show that the prevalence of type 2 diabetes was 36 percent higher (adjusted odds ratio = 1.36) in participants who reported napping four to six times a week and 28 percent higher (OR = 1.28) in those who napped daily. Similar associations were found between napping and impaired fasting glucose. The observed associations were unaltered in statistical analyses that removed participants with potential ill health and daytime sleepiness, suggesting it is less likely that diabetes leads to daytime sleepiness and raising the possibility that napping may increase the risk of diabetes.

According to the authors, napping in China is a social norm, which is practiced by all ages primarily as a habit started in childhood. In Western countries, napping is less common and is often unplanned and prompted by sleepiness likely caused by aging, deteriorating health status or nighttime complaints.

Lead author Neil Thomas, PhD, reader in epidemiology at the University of Birmingham, U.K., said that additional research is needed to determine if napping itself plays a causative role in the development of type 2 diabetes, or if other factors are involved.

"In many non-Mediterranean, Western countries a large proportion of those that nap are generally older or have other conditions that cause tiredness and create an urge to nap," said Thomas. "The napping can therefore be a marker of disease."

This cross-sectional study analyzed baseline data from the Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study, a collaboration between the Guangzhou Number 12 People's Hospital and the Universities of Birmingham and Hong Kong. The community-based study took place in Guangzhou, China, where 19,567 participants between the ages of 50 and 93 years were recruited from 2003 to 2004 and 2005 to 2006. The sample comprised 13,972 women with a mean age of 61.4 years and 5,595 men with an average age of 64.2 years.

Participants underwent a half-day assessment, which included a structured interview on lifestyle and medical history, and a physical examination. Self-reported frequency of napping was obtained by questionnaire, and type 2 diabetes was assessed by a fasting blood glucose sample and/or self-reports of physician diagnosis or treatment. Participants were asked to describe their napping habits and daytime sleepiness.

Type 2 diabetes was identified in 13.5 percent of the sample and was more prevalent in people who reported napping daily (15.1 percent) and in those who napped four to six times per week (14.7 percent). Logistic regression models were constructed to assess the relationship between napping and diabetes and impaired fasting glucose, adjusting for demographics, lifestyle, sleep habits, health status, body fat and metabolic markers.

At least one nap per week was reported by 67.2 percent of participants, more commonly in males (76.4 percent) than in females (63.6 percent). About 59.4 percent of these people reported napping daily. Total sleep duration was longer and daytime sleepiness was reported less often in more frequent nappers than in people who never napped.

In a sub-sample of 3,822 participants who were re-contacted for additional information about sleep habits, there was a statistically significant trend of increasing risk of diabetes with longer nap duration. Compared with people who never took naps, the risk of diabetes was 41 percent higher (OR = 1.41) for people who took naps that lasted longer than 30 minutes and 35 percent higher (OR = 1.35) for people whose naps lasted 30 minutes or less.

The authors noted that the association between napping and diabetes was observed despite the fact that nappers had higher levels of physical activity, which has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes. This suggests that the relationship between napping and diabetes might have been stronger had it not been offset by the protective effects of physical activity. The authors added that there will be profound public health implications in China if the relationship between napping and increased risk of type 2 diabetes is confirmed in longitudinal studies, as the nation is currently affected by an emerging diabetes epidemic.

First sign of injury in glaucoma occurs in the neuronal connections in the brain

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:08:32 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) In a recent study, David Calkins, Ph.D., director of Research at the VEI, discovered that the first sign of injury in glaucoma actually occurs in the brain.

Glaucoma is generally considered a disease of the eye in which sensitivity to ocular pressure causes damage to the retina and optic nerve, which are components of the central nervous system and do not regenerate. The damage begins in the peripheral visual field and progresses toward the center resulting in complete blindness unless detected early. For this reason, degeneration in glaucoma is often hard to detect.

The report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes recent experiments in which Calkins' laboratory shows that glaucoma is very much like other central nervous system diseases.

"This is a paradigm shift on how we think about this disease," said Calkins, associate professor of Ophthalmology at VEI and a member of the neuroscience program. "This will have global implications. This information opens up an entirely new domain of nerve-derived therapeutics."

Combining this new understanding of where the first neuronal injury for glaucoma occurs, with the fact that the incidence of injury increases with age, researchers now have insight into how the loss of sensory function occurs in normal aging.

Traditionally, glaucoma therapies have focused on lowering ocular pressure within the eye. But the recent PNAS study gives credence to taking a new direction of study focusing on neuronal activity in the middle of the brain where the optic nerve forms its first connections.

"This is very exciting work that demonstrates that we must consider not just the eye, but also the brain, in our efforts to understand blinding diseases such as glaucoma," said Paul Sternberg, M.D., chair of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences and director of VEI. "We are optimistic that Dr. Calkins' neurobiological approach will lead to new targets for potential treatment of this devastating condition."

Calkins explained that in other age-related diseases, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the most significant contributor to neuronal susceptibility to injury is age.

"In these diseases, the injury to neurons occurs very early in the distal projections in a process called dying back. In dying back, the neuronal axon loses its ability to communicate with the target.

"In the case of glaucoma, we have shown that the axons in the optic nerve lose their ability to communicate with their projection site in the mid-brain."

Calkins' team expected to find a loss of communication in the optic nerve of the eye, but what they also discovered was that the connectivity between the optic nerve and the brain was dying first.

Using animal models with high pressure glaucoma, the team was able to see that a very early mechanism of vision loss involves the loss of communication between the optic nerve and the mid-brain, where sensory information about sound, heat, cold, pain and pressure originate.

"If you followed the disease long enough, eventually the optic nerve, then the retina, show signs of degeneration," said Calkins. "So the degeneration works in reverse order. It starts in the brain and works its way back to the retina so that in the very latest stages of the disease, the earliest structures, the ones nearest the eye, are the last to go."

Now the team is working on finding drugs that can improve or restore the connectivity between the optic nerve and the mid-brain. Using both synthetic compounds and natural nerve growth factors such as Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), the team is examining how to restore communication in the pathway.

According to National Eye Institute projections, by the year 2020, 80 million people worldwide will have glaucoma. The risk of vision loss in glaucoma cases increases sevenfold after the age of 55.

Since 1915 there have been fewer than a dozen articles about glaucoma published in PNAS, said Calkins.

"People really thought we were crazy when we first suggested that the first signs of injury for glaucoma were in the brain," he said. "What this discovery does is to allow us to view this disease through the same lens that we view other age-related neurodegenerative disorders."

Multicenter EPIC study found that the FiberNet Embolic Protection System had a 97.5% success rate

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:57:02 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A multicenter EPIC (FiberNet® Embolic Protection System in Carotid Artery Stenting Trial) study found that the FiberNet Embolic Protection System (EPS) had a 97.5% success rate when used in patients undergoing carotid artery stenting (CAS). Full findings are published early online in Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions, the official journal of The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions.

Carotid artery stenosis or carotid artery disease occurs when plaque forms in the carotid artery, causing it to narrow and increasing risk for ischemic stroke. According to the National Institutes of Health, a blockage of a blood vessel is the most frequent cause of stroke, responsible for 80% of the estimated 700,000 strokes in the U.S. annually. Carotid artery stenosis is often treated with CAS, the placement of a tiny flexible tube in the diseased vessel.

Unfortunately, stenting procedures carry the risk of embolism, where plaque breaks away from the site of formation and blocks another artery downstream. Embolic protection devices have emerged to prevent strokes by catching the debris that may break away during CAS surgery. Over the past decade, several protection systems have emerged with varying degrees of success.

A research team led by Subbarao Myla, M.D, FSCAI, evaluated the safety and efficacy of this new design concept for embolic protection during CAS. The study was designed to demonstrate that the 30-day major adverse event (MAE) rate of all death, stroke, and myocardial infarction (MI) is significantly less than the performance goal of 8.3% from the ARCHeR 3 results.

The trial enrolled 237 patients with a mean age of 74 years from 26 centers across the U.S. and Europe. Study participants were 64% male and 20% had symptomatic carotid artery disease (CAD). Results indicate the combined MAE rate at 30 days following carotid endarterectomy (CEA) for all death, stroke and heart attack was 3.0%.

"The 30-day death, stroke, and MI rate of 3.0% is encouraging," says Dr. Myla. The researchers concluded that the FiberNet EPS, when used with commercially available stents, produced low stroke rates following CAS in high surgical risk patients with CAD.

Dr. Myla describes the team's experience with the new embolic protection device: "The low crossing profile and integration of a primary guidewire shortened procedure time, and facilitated lesion crossing and filter placement, especially in the presence of tortuous anatomy. The 0.014" guidewire tip demonstrated good torque response and the guidewire provided excellent support…it was ideal for procedures in which tortuosity would preclude placement of a more structured DPD with a stiff delivery catheter. Conformability of the expanded fiber network to the vessel wall and the short landing zone of the device made it ideal for challenging anatomy distal to the lesion. Anecdotally, investigators have commented the FiberNet EPS resulted in fewer vessel spasms."

Increased risk of hearing loss with regular analgesic use

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:47:58 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) In a study published in the March 2010 issue of The American Journal of Medicine, researchers determined that regular use of aspirin, acetaminophen and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) increases the risk of hearing loss in men, particularly in younger men, below age 60.

Hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder in the US, afflicting over 36 million people. Not only is hearing loss highly prevalent among the elderly, but approximately one third of those aged 40-49 years already suffer from hearing loss. Even mild hearing loss can compromise the ability to understand speech in the presence of background noise or multiple speakers, leading to social isolation, depression, and poorer quality of life.

Investigators from Harvard University, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Vanderbilt University and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston looked at factors other than age and noise that might influence the risk of hearing lose. Aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen are the 3 most commonly used drugs in the US. The ototoxic effects of aspirin are well known and the ototoxicity of NSAIDs has been suggested, but the relation between acetaminophen and hearing loss has not been examined previously. The relationship between these drugs and hearing loss is an important public health issue.

Study participants were drawn from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which tracked over 26,000 men every 2 years for 18 years. A questionnaire determined analgesic use, hearing loss and a variety of physiological, medical and demographic factors.

For aspirin, regular users under 50 and those aged 50-59 years were 33% more likely to have hearing loss than were nonregular users, but there was no association among men aged 60 years and older. For NSAIDs, regular users aged under 50 were 61% more likely, those aged 50-59 were 32% more likely, and those aged 60 and older were 16% more likely to develop hearing loss than nonregular users of NSAIDs. For acetaminophen, regular users aged under 50 were 99% more likely, regular users aged 50-59 were 38% more likely, and those aged 60 and older were 16% more likely to have hearing loss than nonregular users of acetaminophen.

Writing in the article, Sharon G. Curhan, MD, ScM, Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and colleagues state, "Regular use of analgesics, specifically aspirin, NSAIDs, and acetaminophen, might increase the risk of adult hearing loss, particularly in younger individuals. Given the high prevalence of regular analgesic use and health and social implications of hearing impairment, this represents an important public health issue."

Two-hit model may explain loss in barrier function of endothelial cells

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:34:08 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers at Albany Medical College are releasing results of a study this week that they say will help refocus the search for new drug targets aimed at preventing or reversing the devastating tissue inflammation that results after heart attack and stroke.

In the March 5 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, lead author Alejandro P. Adam and his colleagues at the college's Center for Cardiovascular Science are reporting that vascular cells' ability to properly regulate fluid movement is not necessarily affected solely by the activity of an enzyme that for years has been in the crosshairs of scientists and pharmaceutical developers.

"Learning the mechanisms of inflammation is a key step in the development of new and better therapies to improve the outcome of widespread pathologies, such as stroke, heart attack, septic shock and pulmonary edema," said Adam, a postdoctoral fellow at the cardiovascular center. "To determine which are the best targets for treatment, we need to understand exactly what role each molecule is playing in the regulation of the vessel walls, and we found that the enzyme Src may be needed to get changes in barrier function but by itself is not sufficient."

Blood vessels, which form a tight barrier between blood and the surrounding tissues, are composed of endothelial cells that act as gatekeepers, controlling how, when and where molecules of water, solutes and blood cells pass through them into the body's tissues.

Previous studies have shown blocking the enzyme Src altered the structure of a protein known to hold the endothelial cells together, thus, keeping their barriers tight and limiting tissue damage caused by fluid accumulation, or edema.

"We found that Src indeed adds several phosphates to this protein, but this addition of the phosphates did not alter barrier function of the endothelial cells," explained professor Peter A. Vincent, who oversaw the team's research. "These findings suggest other pathways are needed for Src to change permeability and open the door to future studies to determine what these other signals are."

There are many "adhesion molecules" involved in holding endothelial cells together and many signaling molecules that tell the adhesion molecules when to hold onto or release each other. Vincent's team is moving forward with what he calls a "two-hit model" – the idea that endothelial cells require two different signals to open up cell-cell connections and allow the passage of fluids.

"Many factors lead to a complex array of signals inside the endothelial cells to promote this loss of barrier function," Adam said. "A two-hit model would explain much better than a single-hit model the regulation of the vascular permeability. On the pharmacological side, it would allow us to propose other drug targets to prevent or reverse inflammation and edema."

By being named a "Paper of the Week" by the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the article by Adam and Vincent, graduate student Amy L. Sharenko and associate professor Kevin Pumiglia has been categorized in the top 1 percent of papers reviewed by the journal's editorial board in terms of significance and overall importance.

Terrorism's new target: 'Econo-Jihad'

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Jihadist terror organizations have set economic terrorism as their new target, intending to harm and paralyze Western economies, the United Sates in particular, claims Prof. Gabriel Weimann, expert researcher of terrorism over the Internet at the University of Haifa. Prof. Weimann monitored websites hosted by terrorist and terrorism-supporting organizations and concludes: For the Jihadists, the present economic crisis signifies an ideal opportunity and platform to leverage an economic terrorist campaign.

In the course of a study that was carried out over a number of years, Prof. Weimann surveyed public and encoded websites run by Islamic terrorist organizations, forums, video clips, and practically all the information related to Islamic Jihad terrorism that is flowing through the network.

According to Prof. Weimann, the focus on economic terrorism was set in motion with the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, when Osama bin Laden stated on the video tapes that he sent out that these attacks mostly damaged the United States' economic base and that these attacks, which cost $500,000 to carry out, cost the U.S. $500 billion.

Other publications by bin Laden himself and by other terrorist leaders show that they understand that Western and U.S. power lies in their economic strength and that the jihad movement should focus on damaging this power by employing various tactics, including: hitting international corporations directly; harming international corporations by means of 1.5 billion Muslims boycotting them, which would pressure the respective governments to adjust their policies; striking at resources that were looted from Muslim countries, such as oil-drilling companies in Iraq; assassinating key personalities in the global economy, most of whom they believe are Jews, and killing anyone who collaborates with these personalities.

Monitoring the Muslim terrorist-related information on the Internet, Prof. Weimann also revealed that the armed struggle against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan is aimed at prolonging American expenditure on maintaining forces in these countries, and not necessarily at military defeat. The jihadists believe that this would help drain America's financial resources and eventually critically damage the American economy. Therefore, they aim to make the U.S. open as many military fronts around the world as possible.

Another result of this new focus on Econo-Jihad is an increasing jihadist interest in websites and online information on the American and Western economies, so as to glean an understanding of how these economies can be hit the hardest. Not only official websites are monitored: forums and e-mails of individual surfers are penetrated too. By tracking Jihadist forums, Prof. Weimann has found that these surfers are increasingly following Western finance-related media publications too, as well as expert and academic analyses of the factors influencing Western economy, such as the war in Iraq, global terrorism, natural disasters, oil prices, unemployment rates, and declines in the stock market.

One might think that an Econo-Jihad is less violent, but this is not the case. Jihadist Internet monitoring alongside terrorist activity in the field, is evidence that the economic turn actually influences the terrorists' targets, which have included oil-drilling infrastructures, tourism, international economic institutions and more. Indeed, Islamic terrorism's future devices will focus on targets that will yield the most economic damage, Prof. Weimann concludes.

Mayo Clinic introduces 2 consumer mobile applications

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic is launching two research-based consumer applications (apps) for iPhone and iPod Touch this quarter, the first in a variety of mobile health products and services supporting the goal of making Mayo's expertise available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker, which launches today, provides users with focused, useful and actionable information from Mayo Clinic experts. User research dictated the simple, less-is-more nature of both the app design and its content. The free app features an adult and child symptom checker optimized for the mobile experience. It is designed to help people manage acute problems and provides guidance on practicing self-care at home, as well as insights into when additional care is needed. Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker also enables users to search MayoClinic.com for more information about thousands of health topics, and provides access to information about care at Mayo Clinic. Mayo's approach was to apply user research to guide the first release and then get it into the hands of users as soon as possible. Feedback from users will guide the priorities for future releases. For a demonstration, go to Mayo Clinic News Blog.

Another app, Mayo Clinic Meditation, launched in early January and provides a form of alternative medicine that focuses on the mind-body connection. The app, which is currently available for $2.99 on iTunes, is based on four years of research by Amit Sood, M.D., a physician in complementary and integrative medicine at Mayo, and has been clinically validated by Mayo Clinic. Mind-body techniques strengthen the communication between your mind and body.

Integrative medicine practitioners say these two systems must be in harmony for a person to stay healthy. The easy-to-use app can be practiced in the home, office or any quiet place.

While these first two applications are for consumers, Mayo Clinic envisions developing meaningful mobile health offerings for audiences that include patients, consumers, corporate clients, medical professionals, and academia. Some mobile products and services will be designed for use before, during, and after care at Mayo Clinic. Others will provide mobile enhancements and expanded distribution for Mayo Clinic's many existing products and services. Ultimately, Mayo's mobile health strategy will be a mix of native and mobile Web applications available across a variety of handsets and platforms.

We are diligently focused on understanding the intricacies of a mobile platform and the needs and desires of users, says Scott Eising, director of Advanced Market/Product Development at Mayo Clinic. We intend to pair our expertise in health care with our growing understanding of the mobile world to develop products and services that are optimized for the mobile audience.

Blacks more likely to have undiagnosed key stroke risk factor, have higher stroke incidence

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Blacks are more likely to have an undiagnosed key risk factor for stroke and are more likely to have a stroke than whites, according to two studies presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2010.

In two separate reports using data from the REGARDS (REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke) study, researchers found significant racial and geographic disparities in stroke incidence and in receiving the recommended treatment to prevent stroke.

The REGARDS study enrolled 30,239 participants across the United States, age 45 or older, between January 2003 and October 2007 and continues to follow them for health events.

In the first analysis (Meschia, Abstract P160), researchers found that among 432 study participants (88 blacks; 344 whites) who had atrial fibrillation (AF), blacks were two-thirds less likely to know they had the disorder and three-fourths less likely to be treated with the gold standard of care, the blood thinner warfarin.

These disparities are a problem, said James F. Meschia, M.D., the study's lead author and a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. For patients who are able to take warfarin, it makes a huge difference. Stroke trials have shown that warfarin reduces the risk of stroke by 60 percent.

Meschia notes that warfarin is not for everyone, because of the risk of bleeding. AF, which affects more than 2.2 million Americans, occurs when one of the heart's upper chambers quivers and doesn't effectively pump blood out, which allows blood to pool and clot. These dangerous clots can cause stroke if they lodge in an artery in or leading to the brain. This research is also simultaneously published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Because atrial fibrillation is such a powerful risk factor for stroke, these findings suggest that lower awareness of atrial fibrillation and reduced likelihood of treatment among blacks may place blacks at higher risk of a stroke, which in turn could contribute to the higher stroke mortality among blacks, Meschia said.

The healthcare system needs to better screen for and inform people about whether they have AF, and more study is needed to shed light on the causes of the disparity in warfarin treatment, he said.

In the second analysis (Howard, abstract P158), researchers provide the first national data describing racial and regional disparities in stroke incidence. Researchers reviewed data on about 26,580 REGARDS participants who had not had a stroke at baseline and documented 299 strokes during the almost five-year period.

4 ORNL researchers named American Physical Society fellows

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Feb. 26, 2010 -- Four scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been named fellows of the American Physical Society.

The APS recognized Carl Gross, Dan Shapira, Matthew Chisholm and Rajesh Maingi for their work in a range of physics-related disciplines. Fewer than one half of one percent of APS members are elected to become fellows.

Gross, a researcher in ORNL's Physics Division, was cited for enabling the studies of most exotic atomic nuclei through the invention and implementation of novel experimental methods.

His work includes development of a ranging out technique for beta- decay studies of neutron-rich radioactive beams that has enabled the counting, identification and purification of radioactive samples.

Gross received his degrees at Florida State University, including his doctorate in 1987, and arrived at ORNL in 1992. The Florida native and his wife, Dorothea Wiarda, live in the Karns community of Knoxville.

Shapira was cited for contributions to the study of nuclear collisions: the discovery of nuclear orbiting, pioneering measurements of the space-time extent of particle-emitting sources, and seminal studies of fusion with n-rich exotic beams, and for development of innovative instrumentation to enable these studies.

Since joining ORNL's Physics Division in 1976, he has worked in different capacities on the study of nuclear reactions and instrumentation development, including research at ORNL's Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.

Shapira, a native of Israel, completed undergraduate studies at the Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa. He received his graduate and doctoral degrees from Yale University and performed postdoctoral research at the University of Rochester, New York. Shapira and his wife, Hanna, live in Oak Ridge where they have raised two children.

Chisholm, a researcher in the Materials Science and Technology Division, was cited by the APS's Division of Materials Physics for pioneering contributions to materials and interface physics through scanning transmission electron microscopy.

His research has concentrated on the atomic and electronic structure of defects and interfaces in materials. He has been instrumental in the co-development of a new imaging technique that can directly reveal individual atoms.

Chisholm received his doctorate in materials science from Carnegie-Mellon University. He is the author of more than 180 publications and has given more than 30 invited talks at international conferences. He and his wife, Katherine, live in Oak Ridge where they have raised four children.

Maingi, who is on a long-term assignment at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, was cited for physics research and demonstration of plasma density control in fusion devices, and for the discovery of a new class of instabilities in plasmas.

He received a doctorate in nuclear engineering from North Carolina State University in 1992, became an ORNL employee in 1997 and was assigned to PPPL in 1999. Maingi and his wife, Nola, reside in Plainsboro Township, N.J.

ESA highlights the potential of satellite data for the European Investment Bank

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The European Investment Bank has an annual lending portfolio of around 75 billion euros, operating globally in more than 130 countries. The Bank has been increasingly mainstreaming environmental considerations into its lending portfolio, boosting the need to monitor the impact of the projects it funds. As its environmental commitments have increased, so too has the demand for geospatial information.

Earth observation (EO) from space can provide consistent, accurate and timely information on the state of the global environment that could help the Bank to assess the feasibility, monitor the progress and quantify the environmental impact of its investment projects. ESA began collaborating with the European Investment Bank (EIB) with three EIB projects chosen as pilots for initial small-scale demonstrations to show how EO can help to monitor their implementation. Specific EO-information services relevant to each project were defined with the help of the Luxembourg-based company LuxSpace, acting as a local technical agent on behalf of ESA. Under the technical guidance of ESA, these specifications were used to select the best offers from value-adding companies across Europe to carry out the work.

First demonstrations

In 2007, the EIB signed a loan for a nickel-cobalt mining and processing project in the Ambatovy region in Eastern Madagascar. The project includes the development of an inland mine site, a refinery close to the harbour on the coast and a connecting 220-km-long pipeline.

Due to the impact on the environment caused by the construction, the borrowers proposed a series of measures to manage the conservation of biodiversity. The measures included the establishment of forest buffer zones at the mine site, the management of a substantial off-set area of primary forest and the monitoring of biodiversity fragmentation along the pipeline.

To assess the impact of the project and to monitor the effectiveness of the adopted measures, the Bank required information on the mining area, an area covered by primary forest, and the 1-km buffer zone around the pipeline.

ESA selected the Belgium-based Keyobs service provider to supply the EIB with a set of up-to-date high-resolution orthophoto maps and land-cover maps of the primary forests and the disturbed areas, based on the most recent EO data. Five SPOT-5 satellite images acquired during 2008 were georeferenced and orthorectified using Landsat ETM+ images and the 90-m digital elevation model.

The service has been a success. It provides valuable information about the land cover of the area, demonstrates to the users exactly what can be monitored and allows them to make an informed decision about whether and how to proceed with EO-based monitoring of this important project, said the EIB's Mr Eberhard Gschwindt, Technical Advisor in the EIB Projects Directorate.

The second EIB demonstration focused on reforestation monitoring on Kolombangara, a small island located in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands. Replanting the forests began in 2007 and will continue until 2011.

The EIB needed information on the progress of replanting of the forests. To achieve this, historic and recent satellite data were used to set the baseline that enabled land cover change detection maps to be created. ESA selected the Danish-based Geographic Resource Analysis and Science (GRAS) service provider who supplied the EIB with mosaics of satellite images covering the entire island, providing information on the progress of the reforestation as well as the impact on the remaining regions of the island.

NOAA, NASA and Old Dominion researchers measure impacts of changing climate on ocean biology

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A three-year field program now underway is measuring carbon distributions and primary productivity in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean to help scientists worldwide determine the impacts of a changing climate on ocean biology and biogeochemistry. The study, Climate Variability on the East Coast (CliVEC), will also help validate ocean color satellite measurements and refine biogeochemistry models of ocean processes.

Researchers from NOAA, NASA and Old Dominion University are collaborating through an existing NOAA Fisheries Service field program, the Ecosystem Monitoring or EcoMon program. The EcoMon surveys are conducted six times each year by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) at 120 randomly selected stations throughout the continental shelf and slope of the northeastern U.S., from Cape Hatteras, N.C., into Canadian waters to cover all of Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine. This area is known as the Northeast U.S. continental shelf Large Marine Ecosystem.

The climate study team will participate in three annual EcoMon cruises aboard the 155-foot NOAA Fisheries Survey Vessel Delaware II, based at the NEFSC's laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. The most recent cruise returned to Woods Hole on February 18.

Findings from the climate impact project, funded by NASA, will help scientists better understand how annual and decadal-scale climate variability affects the growth of phytoplankton, which is the basis of the oceanic food chain. The project will also examine organic carbon distributions along the continental margin of the East Coast and collect data for ocean acidification studies.

John O'Reilly of the satellite ocean productivity group and Kimberly Hyde of the ecosystem assessment program at NEFSC's Narragansett, R.I., laboratory are co-principal investigators on the CliVEC project. Laboratory colleague Jon Hare, an oceanographer and plankton specialist, oversees the EcoMon program and is a collaborator on the new climate study.

The CliVEC program will provide a more complete understanding of the northeast U.S. shelf ecosystem, said Hare. It extends our EcoMon survey efforts, and we are excited about the new knowledge and advances in satellite models that we will all gain from this collaboration and pooling of resources.

O'Reilly has had a long collaboration with NASA scientists in developing algorithms for processing data from ocean color remote sensors on satellites that provide global maps of ocean surface characteristics. The satellite-transmitted data can also be used to develop oceanic primary production models and algorithms that measure carbon distributions in the ocean.

Other lead investigators in the CliVEC project include Antonio Mannino from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Margaret Mulholland from Old Dominion University (ODU), and David Lary from the NASA-affiliated University of Maryland Baltimore County Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology. The team of scientists from GSFC and ODU is conducting water sampling and experiments to quantify primary productivity and carbon distributions.

Phytoplankton are the foundation of the food chain in the ocean and produce about half of the oxygen on Earth, said Mannino. By understanding the distribution of phytoplankton populations and how they react to natural and anthropogenic forcing, we can better predict future responses of phytoplankton and possibly even fisheries.

The Northwest Atlantic location was chosen for the CliVEC study because it is the crossroads between major ocean circulation features like the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current.

Discharges from rivers, seasonal changes in water column density stratification, the freshening of surface waters from melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and other climate-related factors can all alter ocean circulation patterns and affect the strength, timing and location of phytoplankton blooms, potentially decreasing annual primary production and changing ocean biology.

Scientific activities during the recent 18-day cruise included collecting water samples from the surface to the ocean floor for a variety of chemical measurements, and sampling to identify the incursion of Labrador Current water into the Gulf of Maine. Instruments were also deployed to measure sea surface temperatures and salinities and to collect data on chlorophyll, oxygen and nitrate levels, and the depth of light transmission for primary productivity.

In addition to the CliVEC activities, zooplankton samples were collected for the Census of Marine Zooplankton Project. Standard EcoMon sampling was also done, extending oceanographic and plankton time series that started in the early 1970s. Two observers were aboard to identify and count seabirds, and sightings of northern right whales and other whale species were recorded.

Montana State University students take aim at bear spray canisters

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) BOZEMAN, Mont. -- Visitors to national parks and forests are encouraged to use bear spray when they encounter grizzlies, but disposing of the bear spray canisters is a problem that three Montana State University engineering students addressed for their senior capstone project, sponsored by the Gallatin National Forest.

Ashley Olsen, a Butte native who graduated from MSU in December, returned to campus Wednesday to demonstrate a bear spray recycling machine she developed over the past year with Seth Mott of Helena and Kyle Hertenstein of Great Falls.

As private and government partners watched the outdoor demonstration behind the Engineering and Physical Sciences Building, the recycler machine removed the chemical that burns the eyes and mucus membranes of bears. It also removed the refrigerant that propels the chemical out of the canisters. Then the students' machine crushed the cans so they could be recycled normally with other metals. Processing three cans together took about 30 seconds.

Good job, one bystander said as the others cheered.

The demonstration had its glitches. When Olsen tried to remove the top of one canister, it exploded and sent her running with it to a Dumpster that holds hazardous waste. The air compressor didn't have enough pressure at first, delaying the demonstration. Later, when the demonstration was under way, bear spray leaked out of the recycler, setting off some coughing spells among spectators.

All-in-all, the partners said they were pleased with the prototype.

Jane Ruchman, the Gallatin National Forest Developed Recreation Program Manager and Forest Landscape Architect, commissioned the project and bought all the materials for the MSU students. About two years ago, she approached the MSU School of Engineering with the proposal for the project, which was funded by the Forest Service. She said she was very pleased with the results.

The students did an excellent job, Ruchman said. Now that they have completed the prototype, I hope that we can engage some local partners to take it to the next step so that we can recycle the canisters instead of disposing of them as hazardous waste.

The National Forest advocates the use of bear spray as a defense against bears, especially grizzlies, Ruchman explained.

Whatever the outcome with the recycling machine, the partners said bear spray recycling is much needed.

This has been a dream of mine for many years, said Jim Evanoff, environmental protection specialist for Yellowstone National Park.

The park had 3.3 million visitors in 2009, with many of them carrying bear spray while in the park, Evanoff said. Some visitors turned the canisters in at visitor centers or the park gates when they left. Others threw the canisters into Dumpsters, which can create problems later. Every piece of garbage in the park ends up in a composting facility just outside of West Yellowstone. If a fork lift or backhoe accidentally runs over the canisters, the building has to be evacuated for several hours while the bear spray dissipates.

It's just a huge issue in this ecosystem, Evanoff said.

Ruchman said some tourists throw bear spray canisters into garbage cans at area airports when they're ready to board airplanes. Some people store the canisters until they're too old to be effective. Bear spray is supposed to be disposed of as a hazardous waste, but some people just toss it, Ruchman added. If garbage collectors and landfill operators discover the canisters, they have to retrieve them and treat them as hazardous waste.

Chris Jenkins, head of MSU's Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and back-up adviser for the bear spray project, said the recycler was one of many projects that students in his department completed during their senior year.

I'm very proud of what our young engineers have been able to do on limited time and money, he commented.

Olsen said she enjoyed working on the recycler.

It was definitely interesting, she said. I didn't know anything about it when I started.

Cancer patients find relief in integrative medicine services

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) CHICAGO- The very instant Penny Kukovec was diagnosed with breast cancer her world permanently changed. Suddenly, it felt as if her life was out of her control. She felt powerless and overwhelmed. There were so many unanswered questions. Why me? What's next? What about my family? The feelings Kukovec experienced are felt by many cancer patients following their initial diagnosis and as they pursue treatment. In an effort to effectively and compassionately respond to these worries, as well as address common side effects associated with cancer treatment, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University now offer integrative oncology services.

When a patient is diagnosed with cancer many of them want to fully participate in their recovery, but don't know where to begin. This program gives them control over their treatment, said Julian Schink, MD, chief of Gynecologic Oncology at Northwestern Memorial and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

The integrative oncology services are part of a larger 360 Care Program that recently launched aimed to address cancer patients' needs from every angle through treatment that extends beyond medical therapies, to include counseling, stress management and integrative medicine. Integrative oncology services include acupuncture, massage, energy healing and naturopathic medicine offered by Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group's Center for Integrative Medicine and Wellness.

Our goal is to treat the whole person, not just their illness, said Melinda Ring, MD, medical director of the Center for Integrative Medicine and Wellness. Research suggests that a holistic approach can alleviate stress and anxiety, as well as the physical pain and discomfort patients often experience while undergoing cancer treatments by activating the body's innate healing process.

While there is little research to explain exactly how integrative approaches like acupuncture work, researchers at the National Institute of Health state complementary therapy such as acupuncture do improve the body's immune system. In an oncology setting, integrative approaches provide an effective way to manage symptoms, alleviate side effects, and help patients restore their sense of control and vitality.

My body was hit hard with trauma. I was so tired, my joints hurt and my muscles were tense. I knew I needed more help. When I began massage therapy my muscles relaxed, and it helped me release my emotions. It reminded my body that it can relax in spite of what I am going through, said Penny Kukovec, patient at Northwestern Memorial.

Common side effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for cancer include muscle tension, aches, pains nausea, vomiting and fatigue. The main role of complementary medicine is to provide supportive care and reduce adverse effects while helping the patient cope.

Unfortunately, the side effects associated with conventional therapies often cause patients to end their treatments prematurely, or require that we take a less aggressive approach, said Schink. We've seen this occurrence decrease with the addition of integrative oncology services.

The medicine I was taking for my cancer caused nerve damage in my hands and feet. It was very uncomfortable. Acupuncture helped relieve the pain, said Nancy Amicangelo, patient at Northwestern Memorial.

There is evidence that integrative approaches may also play a role in reducing the rate of depression among cancer patients. Services such as massage therapy are believed to have a short-term effect on reducing anxiety related to depression among patients.

You're sick, your hair falls out, and your family is stressed. When you are diagnosed it's sometimes all that you can think about. The massages offer me a chance to escape, said Kukovec.

While integrative medicine does not offer a cure for cancer, there is strong evidence that it positively affects the patient. Studies show 77 percent of cancer patients who incorporate complementary approaches believe it improves their quality of life, and 73 percent state it makes them feel hopeful. In addition, 71 percent say it helps to boost their immune system.

QB3 adds ZCube as limited partner in Mission Bay Capital Fund

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Mission Bay Capital, LLC, has added a new limited partner to its first venture fund, bolstering the fund's ability to invest in promising bioscience companies emerging from the University of California.

Zcube, Srl, the research corporate venture of Italian pharmaceutical leader Zambon Co., SpA, joined the Mission Bay Capital Fund with a $1 million investment. Zcube is the only European company to contribute to the Mission Bay Capital Fund, to date.

The new partnership brings the total fund to $8.5 million, according to Regis Kelly, PhD, executive director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), who also serves as an unpaid director of Mission Bay Capital.

Zcube is a valuable new partner for Mission Bay Capital, both in helping generate important funds for UC entrepreneurs and in contributing significant expertise in commercializing innovative drug delivery systems, Kelly said, noting that Zcube also has been invited to be a member of the QB3 Industrial Advisory Board. This is a significant area of research for QB3, especially at UCSF. Zcube's expertise will help evaluate that research to move important scientific projects out of the laboratory and into public use.

The project aims to identify UC research that looks promising for commercialization and provide the venture funding and external review to confirm the commercial potential of the technology, Kelly said. This will enable research entrepreneurs to advance their projects to the proof-of-concept stage and ultimately help prepare them for subsequent investments to support the company's growth.

Mission Bay Capital is directly aligned with Zcube's efforts to support emerging life science companies that can improve health into the future, said Lorenzo Pradella, PhD, business and operational development director at Zcube.

Zcube had been considering certain investment opportunities in the United States, Pradella continued. Mission Bay Capital is a very promising initiative, providing us with the possibility of collaborating with QB3, one of the most advanced and productive US incubators, with a significant focus on a key area for us: the field of drug delivery.

Zcube was founded in 2003 in an effort to support emerging life science technology and research worldwide, Pradella said. The group has been actively investing in life science opportunities, promoting the launch of three start-ups companies: PharmEste Srl, SuppreMol GmbH and ProtAffin Biotechnologie AG.

Since 2007, Zcube has dedicated particular emphasis on drug delivery systems in different therapeutic fields. Zcube invests in and validates early stage innovative drug delivery systems with the potential to generate new products in selected therapeutic areas and with the opportunity to generate new companies. Its main sources are universities with significant research programs in the area of life science and drug delivery, as well as recently formed companies.

The capital fund builds upon ongoing QB3 and Mission Bay Capital efforts to help bioscience entrepreneurs create new companies based on their research. Those efforts include the QB3 Garage and QB3 Mission Bay Incubator Network, both of which provide micro-amounts of laboratory space for entrepreneurs. The institute also has created the QB3 Innovation Toolkit, which provides access to the legal, management and investment expertise critical to avoiding many of the initial mistakes that often derail startups.

Since QB3 created the Garage in 2003, it has helped launch 21 startup bioscience companies on the UCSF Mission Bay campus and its surrounding neighborhood, including four that have successfully landed follow-on funding or were purchased by larger companies. Twelve of those companies were launched in the past year.

QB3, which was founded in 2000 with the mission of helping UC research reach commercial use, will help guide the entrepreneurs through the pre-commercial phase of the company's growth, including help with defining technical and commercial milestones, conducting due diligence on the technology and business ideas, helping recruit management for future start-up, and coaching entrepreneurs on their business plans.

'Rare' cancers in the spotlight at major European conference

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) More should be done across Europe to ensure that people with rare forms of cancer are not denied access to the best possible treatment, say the organizers of a major European cancer conference to be held in Milan on 9 and 10 March 2010.

People with rare diseases have the same right to receive proper treatment as all other patients, said Dr. Paolo G. Casali, Head of the Sarcoma Medical Treatment Unit at the Milan Istituto Nazionale Tumori and co-chair of the ESMO Conference on Sarcoma and GIST. Yet the sad reality is that access to treatments for rare cancers varies across Europe. And patients with these tumors do not always receive the best possible care.

Focusing on these forms of cancer can have wider benefits, Dr. Casali added. Many rare cancers are exceptionally rich of targets for the new molecularly targeted therapies. Sarcomas are an obvious case: they are relatively rare, they can be split into 50-plus subgroups, they have plenty of targets, they are serving as an advanced model for medical oncologists. This Conference highlights all this.

The ESMO Conference on Sarcoma and GIST is part of the European Society for Medical Oncology's strong commitment to cover the newest therapies and address issues related to rare cancers. The conference will present the latest developments in the diagnosis and treatment of a group of rare cancers that affect the body's connective tissues.

Known as soft tissue sarcomas, these tumors can be found in muscle, blood vessels, deep skin tissues, nerves and the tissues around joints. GIST, or gastrointestinal stromal tumour, is a type of sarcoma that originates from the wall of the gastrointestinal tract. Around 50 different kinds of soft-tissue sarcomas have been identified. Altogether, connective tissue cancers affect about 25,000 people in Europe each year.

Therapies in sarcomas present many real challenges, said Dr.Paolo Dei Tos Director of the Pathology Unit of the Regional Hospital of Treviso, Italy co-chair of the meeting. We know that the best treatment results come when we can combine information from biology, pathology and the clinic. The goal of this conference is to improve treatment across Europe by providing a comprehensive overview of the current medical therapy of these diseases.

Around 200 specialists in sarcoma and GIST are expected to attend this niche conference, which is organized by the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in cooperation with the Milan Istituto Nazionale Tumori, and with the support of Conticanet, a EU-funded project for clinical research on connective tissue cancers in Europe.

If we are going to make progress against these diseases in Europe then we need to make a concerted effort to understand them better, said Conticanet's coordinator, Dr. Jean-Yves Blay, who is one co-chair of the conference.

The conference will have a particular focus on the molecular and pathological bases of soft tissue sarcomas and GIST, aiming to give a perspective on the state of the art in medical treatment and what new approaches are coming. Some of the most respected and pioneering experts dealing with these rare cancers will be among the speakers.

Sarcomas being rare cancers make this meeting a significant expression of ESMO's efforts on rare diseases, said Dr. Casali. When all the 'rare' tumors are considered as a group, they represent one-fourth of all cancer cases.

NSF and USC School of Cinematic Arts announce novel partnership

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A major government research agency and a renowned cinematic arts school announced on Feb. 19 that they will combine talents to forge collaborations between researchers and entertainment scholars to produce cutting-edge materials that inspire and inform mass-media audiences about science and engineering concepts. It is the first program to link a federal science agency with an academic leader in the field of entertainment and interactive media.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) announced their intentions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose theme was Bridging Science and Society.

This novel and creative partnership will enlist the power of the entertainment media to inspire audiences to learn more about science and engineering, to develop a network of scientific experts, facilities, and instruments available to the arts, and bring new technologies in sight, sound, and video to the marketplace, said Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a statement.

This partnership will support initiatives already announced by President Obama as part of his 'Educate to Innovate' campaign to motivate and inspire students to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Kalil said.

Speakers at the announcement included Academy-Award winning director and producer Ron Howard, entertainment scholar and SCA Dean Elizabeth M. Daley, Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement Kalpen Modi, and National Science Board Vice Chair Patricia Galloway.

Operating as the Creative Science Studio, or CS2, and based at USC's downtown Los Angeles campus, the partnership aims to:

Provide NSF-funded researchers on campuses throughout the country with novel opportunities to create entertaining and engaging outreach products through collaborations with SCA faculty and students

Provide SCA faculty and students, and other entertainment producers, with science and engineering collaborations and access to state-of-the-art resources--including instruments, data visualization methodologies and other cutting edge technologies--to enhance depictions of science in mass entertainment works

Expose next-generation entertainment producers to science and engineering themes during their education to increase familiarity and comfort level with those topics

Provide test-bed opportunities between NSF-funded researchers and SCA scholars to produce highly engaging and creative products to educate mass audiences on leading topics in science and engineering

This alliance is a vital and essential one, said Dean Elizabeth M. Daley. I'm excited for a potential symbiosis between these two institutions, which will play a major role in the ongoing evolution of scientific communication for both researchers and storytellers.

Founded in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1929, SCA features soundstages, animation facilities, post-production suites, mixing theaters, screening rooms and all-digital classrooms. Faculty members work professionally as directors, editors, writers, producers, sound designers, lighting artists, animators and in many other roles. They contribute to projects ranging from box-office blockbusters to independent films, broadcast and cable television hits, interactive games and other new media. Since 1973, not a year has passed without an SCA graduate being nominated for an Emmy or Academy Award.

USC is the natural place to establish this program, given our rich history in science education and strong academic tradition in film, television and interactive media, said USC Executive Vice President and Provost C. L. Max Nikias.

As the federal government's primary science research agency with an annual budget of nearly $7 billion, NSF is the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities. NSF supports science and engineering at universities, laboratories and field sites all over the United States and throughout the world.

The Creative Science Studio is an outcome of ongoing activities of NSF's Office of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA) to enhance relationships between NSF-supported researchers and entertainment scholars and professionals as part of its mission to communicate science to broad public audiences.

Through our activities we hope audiences of all types will learn that science can be entertaining and not has hard as they think if it's explained in an engaging way, said OLPA Director Jeff Nesbit.

Total fat, trans fat linked to higher incidence of ischemic stroke

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Post-menopausal women who reported consuming the most daily dietary fat had a 40 percent higher incidence of clot-caused strokes compared to women who ate the least amount, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2010.

The incidence of ischemic stroke also increased by 30 percent in the quartile of women consuming the highest daily amount of trans fat (average intake 7 grams per day) compared to those who consumed the least (average 1 gram/day). Two common sources of trans fat are processed foods and fried foods.

Ischemic strokes are caused by blockages in blood vessels in or leading to the brain.

We found positive associations between total fat intake and ischemic stroke incidence and between trans fat intake and ischemic stroke incidence, said Sirin Yaemsiri, M.S.P.H., a doctoral student in the department of epidemiology in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The study is the first to examine the associations of different fats and different subtypes of ischemic stroke in post-menopausal women, who face a higher stroke risk than men of a similar age.

Evidence from other studies shows that different types of fat have different effects on the incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), with trans fat implicated in the development of CHD. However, studies of ischemic stroke and fat have been inconclusive, possibly because earlier studies had small numbers of ischemic stroke cases.

Before menopause, women have a lower risk of stroke compared to men of similar age, a situation that reverses after menopause, Yaemsiri said.

The analysis included data on 87,230 post-menopausal women ages 50 to 79 who participated in the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) Observational Study, a project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The women answered a food frequency questionnaire when they entered the study and were followed for an average of 7.6 years, the researchers said. During that time, 1,049 ischemic strokes occurred.

Researchers looked for links between dietary fat intake and four ischemic stroke subtypes, which were characterized by their size or point of origin. However, the data on ischemic stroke subtypes fell short of statistical significance, perhaps because strokes are difficult to characterize and 43 percent (445 cases) of the ischemic strokes in the study were of unknown type, Yaemsiri said.

Researchers divided the women into quartiles based on the amount of total dietary fat and types of fat (saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat and trans fat) they reported consuming per day.

Variables included age, race, smoking status, physical activity, alcohol or aspirin use, body mass index, hormone therapy, heart disease history, diabetes, systolic blood pressure and whether the women took medication for high blood pressure or to reduce cholesterol, vitamin E supplementation, fruit/vegetable intake, total calories and dietary fiber.

Women in the top quartile for total fat intake had an average intake of 86 grams of total fat per day. Those in the lowest quartile consumed an average of 26 grams a day.

I think our findings support the American Heart Association recommendations for keeping trans fat intake at less than 1 percent of energy, said Ka He, M.D., Sc.D., M.P.H., senior author of the study and associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Vitamin B3 shows early promise in treatment of stroke

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) An early study suggests that vitamin B3 or niacin, a common water-soluble vitamin, may help improve neurological function after stroke, according to Henry Ford Hospital researchers.

When rats with ischemic stroke were given niacin, their brains showed growth of new blood vessels, and sprouting of nerve cells which greatly improved neurological outcome.

Now research is underway at Henry Ford to investigate the effects of an extended-release form of niacin on stroke patients. Henry Ford is the only site nationally conducting such a study.

If this proves to also work well in our human trials, we'll then have the benefit of a low-cost, easily-tolerable treatment for one of the most neurologically devastating conditions, Michael Chopp, Ph.D., scientific director of the Henry Ford Neuroscience Institute.

Dr. Chopp will present results from the animal model study at the International Stroke Conference in San Antonio.

According to the National Stroke Association, stroke is the third-leading cause of death in America and a leading cause of disability.

Ischemic strokes occur as a result of an obstruction within a blood vessel supplying blood to the brain. Ischemic stroke accounts for about 87 percent of all cases. One underlying condition for this type of obstruction is the development of fatty cholesterol deposits lining the vessel walls.

Niacin is known to be the most effective medicine in current clinical use for increasing high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), which helps those fatty deposits.

Dr. Chopp and his colleagues found that in animals niacin helps restore neurological function in the brain following stroke.

In 2009, stroke physicians at Henry Ford Hospital published research which showed that HDL-C is abnormally low at the time stroke patients arrive at the hospital.

Dr. Chopp's research found that in animals, niacin increased good cholesterol (HDL-C), which increased blood vessels in the brain and axonal and dendritic growth leading to a substantial improvement in neurological function.

Niacin essentially re-wires the brain which has very exciting potential for use in humans, says Dr. Chopp. The results of this study may also open doors in other areas of neurological medicine, including brain injury.

Andrew Russman, D.O., is the principal investigator of the team at Henry Ford Hospital who will evaluate in clinical trials whether niacin improves recovery for human stroke patients.

If we are able to prove that treating patients with niacin helps to restore neurological function after stroke, we're opening a whole new avenue of treatment for the leading cause of serious long-term disability in adults, says Dr. Russman.

GE Healthcare, Intel and Mayo Clinic explore new models of health care delivery

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ROCHESTER, Minn. - GE Healthcare, Intel Corporation and Mayo Clinic are investigating a new model of health care delivery for patients at increased risk of rehospitalization that is designed to meet patients' needs where they are, including in their homes.

Mayo Clinic will conduct a yearlong research study to determine if home monitoring of patients with chronic diseases, using Intel's remote patient monitoring technology, will reduce hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visits.

This study reflects the commitment of GE Healthcare, Intel and Mayo Clinic to develop new patient-centered delivery care models. With the numbers of seniors expected to rise dramatically and increasing numbers of patients experiencing chronic disease, the current focus on face-to-face clinic interaction with the provider is not a sustainable delivery model. Technology could enable new care models to help rein in costs and improve patient outcomes through personalized care and ongoing disease management at home and in the community.

The research study will involve 200 high-risk Mayo Clinic patients over age 60 who receive care in Rochester, Minn. The goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of daily in-home monitoring technology in reducing hospitalizations and ED visits compared with usual medical care. Patients will measure their vital signs such as blood pressure, pulse and weight, and respond to questions specific to their diseases on a daily basis, with all data reviewed by the clinical care team working with their primary care provider. The technology, which also includes videoconferencing capability, allows the care team to assess the patient for signs and symptoms suggesting clinical deterioration to facilitate early medical intervention. The hope is that early recognition and treatment of a change in clinical status will reduce the need for ED visits and hospitalizations.

To meet evolving patient needs and broaden its reach in the 21st century, says Gregory Hanson, M.D., Mayo Clinic Department of Primary Care Internal Medicine, one of the principal investigators in the study, Mayo Clinic will build on its model of care to provide products and services to people in new ways. Mayo Clinic is evaluating several approaches to remote monitoring of patients. We're excited to move forward with this research study in collaboration with GE Healthcare and Intel.

This research study further illustrates GE Healthcare and Intel's commitment, announced in April 2009, to jointly market and develop innovative technologies for independent living and chronic disease management and to extend care from the hospital to the home. The two companies plan to invest $250 million over the next five years for the research and product development of home-based health technologies. In addition, GE Healthcare is selling and marketing the Intel Health Guide in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Transforming health care requires more than just health care reform. It requires innovative thinking and the use of technology to change how and where care is delivered, says Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of the Intel Digital Health Group. We need to go beyond just hospital-and-clinic visits when we are sick - to home and community-based care models that allow for prevention, early detection, behavior change and social support. This study is an example of how we are looking to address this.

Omar Ishrak, president and CEO Healthcare Systems at GE Healthcare says, Nearly 80 million 'baby boomers' in the U.S. are approaching 'seniors' status, and they expect the best possible care. By joining together with two world-class partners in this research study - Mayo Clinic and Intel - GE expects to gain valuable insight on how we can better deliver technologies that improve the lives of seniors and people with chronic illness. This is an important step in a journey to improve access to quality care while helping lower health costs.

Changes during menopause increases risk of heart disease and stroke

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) CHICAGO- When women hear the word menopause, they often think about hot flashes, hormone shifts and mood swings. But what about heart disease? Studies show a woman's risk of heart disease intensifies drastically around the time of natural menopause, which for most women is around the age of 50. This news may come as a surprise, but experts explain that understanding risk factors is an important first step, and reassure women that there are ways to lower your risk.

Many women younger than 50 have not yet gone through menopause and still have high levels of the female hormone estrogen in their blood, which is thought to help protect the heart. After menopause, however, the levels of estrogen in a woman's body drop significantly and can contribute to the higher risks of cardiovascular disease, explains Vera Rigolin,MD, associate director of the Center for Women's Cardiovascular Health in the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute of Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Weight gain is also a factor that may play a role in postmenopausal risk of heart disease. Maintaining a healthy weight often becomes difficult after your body experiences a change in hormone levels. Extra mass can take a toll on the body causing physical inactivity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol, all risk factors that can lead to heart attack and stroke.

Detecting heart disease in women can be difficult. Many women are unaware that symptoms of the disease may differ from those of men. Although women often experience chest discomfort when presenting with a heart attack, they commonly have other, more subtle symptoms, including fatigue, nausea, shortness of breath, jaw pain and general discomfort in the chest and abdominal area.

In some women, plaque can build in the smallest blood vessels called the microvascular circulation. These blockages do not show up in an angiogram, says Rigolin. In these cases, we often use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) with medication to visualize blood flow within the small blood vessels when other standard tests do not provide us answers.

Women, especially those who are menopausal can reduce the risk of heart disease by adopting a healthy lifestyle.

If you are a smoker, quit immediately and avoid second hand smoke. Eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and exercise at least three times per week to maintain a healthy body weight, says Rigolin.

Rigolin also recommends visiting your health care provider at least once per year to have your blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels checked.

Stress hormone, depression trigger obesity in girls

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Depression raises stress hormone levels in adolescent boys and girls but may lead to obesity only in girls, according to researchers. Early treatment of depression could help reduce stress and control obesity -- a major health issue.

This is the first time cortisol reactivity has been identified as a mediator between depressed mood and obesity in girls, said Elizabeth J. Susman, the Jean Phillips Shibley professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. We really haven't seen this connection in kids before, but it tells us that there are biological risk factors that are similar for obesity and depression.

Cortisol, a hormone, regulates various metabolic functions in the body and is released as a reaction to stress. Researchers have long known that depression and cortisol are related to obesity, but they had not figured out the exact biological mechanism.

Although it is not clear why high cortisol reactions translate into obesity only for girls, scientists believe it may be due to physiological and behavioral differences -- estrogen release and stress eating in girls -- in the way the two genders cope with anxiety.

The implications are to start treating depression early because we know that depression, cortisol and obesity are related in adults, said Susman.

If depression were to be treated earlier, she noted, it could help reduce the level of cortisol, and thereby help reduce obesity.

We know stress is a critical factor in many mental and physical health problems, said Susman. We are putting together the biology of stress, emotions and a clinical disorder to better understand a major public health problem.

Susman and her colleagues Lorah D. Dorn, professor of pediatrics, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and Samantha Dockray, postdoctoral fellow, University College London, used a child behavior checklist to assess 111 boys and girls ages 8 to 13 for symptoms of depression. Next they measured the children's obesity and the level of cortisol in their saliva before and after various stress tests.

We had the children tell a story, make up a story, and do a mental arithmetic test, said Susman. The children were also told that judges would evaluate the test results with those of other children.

Statistical analyses of the data suggest that depression is associated with spikes in cortisol levels for boys and girls after the stress tests, but higher cortisol reactions to stress are associated with obesity only in girls. The team reported its findings in a recent issue of the

IOM report declares high blood pressure a neglected disease

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WASHINGTON -- Public health officials and health care providers need to step up their efforts to reduce Americans' increasing rates of high blood pressure and better treat those with the condition, which triggers more than one-third of heart attacks and almost half of heart failures in the United States each year, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine.

Policies that create environments which support healthier eating, lowered sodium consumption, and increased physical activity offer greater promise of reducing the high hypertension rate than merely educating individuals about the dangers of high blood pressure, said the committee that wrote the report. Roughly three-quarters of Americans recognize the importance of having their blood pressure checked, but this awareness has not translated into sustained reductions in the condition. Nearly one-third of U.S. adults have high blood pressure, and it accounts for about one in six adult deaths annually, a 25 percent increase from 1995 to 2005.

Given that many individuals with high blood pressure have not been diagnosed and the majority of patients with hypertension do not have it under control, the report also calls on public health and medical officials to explore ways to improve health care providers' adherence to treatment guidelines. Multiple studies show that physicians are unlikely to start or intensify treatment for mild to moderate hypertension and that they are less aggressive about treating older patients, who are the most likely to have the condition and benefit from therapy. In addition, public health officials should work with health insurance plans to reduce or eliminate deductibles and co-payments for anti-hypertensive drugs to improve patients' compliance with treatment regimens.

Although hypertension is relatively easy to prevent, simple to diagnose, and relatively inexpensive to treat, it remains the second leading cause of death among Americans, and as such should rightly be called a neglected disease, said committee chair David Fleming, director and health officer, Public Health -- Seattle/King County, Seattle. Undiagnosed and uncontrolled cases are occurring at alarming rates, even though many people with hypertension see their doctors regularly. We think health care providers can do better at helping patients control their blood pressure, but what will make the biggest difference is creating environments that help people avoid the condition in the first place through healthy eating and active living.

The committee's review of the science points to heavy weight, inactivity, and unhealthy diets containing too much salt and too little potassium as the major risk factors for high blood pressure. Fortunately, all can be prevented through behavioral changes, but the typical American community and lifestyle make a poor diet and inactivity easier patterns to fall into than healthy eating and active living.

The report calls for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to work with partners in the public and private sectors to promote policies that make it easier for people to engage in regular physical activity, cut calories, and reduce their intake of foods containing high levels of sodium while increasing their exposure and access to produce and other foods containing potassium.

Based on available data, the committee estimated that hypertension prevalence might be reduced by as much as 22 percent if Americans consumed less salt in their diet and ate more vegetables, fruit, and lean protein. A recent study calculated that reducing salt intake from 3,400 milligrams to the currently advised maximum intake level of 2,300 milligrams per day could bring down the number of individuals with high blood pressure by about 11.1 million and result in approximately $17.8 billion in health care cost savings annually. The committee also estimated that an initiative to help overweight and obese Americans each lose 10 pounds could reduce the prevalence of high blood pressure in the overall population by 7 percent to 8 percent. An exercise program that gets physically inactive people more active could decrease prevalence by 4 percent to 6 percent.

Efforts to get health care providers to follow current guidelines for treatment and prevention are also needed, the report says. The committee noted that lack of physician adherence to treatment guidelines for hypertension is a significant reason why many patients are unaware of their condition and do not have it under control. Data show that 86 percent of individuals with uncontrolled hypertension have insurance and visit their doctors. Since it is not clear why providers frequently do not follow the guidelines, CDC officials should research this issue as well as work with accreditation programs to improve providers' adherence to recommended treatment regimens.

Out-of-pocket costs are a significant reason why some hypertensive patients reduce or discontinue their medications, the report notes. CDC should encourage the Medicare and Medicaid programs and private insurers to find ways to eliminate or reduce deductibles and co-payments for anti-hypertensive medications and to work with the pharmaceutical industry to standardize and simplify applications for patient assistance programs that provide reduced-cost or free hypertension medications.

Use of DNA evidence is not an open and shut case

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) University Park, Pa. -- Whether used to clinch a guilty verdict or predict the end of a CSI episode, DNA evidence has given millions of people a sense of certainty -- but the outcomes of using DNA evidence have often been far from certain, according to David Kaye, Distinguished Professor of Law at Penn State.

In his new book, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence (Harvard University Press), Kaye focuses on the intersection of science and law, and emphasizes that DNA evidence is merely information.

There's a popular perception that with DNA, you get results, Kaye said. You're either guilty or innocent, and the DNA speaks the truth. That goes too far. DNA is a tool. Perhaps in many cases it's open and shut, in other cases it's not. There's ambiguity.

In the O.J. Simpson case, for example, Kaye noted that the defense was able to argue that the result was not conclusive, that maybe the DNA evidence was in fact planted at the crime scene or was contaminated. As with any evidence, the defense was able to raise some doubt.

One of the book's key themes is that using science in court is hard to do right.

It requires lawyers and judges to understand a lot about the science, Kaye noted. They don't have to be scientists or technicians, but they do have to know enough to understand what's going on and whether the statements that experts are making are well-founded. The lawyers need to be able to translate that information into a form that a judge or a jury can understand.

Kaye also believes that lawyers need to better understand statistics and probability, an area that has traditionally been neglected in law school curricula. His book attempts to close this gap in understanding with several sections on genetic science and probability.

The book also contends that scientists, too, have contributed to the false sense of certainty, when they are so often led by either side of one particular case to take an extreme position. Scientists need to approach their role as experts less as partisans and more as defenders of truth.

Aiming to be a definitive history of the use of DNA evidence, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence chronicles precedent-setting criminal trials, battles among factions of the scientific community and a multitude of issues with the use of probability and statistics related to DNA. From the Simpson trial to the search for the last Russian Tsar, Kaye tells the story of how DNA science has impacted society. He delves into the history of the application of DNA science and probability within the legal system and depicts its advances and setbacks.

The important role that DNA science plays across a broad number of applications cannot be underestimated, according to Kaye. It has already led to the exoneration of more than 200 long-imprisoned individuals, and has helped to changed public perception of the criminal justice system, causing many people to have second thoughts about the death penalty.

People are also talking about looking at Lincoln's DNA to see if he had Marfan syndrome, he said. You can use DNA to identify species to find out if what's being sold as caviar is the real thing, or to identify endangered species. And more applications are being considered every day.

Treadmill training could help tots walk

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Using a treadmill could help infants with prenatal complications or who were injured at birth walk earlier and better, according to a University of Michigan researcher.

Prenatal injuries can often result in self-correcting or fixable neuromotor delays, but sometimes toddlers get a more serious diagnosis, such as cerebral palsy, says Rosa Angulo-Barroso, associate professor of movement science at the U-M School of Kinesiology. Some of those diagnoses may come much later, or in mild cases, never, she says.

Angulo-Barroso and colleagues followed 15 infants at risk for neuromotor delays for two years and tested their changes in physical activity and treadmill-stepping in their homes. The infants were assisted using the treadmill by their parents.

The researchers looked at the frequency of steps and also the decrease in toe-walking over the two-year period. For those infants who were still not walking, they followed up by calling families to see if infants were walking by age 3.

They found that kids with neuromotor delays using the treadmill were on the same improving trajectory as normal kids. Of the 15 children, six were diagnosed with cerebral palsy.

We found that in those with neuromotor delays, the pattern of development through time was parallel (but less) than normal kids. said Angulo-Barroso, who is also a research associate professor at the U-M Center for Human Growth and Development. We also found less toe-walking, so foot placement improved.

The study also suggests a critical intervention window. Both children without a diagnosis and kids with cerebral palsy improved the most between 10 months and 18 months.

So what does this means for parents of children at risk for neuromotor delays?

We are putting words of caution here, Angulo-Barroso said. This is a feasibility study only and the results show it seems viable to do treadmill intervention.

A feasibility study merely shows that it warrants more work to see how much treadmill intervention helps. However, Angulo-Barroso stresses that in the meantime, parents should take other interventions seriously.

Early interventions are really, really critical, so at this point I wouldn't tell them to go find a treadmill, but I would say make sure you get a good physical therapist and work with the physical therapist to see if your kids would be a good candidate for that kind of (treadmill) intervention, said Angulo-Barroso, who noted that the next study is a randomized sample of children to see how they respond to a formal treadmill intervention.

Babies and sleep: Another reason to love naps

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Anyone who grew up in a large family likely remembers hearing Don't wake the baby. While it reinforces the message to older kids to keep it down, research shows that sleep also is an important part of how infants learn more about their new world.

Rebecca Gomez, Richard Bootzin and Lynn Nadel in the psychology department at the University of Arizona in Tucson found that babies who are able to get in a little daytime nap are more likely to exhibit an advanced level of learning known as abstraction.

Nadel, a Regents' Professor at the UA, will describe the group's work (Early Learning in Infants May Depend on Sleep) in a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Diego on Sunday, Feb. 21, starting at 8:30 a.m., Pacific time.

In their research, Nadel and his colleagues played recordings of phrases created from an artificial language to four dozen 15-month-old infants during a learning session. Their methodology included repeatedly playing phrases like pel-wadim-jic until the babies became familiar with them.

These phrases contained three units, with the first and last unit forming a relationship. In this example, the first word, pel, predicts the last, jic. Even though these are nonsensical sounds, the language created for the test shares some similarity with structure commonly found in subject-verb agreement in English sentences.

Prior to being tested, some infants learning this faux language took their normally scheduled naps. Others were scheduled at a time when they would not nap following the session. When the infants returned to the lab, they again heard the recordings - along with a set of different phrases in which the predictive relationship between the first and last words were new.

By carefully watching the babies' facial expressions as they listened to both old and new phrases, the researchers were able to rate their level of attention. They found that babies' longer gazes at a flashing light that coincided with the phrases signaled attention, which indicated that they had learned a particular phrase or relationship.

Differences arose between the infants who had napped and those who had not. The infants who did not sleep after the sessions still recognized the phrases they had learned earlier. But those babies who had slept in between sessions were able to generalize their knowledge of sentence structure to draw predictive relationships to the new phrases. This suggests that napping supports abstract learning - that is, the ability to detect a general pattern contained in new information.

In follow-up work, the UA researchers have shown that infants must have their naps within four hours of listening to the artificial language in order for them to demonstrate this beneficial abstraction effect. Those who failed to nap within that time, but slept normally that evening, failed to show the abstraction effect the next day.

It's a fairly nuanced story, Nadel said. What we know is that infants have mostly REM sleep, given the type of sleep they have, given how their brains are developed at that point. And they have to get some of that sleep within a reasonable amount of time after inputting information in order to be able to do abstracting work on it. If they don't sleep within four to eight hours, they probably just lose the entire thing, he said.

What this should reinforce for parents, he said, is that while it obviously is important to give infants and young children the kind of stimulation that comes from reading, talking and exposing them to lots of words, thise stimuli need to happen within the context of a reasonably well-regulated daily cycle that includes adequate sleep.

CU physicists use ultra-fast lasers to open doors to new technologies unheard of just years ago

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) For nearly half a century, scientists have been trying to figure out how to build a cost-effective and reasonably sized X-ray laser that could, among other things, provide super high-resolution imaging. And for the past two decades, University of Colorado at Boulder physics professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn have been inching closer to that goal.

Recent breakthroughs by their team at JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, have paved the way on how to build a tabletop X-ray laser that could be used for super high-resolution imaging, while also giving scientists a new way to peer into a single cell and gain a better understanding of the nanoworld.

Both of these feats could lead to major breakthroughs in many fields including medicine, biology and nanotechnology development.

Our goal is to create a laser beam that contains a broad range of X-ray wavelengths all at once that can be focused both in time and space, Murnane said. If we have this source of coherent light that spans a huge region of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would be able to make the highest resolution light-based tabletop microscope in existence that could capture images in 3-D and tell us exactly what we are looking at. We're very close.

Murnane and Kapteyn presented highlights of their research today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, annual meeting in San Diego, during a panel discussion about the history and future of laser technology titled Next Generation of Extreme Optical Tools and Applications.

Most of today's X-ray lasers require so much power that they rely on fusion laser facilities the size of football stadiums or larger, making their use impractical. Murnane and Kapteyn generate coherent laser-like X-ray beams by using an intense femtosecond laser and combining hundreds or thousands of visible photons together. And the key is they are doing it with a desktop-size system.

They can already generate laser-like X-ray beams in the soft X-ray region and believe they have discovered how to extend the process all the way into the hard X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

If we can do this, it could lead to all kinds of possibilities, Kapteyn said. It might make it possible to improve X-ray imaging resolution at your doctor's office by a thousand times. The X-rays we get in the hospital now are limited. For example, they can't detect really small cancers because the X-ray source in your doctor's office is more like a light bulb, not a laser. If you had a bright, focused laser-like X-ray beam, you could image with far higher resolution.

Their method can be thought of as a coherent version of the X-ray tube, according to Murnane. In an X-ray tube, an electron is boiled off a filament, then it is accelerated in an electric field before hitting a solid target, where the kinetic energy of the electron is converted into incoherent X-rays. These incoherent X-rays are like the incoherent light from a light bulb or flashlight -- they aren't very focused.

In the tabletop setup, instead of boiling an electron from a filament, they pluck part of the quantum wave function of an electron from an atom using a very intense laser pulse. The electron is then accelerated and slammed back into the ion, releasing its energy as an X-ray photon. Since the laser field controls the motion of the electron, the X-rays emitted can retain the coherence properties of a laser, Murnane said.

Being able to build a tabletop X-ray laser is just the beginning, said Kapteyn.

An analogy that is pretty close to what is going on in this field is the MRI, which started as just a fundamental investigation, said Kapteyn. People then started using it for microscopy, and then it progressed into a medical diagnostic technique.

Murnane and Kapteyn were recently recognized with the American Physical Society's Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science for pioneering work in the area of ultra-fast laser science, including development of ultra-fast optical and coherent soft X-ray sources. The prize, which was endowed by NEC Corporation in 1991, recognizes outstanding contributions to basic research which uses lasers to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interaction with light. Nobel laureates and CU-Boulder physics Professors Carl E. Wieman (1999) and John L. Hall (1993) also have won the award.

Will coral reefs disappear?

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) This is the title of an upcoming symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual conference in San Diego, California. And it's a topic that should not be taken lightly.

NSERC-funded researcher Dr. Simon Donner, an assistant professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, will be talking about the vulnerability of coral reefs to climate change due to higher ocean temperatures.

Dr. Donner studies coral bleaching. Corals get most of their energy from microscopic algae that live in their tissue. These algae are colourful and are what gives corals their vivid hue. When environmental factors go out of the range that corals are used to (such as warming water), the symbiosis between the coral and the algae breaks down and corals effectively expel the algae and turn white. The coral is then deprived of its source of energy, and dies.

Dr. Donner studies the frequency of coral bleaching events, their consequences and the link to unusually warm oceans. He says that mass coral bleaching events were thought to be extremely rare as far back as 30 years ago.

At the AAAS conference he will be talking about the predicted occurrence of bleaching events under different climate scenarios and, according to

Dr. Donner, it doesn't look good.

Even if we froze emissions today, the planet still has some warming left in it. That's enough to make bleaching dangerously frequent in reefs worldwide, he says.

Given the hundreds of millions of people living in the tropics who depend on coral reefs for food, income, tourism and shoreline protection, the loss of reefs is a serious issue.

Obviously, there's an aesthetic concern because people see Finding Nemo and they're worried about what's going to happen to the world's coral reefs, but the key thing is that there are hundreds of millions of people who depend on them for their livelihood, says Dr. Donner.

However, the outlook isn't completely bleak. Dr. Donner says that no one is predicting that coral reefs will go extinct; they will continue to survive, but only in certain habitats, such as shaded areas. The reality is a general loss of coral cover and a breakdown of the physical structure of reefs.

In order to see what the future of reefs might be, Dr. Donner is pursuing fieldwork in the central equatorial Pacific, because the islands and reefs in that area are affected by repeated El Nino events. Because of this, they've experienced higher year-to-year temperature variability than other areas on the planet. Dr. Donner is studying the corals in these areas to understand how the reefs are biologically different, and how that has allowed them to persist through warm water events that would kill coral in other areas of the planet.

It's a natural model for the future, he says.

Neuroscientist: Think twice about cutting music in schools

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) EVANSTON, Ill. --- At an 11 a.m. press briefing, Saturday, Feb. 20, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, a Northwestern University neuroscientist will argue that music training has profound effects that shape the sensory system and should be a mainstay of K-12 education.

Playing an instrument may help youngsters better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice, says Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication Sciences at Northwestern University.

Cash-strapped school districts are making a mistake when they cut music from the K-12 curriculum, says Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory in Northwestern's School of Communication.

Kraus will present her own research and the research of other neuroscientists suggesting music education can be an effective strategy in helping typically developing children as well as children with developmental dyslexia or autism more accurately encode speech.

People's hearing systems are fine-tuned by the experiences they've had with sound throughout their lives, says Kraus. Music training is not only beneficial for processing music stimuli. We've found that years of music training may also improve how sounds are processed for language and emotion.

Researchers in the Kraus lab provided the first concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds. The findings are consistent with other studies they have conducted revealing that anomalies in brainstem sound encoding in some learning disabled children can be improved with auditory training.

The Kraus lab has a unique approach for demonstrating how the nervous system responds to the acoustic properties of speech and music sounds with sub-millisecond precision. The fidelity with which they can access the transformation of the sound waves into brain waves in individual people is a powerful new development.

The neural enhancements seen in individuals with musical training is not just an amplifying or volume knob effect, says Kraus. Individuals with music training show a selective fine-tuning of relevant aspects of auditory signals.

By comparing brain responses to predictable versus variable sound sequences, Kraus and her colleagues found that an effective or well-tuned sensory system takes advantage of stimulus regularities, such as the sound patterns that distinguish a teacher's voice from competing sounds in a noisy classroom.

They previously found that the ability of the nervous system to utilize acoustic patterns correlates with reading ability and the ability to hear speech in noise. Now they have discovered that the effectiveness of the nervous system to utilize sound patterns is linked to musical ability.

Playing music engages the ability to extract relevant patterns, such as the sound of one's own instrument, harmonies and rhythms, from the 'soundscape,' Kraus says. Not surprisingly, musicians' nervous systems are more effective at utilizing the patterns in music and speech alike.

Studies in Kraus' laboratory indicate that music -- a high-order cognitive process -- affects automatic processing that occurs early in the processing stream. The brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain, is modified by our experience with sound, says Kraus. Now we know that music can fundamentally shape our subcortical sensory circuitry in ways that may enhance everyday tasks, including reading and listening in noise.

At 3:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 20, Kraus will present Cognitive-Sensory Interaction in the Neural Encoding of Music and Speech as part of a panel on music-language interactions in the brain at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

New tool illuminates connections between stem cells and cancer

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers have a new tool to understand how cancers grow -- and with it a new opportunity to identify novel cancer drugs. They've been able to break apart human prostate tissue, extract the stem cells in that tissue, and alter those cells genetically so that they spur cancer.

Owen Witte, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles, will present the findings on February 20, 2010, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Many tissues contain pools of stem cells that replenish the tissue when it's damaged or when changes take place. For instance, stem cells in the skin produce new cells to replace those irreparably damaged by the sun, and stem cells in the breast create milk-producing cells when a woman is pregnant. The hallmark of these stem cells is that they self-renew. This means that in addition to making cells with a specific function, they also make many new stem cells.

Mounting evidence suggests that these self-renewing cells are also tied to cancer. They tend to collect mutations, says Witte, and not much separates tumor cells, with their capacity for unchecked growth, from healthy, tissue-forming stem cells. These cells have a huge capacity for self-renewal, and when the pathways that control self-renewal are augmented or changed, they can form tumors, says Witte.

Many scientists suspect that although tumors are made up of many cells, only the tumor cells derived from stem cells contribute to the growth of the tumor. For certain cancers, such as breast cancer and leukemia, that idea is well established. For others, such as prostate cancer, which Witte studies, the data are not conclusive.

Witte's group has been analyzing the relationship between tissue stem cells and cancer stem cells in the prostate. They have been attacking this problem by dividing mouse prostate tissue into its component cell types, culturing those cells, and then reassembling them to understand how they interact. Now, for the first time, they've accomplished that feat with human tissue. Importantly, they've also engineered specific genetic changes into human prostate stem cells to transform them into cancer cells.

The group is in the early stages of putting the technique to use, but Witte says it offers some distinct advantages for developing new cancer drugs. Cells can be grown directly from a prostate tumor for use in experiments, but without knowing the precise genetics of those cells, scientists may never know why they became cancerous. Drugs that are effective in stopping their growth may not have the same impact on prostate tumors driven by different gene mutations. Starting from prostate stem cells, Witte knows exactly which genetic changes have made a cell cancerous.

Here you can preprogram the genetic buffet, and then evaluate a compound in the face of those specific changes, says Witte.

That precision should speed the development of a new generation of fine-tuned cancer therapies. The new system should give scientists a firmer grasp of the genetic makeup of cells that are affected by particular compounds, and by extension, help clinicians identify the drugs that will best help particular patients. The field of cancer research has produced a significant number of major new targeted therapies, says Witte. Now we have to understand how best to use those therapies.

Nanotechnology could help Arab region

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) February 20. Nanotechnology could aid the future of development of the Arab region, says Mohamed H.A. Hassan, executive director of TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world, and president of the African Academy of Sciences. Hassan made his remarks at a panel session, Re-emergence of Science, Technology and Education as Priorities in the Arab World, taking place at the AAAS's annual meeting in San Diego.

The Arab region, home to some 300 million people, faces a host of daunting development challenges, Hassan notes. Three of the most fundamental involve ensuring adequate supplies of water, energy and food. Advances in nanotechnology, he says, could help achieve progress by helping to address each of these challenges.

For example, he notes that nano-filters could enhance the efficiency of desalinization plants, helping to ensure adequate supplies of water in the region. Similarly, nanotechnology could improve the capacity of solar panels. More abundant supplies of water and energy, Hassan adds, would boost irrigation and help increase agricultural output.

But none of this is likely to take place, he cautions, without a strong commitment to training the next generation of scientists. The Arab region has some inherent demographic advantages when seeking to address human resource issues related to scientific capacity building. Sixty percent of the population is less than 25 years old, he says.

Yet, the region has some glaring weaknesses as well, he says. Arab countries spend just 0.3% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on science and technology, compared to 1% in a growing number of developing countries and 2% to 3% in many developed countries. Scientists in the region publish less than 1% of the world's peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Hassan points to some encouraging recent signs, however. A growing number of countries have invested in high-profile projects designed to quickly build scientific capacity in critical areas of science and technology. He cites, for example, the opening of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for post-graduate studies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar's Science and Technology Park (QSTP).

But much more will need to be done, he says. To boost science, he calls on each Arab country to create at least one world-class university and build at least one world-class state-of-the-art science centre. Hassan also believes the national merit-based academies in the region should become more engaged in their societies and stronger advocates for science education and science-based development.

He readily acknowledges that with so many immediate challenges facing the region, it's difficult for governments to engage in long-term strategies for development. But he says that unless countries within the Arab region make a sustained effort to build scientific capacity, they will find themselves unable to overcome the 'knowledge-deficit' obstacles that have impeded economic development for far too long.

Nanotechnology may not be the first thing that comes to mind in discussions dealing with strategies to address the Arab region's most pressing challenges, Hassan concludes. But such investments in science and technology could be a key to the region's future.

Great Southern California shakeout results provide new communication strategies

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers who devised the largest earthquake preparedness event ever undertaken in the United States say one of the biggest challenges was translating devastation projections from a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 San Andreas Fault temblor into timely, usable information to the more than 5 million California participants in 2008.

Known as the Great Southern California Shakeout, the event was designed by more than 300 experts in fields including earth sciences, engineering, policy, economics and public health, said University of Colorado at Boulder Research Professor Keith Porter, who coordinated estimates of physical damages in the scenario. He said the interests of the scientists -- including high-tech research and state-of-the-art projections -- did not always coincide with concerns of the general public and emergency preparedness planners looking for timely, simple information on issues.

One of the biggest challenges of the ShakeOut was to get scientists to speak the language of citizens, said Porter of CU-Boulder's civil, environmental and architectural engineering department. While many researchers were concerned about advancing the state of science through different modeling scenarios and debate, the citizens made it clear to us they needed the big picture.

Porter gave a presentation on the subject at the 2010 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held Feb. 18-22 in San Diego. Porter's talk was part of a session titled Earthquake Science and Advocacy: Helping Californians Live Along the San Andreas Fault. The Great Southern California ShakeOut event was led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Pushing the limits of science, including efforts like the ShakeOut, almost invariably creates a lack of consensus among scientists that can cause confusion in the public sector leading to ambiguity aversion -- a preference by people to deal with known risks and to avoid dealing with risks where there is significant disagreement about the level of uncertainty, said Porter. We found these people needed a single, discreet, story, which led us to explore and present what we thought was a single, realistic outcome of the hypothetical earthquake, as opposed to a discussion of possible outcomes.

The 2008 ShakeOut scenario and a follow-up 2009 ShakeOut exercise involving more than 5 million Californians participating in drop, cover and hold on earthquake drills and other family, school and organizational emergency plans were huge successes, causing the USGS and collaborators to make the ShakeOut an annual event, Porter said. Our hope is the activities undertaken by participants will become second nature, he said. In a sense it is similar to people taking CPR courses annually to keep up to speed.

The USGS team that created the ShakeOut is now creating an emergency preparedness scenario known as ARkStorm to simulate the outcome of a series of massive West Coast storms similar to those that pounded California in 1861 and 1862. Those storms lasted for 45 days, flooded vast areas of northern and southern California, submerged a swath of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys 300 miles long and up to 60 miles wide and inundated large areas of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Such storms draw heat and moisture from the tropical Pacific Ocean, forming atmospheric rivers that cause damage on the same scale of earthquakes and are projected to become more intense as a result of climate change, said Porter. Porter is leading the ARkStorm team that is assessing the potential outcome from such a storm in terms of physical damages, repair costs and the restoration time for buildings, dams, levees, harbors, bridges, roads, water supply systems and electric power.

Panel challenges colleges and universities to improve science education for future doctors

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Colleges and universities should seize the opportunity to make premedical and medical education more interactive and interdisciplinary, says Peter J. Bruns, vice president for grants and special programs at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

That challenge is part of a bold new approach to premedical and medical education proposed by Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and HHMI in the report Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, which was published in June 2009. The report outlines specific scientific topics, called competencies, that undergraduates should know before they enter medical school and medical students should know before they become doctors.

The idea is to allow universities and medical schools to wean themselves off a strict list of required courses and instead teach science in the most innovative possible ways. The tyranny of being connected to a series of specific courses has hampered change in science education, Bruns says. These competencies allow colleges to teach integrated science courses that bring together different scientific disciplines.

A group of scientist-educators will discuss the report and the road forward at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego this week. The panel will be moderated by Sharon R. Long, a professor of biological sciences and former dean at Stanford University. In addition to Bruns, the speakers include Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians committee members Julio de Paula, a chemistry professor and dean at Lewis and Clark College, and Wayne M. Samuelson, a professor of internal medicine and associate dean for admissions at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Bruns notes that HHMI has long played an important role in invigorating science education at all levels in the United States. But he traced the Institute's decision to get involved in finding new ways to approach medical and premedical education to Bio 2010, a report issued by the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. The report, which called for improvements to undergraduate science education, noted that undergraduate courses are taught within strict disciplinary silos but that research biologists often work across disciplines. Modern biology is a real mix of disciplines coming together to solve problems, Bruns says. That is the way it should be taught.

In 2007, HHMI joined forces with the AAMC to see if the two institutions could work together to address this problem. They convened a committee of researchers, physicians, and science educators representing a wide range of scientific and medical disciplines. Committee members were chosen from the faculty at selected small colleges, large universities, and medical schools across the country. Long and Robert J. Alpern, dean of Yale University School of Medicine, co-chaired the committee.

The resulting report recommends eight scientific competencies that students should know before entering medical school and eight additional natural science competencies that they should master before receiving their medical degrees. The committee supplemented the broad competencies with specific learning objectives and examples. To see the full report, go to http://www.hhmi.org/grants/sffp.html.

The report has been circulating among science educators since its release in June 2009. Several applicants for HHMI's ongoing competition for a new round of undergraduate education grants at research universities included plans to create just the type of courses that the AAMC-HHMI report envisions. In addition, the National Science Foundation said several of its current competitions would be a good fit for the interdisciplinary curriculum development, including Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) grants for undergraduate education.

The report's findings are being considered in AAMC's review of the MCAT, the medical school admissions exam, and several members of the MCAT review panel were also on the AAMC-HHMI committee. That review is expected to be completed in 2012.

Bruns hopes that colleges and universities across the country will respond to the call for change. We are arguing that future physicians need to be prepared in contemporary science, and that is no different from the way future scientists need to be prepared, he says. It's an opportunity to create new ways to teach science, not an obstacle.

Study shows people not only judge mothers based on work status, but also judge their kids

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Although a woman's role in the home varies, a recent study shows that people favor not only a mother, but also her child and their relationship when she is not employed outside the home full time.

A Kansas State University study evaluated the perceptions people have of women and their children based on the woman's work status. The findings showed that people value, and do not differentiate between, mothers who stay in the home full time and mothers who find a compromise between working and at-home motherhood after they have a child. People also devalue mothers employed full time outside the home, relative to their non-employed counterparts, and perceive their children to be troubled and their relationships to be problematic.

The most interesting, and potentially dangerous, finding is the view that if a child has a working mother, people don't like that child as much, said Jennifer Livengood, a K-State graduate student in psychology from Sweet Springs, Mo. People really devalue a mom who works full time outside the home in comparison to a mom who doesn't. People like mothers who fulfill traditional stereotypes, like staying at home. That's just not a reality and not a preference for women as much as it used to be.

Livengood did the study for her master's thesis and collaborated with K-State's Mark Barnett, professor of psychology. The research was presented by Tammy Sonnentag, doctoral student in psychology from Edgar, Wis., at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in January.

Previous research has shown that people rate stay-at-home moms as more likeable than mothers employed outside the home. While studies have shown that many women now would like more of a compromise between staying home full time and working outside the home full time, Livengood said there is little research on the perceptions of mothers who pursue this middle ground.

I've always been interested in how women are viewed based on their choice to work outside the home, or not, after they have a child, Livengood said.

The researchers did a study involving undergraduate students, all of whom were single, and 99 percent of the sample had no children. Each participant first listened to one of three interviews that reflected a working mother, a stay-at-home mother and what the researchers called a middle mother.

The working mother said in the interview that she went back to work two weeks after giving birth and worked more than 40 hours per week. The stay-at-home mother reported having stopped working outside of the home after giving birth. The middle mother described taking 18 months away from work after giving birth and then going back to work part time and gradually increasing her work hours.

As a cover story, the participants were led to believe that there were many mother-child pairs being evaluated to see if people could tell if there were problems in the relationship, Livengood said.

Then, each participant watched the same video of a mother and her 4-year-old son completing a puzzle and playing a game together. Because of the audiotape, the participants either thought she was a working mother, a stay-at-home mother or a middle mother.

The participants then filled out a questionnaire that evaluated their perception of the mother. They rated statements like, She does a good job as a mom. They also filled out a questionnaire about their perceptions of the child and responded to statements like, This child is well-adjusted. The last questionnaire regarded their perception of the mother-child relationship, such as if they thought the pair worked well together.

The findings showed that the participants didn't differentiate between the stay-at-home mother and middle mother, but they did devalue the working mother in comparison. Livengood said the similar ratings for the two mothers might indicate that individuals understand women need a compromise. Findings also showed that not only did the participants devalue the mother who worked outside the home full time, but they also extended that negative perception to the child and their relationship.

By just telling them the mother's work status -- by just manipulating that one variable -- it was strong enough for participants to discriminate between the children of working mothers and the other two mothers, as well as between their relationships, Livengood said.

She said these findings might indicate that people perceive the child of a working mother to have a higher incidence of behavioral and adjustment problems and their relationship to be relatively cold and troubled.

She said this perception might be specific to the sample of undergraduate students. If not, it could mean that people treat children of working mothers differently and have negative expectations, which could initiate a self-fulfilling prophecy with the child.

Women are going to continue working, and they're going to continue having children, Livengood said. Knowing how their decisions in these arenas are perceived by others may help us understand the foundations of these potential biases and identify ways to support mothers in their work-family decisions.

Gladstone's Lennart Mucke wins Potamkin prize

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Lennart Mucke, MD, Director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease (GIND), has been named a recipient of the American Academy of Neurology's prestigious Potamkin Prize. Mucke is recognized for the development of experimental strategies to make the brain more resistant against Alzheimer's disease and for instigating a turnaround in the direction of research in this field. Mucke and his co-recipient Bruce Miller, MD, UCSF professor of neurology and psychiatry, will be presented with the prize for research in Pick's, Alzheimer's and related diseases on April 15.

Our ability to think, remember and control our lives depends on finely balanced activities in complex neural networks in our brains. Alzheimer's disease erodes and destabilizes these networks, setting in motion vicious cycles of abnormal neuronal activity resulting in cognitive deficits and neurodegeneration. Mucke and colleagues discovered strategies that effectively prevent and even reverse abnormal network activity and cognitive impairments in mouse models of the disease. Remarkably, the same strategies also increased resistance to epileptic seizures, suggesting that they could be of broad therapeutic benefit.

Most treatments for dementing disorders currently under development aim to block the buildup of poisonous proteins in the brain, but the long-term efficacy and safety of these approaches remains unknown. The strategies Mucke discovered could complement these approaches by making the brain more resistant to these abnormal proteins and to other disease processes causing abnormal neuronal activities.

Ten years ago, many scientists believed the dementia of Alzheimer's disease was caused by the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain. Mucke and colleagues showed that a minuscule constituent of these plaques, known as amyloid-beta peptide, can impair the function of brain cells independent of plaques, thus narrowing the whereabouts of the disease culprit from the haystack to the needle.

Miller is the clinical director of UCSF's Memory and Aging Center and has a special interest in the behavioral effects of dementia, notably frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), which used to be more commonly known as Pick's disease. Along with Alzheimer's disease, FTLD is the leading cause of dementia in patients under 65 years. Thanks in part to the pioneering work of Miller and his colleagues, the condition is gaining significantly wider prominence and neurologists are now able to distinguish it from Alzheimer's in its earlier stage.

According to Mucke, the Potamkin award is a wonderful reinforcement of the synergism between himself and Miller. Working together, we have developed innovative translational programs for the investigation and treatment of dementia and related disorders. Miller concurs and describes the Potamkin Prize as the highlight of his academic career.

Lennart Mucke's primary affiliation is with the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, where he is director/senior investigator and where his laboratory is located and his research is conducted. He is also the Joseph B. Martin Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience at UCSF.

Jurassic space: Ancient galaxies come together after billions of years

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Imagine finding a living dinosaur in your backyard. Astronomers have found the astronomical equivalent of prehistoric life in our intergalactic backyard: a group of small, ancient galaxies that has waited 10 billion years to come together. These late bloomers are on their way to building a large elliptical galaxy.

Such encounters between dwarf galaxies are normally seen billions of light-years away and therefore occurred billions of years ago. But these galaxies, members of Hickson Compact Group 31, are relatively nearby, only 166 million light-years away.

New images of this foursome by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offer a window into the universe's formative years when the buildup of large galaxies from smaller building blocks was common.

Astronomers have known for decades that these dwarf galaxies are gravitationally tugging on each other. Their classical spiral shapes have been stretched like taffy, pulling out long streamers of gas and dust. The brightest object in the Hubble image is actually two colliding galaxies. The entire system is aglow with a firestorm of star birth, triggered when hydrogen gas is compressed by the close encounters between the galaxies, and collapses to form stars.

The Hubble observations have added important clues to the story of this interacting group, allowing astronomers to determine when the encounter began and to predict a future merger.

We found the oldest stars in a few ancient globular star clusters that date back to about 10 billion years ago. Therefore, we know the system has been around for a while, says astronomer Sarah Gallagher of The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, leader of the Hubble study. Most other dwarf galaxies like these interacted billions of years ago, but these galaxies are just coming together for the first time. This encounter has been going on for at most a few hundred million years, the blink of an eye in cosmic history. It is an extremely rare local example of what we think was a quite common event in the distant universe.

Everywhere the astronomers looked in this group they found batches of infant star clusters and regions brimming with star birth. The entire system is rich in hydrogen gas, the stuff of which stars are made. Gallagher and her team used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to resolve the youngest and brightest of those clusters, which allowed them to calculate the clusters' ages, trace the star-formation history, and determine that the galaxies are undergoing the final stages of galaxy assembly.

The analysis was bolstered by infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and NASA's Swift satellite. Those data helped the astronomers measure the total amount of star formation in the system. Hubble has the sharpness to resolve individual star clusters, which allowed us to age-date the clusters, Gallagher adds.

Atlas of Coastal EcoSystems

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Feb. 18, 2010 -- The University of Arizona Press has announced publication of the Atlas of Coastal Ecosystems in the Western Gulf of California: Tracking Limestone Deposits on the Margin of a Young Sea.

Emphasizing the intricate workings of the Gulf and focusing on limestone production, the process undertaken by mollusks, coral, and coralline algae that play a role in the carbon cycle, the book answers the questions What was the richness of 'fossil' ecosystems in the Gulf of California? How have those ecosystems changed over time? and Which ecosystems are more amenable to conservation?

The atlas is co-edited by Markes E. Johnson and Jorge Ledesma-Vazquez. Johnson is the Charles L. MacMillan Professor of Geology at Williams College. Ledesma is associate dean of the Marine Sciences Faculty at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California (UABC).

The two scientists have worked together as field partners in Mexico since 1990. Much of their collaborative research has been supported by The Petroleum Research Fund through the American Chemical Society, which promotes participation by undergraduate students with grants to institutions like Williams College.

Dean A. Dunn, geologist by training and program manager of the Office of Research Grants at the American Chemical Society, welcomed the new atlas as an impressive body of work and a manifestation of the kind of cutting-edge research that comes out of grants dedicated to the support of science at undergraduate schools.

The volume features the work of 16 researchers from Mexico and the United States and its publication marks the culmination of four years of work and research that began following a Gulf of California Conference in 2004, where the editors presented some of the first high-resolution satellite images showing the location of limestone deposits on the Baja California Peninsula and its associated islands. The chapters written by Johnson and Ledesma showcase the research of the many Williams and UABC students they supervised during the last 20 years.

The atlas is a lavishly illustrated reference. Its high-quality satellite images and field photos help to illustrate the intricacies of the Gulf ecosystems, making the text a valuable resource for earth and marine scientists who study coastal areas.

The satellite photos contained in the volume are the product of joint research by faculty and students carried out at the Remote Sensing and GIS Laboratory at Williams College. A novel aspect of the volume is inclusion of a CD with full coastal coverage through a set of 26 overlapping satellite images that anyone with a computer can access and study.

The Gulf of California is acknowledged as one of the richest bodies of water on the planet. This atlas captures the dynamics of natural cycles in its fertility that have been in near continuous operation for more than five million years since the Baja California Peninsula was separated from mainland Mexico in an ongoing tectonic process that eventually will sunder upper California along the San Andreas Fault on the U.S. side of the border. Tens of million of years from now, the entire peninsula will transform itself into an island with an inside passage from end to end.

Johnson is also the author of Discovering the Geology of Baja California: Six Hikes on the Southern Gulf Coast, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2002. He has been at Williams since 1977, after receiving his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His main interests include Silurian stratigraphy, biostratigraphy and sea level changes, the history of geology, and paleoislands of all geological ages. His teaching at Williams has ranged from courses on invertebrate paleobiology to paleoecology and stratigraphy. He is currently conducting sabbatical studies on Paleoislands under the support of grants from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

NHLBI, CDC launch surveillance and research program for inherited blood diseases

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Medical researchers are developing a new surveillance system to determine the number of patients diagnosed with a family of inherited blood disorders known as hemoglobinopathies, including sickle cell disease, thalassemias, and hemoglobin E disease.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health is funding the four-year pilot project, which will involve the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and six state health departments, to create ways to learn more about the extent of hemoglobinopathies in the United States.

Data collected from the $27 million Registry and Surveillance System in Hemoglobinopathies (RuSH) project will help researchers determine the most effective plans for developing future hemoglobinopathy registries. Research findings based on data from disease registries may provide new ideas for drug therapies and can spur the development of tests that can determine severity of diseases over the lifespan.

To manage the surveillance efforts, the NHLBI has entered into an interagency agreement with the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. As part of the project, the CDC has developed cooperative agreements to create surveillance programs with state health departments in California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Hemoglobinopathies involve problems with hemoglobin, the vital blood component responsible for transporting oxygen throughout the body. Production of abnormal hemoglobin, which occurs in the family of sickle cell diseases and hemoglobin E, or production of too little hemoglobin, which occurs in the thalassemias, can cause organ damage and shorten lifespan. While all states now test newborns for some of these diseases, there is no system to track the diseases nationally. In addition, patients born before screening programs began or those who have immigrated to the United States are not tracked. These statistical gaps make it difficult to know the true impact of hemoglobinopathies in this country. RuSH will help determine how many people are affected by hemoglobinopathies. Such data are essential for public health agencies to allocate adequate resources to meet the medical and social service needs of hemoglobinopathy patients.

While we have made great strides in developing treatments for patients with sickle cell disease and other hemoglobinopathies, RuSH stands as the first major surveillance and registry program to gather comprehensive demographic and other information on people with these life-threatening diseases, said NHLBI Acting Director Susan B. Shurin, M.D., a hematology researcher.

Hemoglobinopathies cause health problems when abnormal hemoglobin genes are inherited from both parents. Individuals who inherit a single abnormal gene, which is called carrying a trait, have few of these health problems.

The hemoglobinopathies are most common in areas where malaria has been endemic. Sickle cell disease is the most common hemoglobinopathy in the United States and the condition affects millions worldwide. Of the estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people in the United States with sickle cell disease, most are thought to have African ancestry, although the gene also occurs among people from the Mediterranean and Middle East. The abnormal hemoglobin molecules of sickle cell disease deform red blood cells, causing them to clump together and block blood flow through blood vessels, leading to painful sickle cell crises, organ damage, anemia (lack of red blood cells), and premature death.

Life-threatening complications include infections, acute chest syndrome, stroke, and pulmonary hypertension (increased blood pressure in the lung arteries). Painful crises are the leading cause of emergency room visits and hospitalizations of people who have sickle cell disease. Life expectancy has increased dramatically with state newborn screening programs and early treatment, which can include daily penicillin treatment for patients age five and younger as well as immunizations for other diseases to prevent complications.

Patients with thalassemia syndromes produce less hemoglobin than normal, and the red blood cells that are produced are rapidly destroyed. Signs and symptoms of thalassemia can include severe anemia; slowed growth and delayed puberty; bone problems; and enlarged spleen, liver, and heart. Severely affected individuals require frequent and repeated blood transfusions and treatments to reduce the accumulation of iron in the body. Thalassemia genes are widespread across the Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia.

Hemoglobin E diseases are most common among persons with ancestors from Southeast Asia. Affected individuals produce a smaller than normal number of red blood cells. Red blood cells in these individuals are smaller than normal and misshapen. These abnormal red blood cells carry less oxygen to organs. Milder forms of hemoglobin E disease may not need treatment, although affected individuals may have mild anemia. Severe forms of hemoglobin E disease can cause significant anemia, bone pain, and other complications.

Through surveillance under the initial phase of the RuSH pilot program, researchers hope to determine the prevalence of the hemoglobinopathies among screened newborns and patients not identified through newborn screening. The data should help determine the prevalence of the various conditions. The research will also help describe the demographic characteristics of individuals with these conditions as well as their geographic distribution. Researchers will also examine the existing health care resources available for patients with hemoglobinopathies.

The data gathered through our RuSH surveillance efforts will provide critical knowledge about the current state of care available for patients who have hemoglobinopathies, said Hani Atrash, M.D., M.P.H, director of the Division of Blood Disorders, National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities at the CDC.

Listen to the natives for better moose monitoring

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Modern methods can answer a multitude of questions, but sometimes traditional techniques are superior. Authorities in northern Quebec, Canada, found this to their cost, when they relied upon statistical data to monitor moose populations.

For many centuries the Cree, an indigenous group of people living in the James Bay region of northern Quebec (around 800km north of Montreal), have lived in harmony with their environment. They hunt a variety of animals including beaver, bear, and moose, killing just enough to feed and clothe themselves. By rotating the territories over which they hunt, and only killing adult animals, they ensure that the animal populations always remain stable.

Until the mid 1980s the James Bay region, at the southern end of Hudson Bay in Canada, was inaccessible to most, and the Cree were the only people who hunted in the region. However, in the mid 1980s, following pressure from sport-hunting and fishing groups, the Canadian authorities granted access to the region (via a previously locked road, known as the James Bay highway, which had been constructed for a hydro-electric project).

Sport hunters travelled from far and wide, hoping to bag a few moose. At the time wildlife managers were eager to open up access to this region, as they believed it would relieve the pressure on hunting grounds further south, said Colin Scott from McGill University, who led the team documenting these changes.

To ensure that moose populations remained stable the Canadian authorities relied on aerial surveys to monitor moose numbers in hunting territories. In addition records were kept of the number of moose caught by each hunter, and the time it had taken to catch them.

By the late 1980s the Cree people became concerned about the moose numbers, particularly in 'Zone 17', one of the hunting territories in the James Bay region, covering an area of several thousand square kilometres. Using their system of monitoring moose populations (based on moose sightings, tracking and faeces) they detected a significant decline in numbers.

The Cree people alerted wildlife managers, but they were not taken seriously. Instead the authorities insisted that the moose population must be stable because the 'catch per unit effort' (average number of moose caught by hunters in a particular time period) had remained the same over the years.

But by the early 1990s the authorities were forced to concede that there was a problem in zone 17, as it became clear that a severe crash in population had occurred, with a drop of more than 50%. Opening the road had opened up opportunities for the forestry sector as well, enabling them to clear cut the forest and leaving the moose with less cover to hide in, said Scott. The moose became easy targets and sport hunters became much more efficient. However, because the moose population was declining, their 'catch per unit effort' remained stable, lulling the authorities into a false sense of security.

In this instance the traditional methods of monitoring and managing moose, used by the Cree hunters, was a better measure of moose population. Their methods rely on more variables and have a greater complexity, said Scott, who presented his findings to the ESF BOREAS conference, which took place at the Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi, Finland (

New USC institute to target dirty marine diesel

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A Hong Kong shipping executive has pledged up to $4.1 million to fund a research program at the University of Southern California to reduce emissions and improve combustion efficiency in marine diesel engines.

Kenneth Koo of Tai Chong Cheang Steamship Co. (H.K.) Ltd (TCCHK) says collaboration between industry and academia is needed to substantially reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and harmful pollutants emitted by conventional large bore two-stroke single-acting marine diesel engines used by the world's merchant shipping fleets.

The best way to initiate change is to partner with an institution of higher learning, says Koo, TCCHK's group chairman and CEO. Let's come up with the designs that work and bang on the maritime walls of industry.

The problem Koo wants to solve is significant. Most of the world's merchant ships, including tankers, container ships, and bulk carriers, use large diesel engines that emit significant amounts of carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants.

Compounding the problem are the lower-priced, lower quality fuels typically used by merchant ships, as well as the modest emissions standards for their engines.

Koo intends to work with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering to establish the TCC Institute for Emissions Reduction from Marine Diesel Engines. The first phase of research will be conducted at USC, with the goal of producing lab-scale prototype technology that can be scaled up for eventual testing in actual full-size engines.

Our goal is to reverse, recover and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while also conserving fuel and reducing emissions harmful to health and the environment says Koo. I believe we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the environment, and we are willing to do our part to reduce the impact on climate change caused by our ships.

Koo intends for his company to lead the way by funding research from his own charitable foundation in order to radically change the operation of marine Diesel engines for the better.

Viterbi Dean Yannis Yortsos says the school is thrilled to be working with TCCHK. We applaud Kenneth Koo for his interest in conducting truly path-breaking research that could improve combustion efficiency, while saving fuel and substantially reducing pollution, says Yortsos. He is a real visionary and we are very pleased to be working with him and the TCCHK Team.

Captain Vinay Patwardhan, TCCHK's director of group planning and development and a merchant ship captain, notes that the design and method of operation of large diesel engines is virtually unchanged from 100 years ago.

Combustion efficiency is only about 50 percent, Patwardhan says. We believe a huge improvement approaching complete combustion can be attained with transient plasma ignition, and we intend for USC to conduct research to develop prototype technology that could be truly revolutionary.

In response to Koo's vision, USC has proposed a five-year research plan that will proceed along two paths:

Behavioural signs of autism become evident between the ages of 6 and 12 months

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:04:40 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A study of the development of autism in infants, comparing the behavior of the siblings of children diagnosed with autism to that of babies developing normally, has found that the nascent symptoms of the condition — a lack of shared eye contact, smiling and communicative babbling — are not present at 6 months, but emerge gradually and only become apparent during the latter part of the first year of life.

Researchers conducted the study over five years by painstakingly counting each instance of smiling, babbling and eye contact during examinations until the children were 3. They found that by 12 months the two groups’ development had diverged significantly. Intentional social and communicative behavior among children developing normally increased while among infants later diagnosed with autism it decreased dramatically. The study is published online early and will appear in the March issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

“This study provides an answer to when the first behavioral signs of autism become evident,” said Sally Ozonoff, the study’s lead author, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a researcher with the UC Davis MIND Institute. “Contrary to what we used to think, the behavioral signs of autism appear later in the first year of life for most children with autism. Most babies are born looking relatively normal in terms of their social abilities but then, through a process of gradual decline in social responsiveness, the symptoms of autism begin to emerge between 6 and 12 months of age.”

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder of deficits in social skills and communication, as well as in repetitive and restricted behaviors, with onset occurring prior to age 3. Abnormal brain development, probably beginning prenatally, is known to be fundamental to the behaviors that characterize autism. Current estimates place the condition’s incidence at between 1 in 100 and 1 in 110 children in the United States.

Children with a sibling already diagnosed with autism are known to be among those at greatest risk of developing the disorder. The current study included 25 high-risk children who met criteria for autism at 3 years of age, matched with 25 low-risk peers who were developing normally. It was conducted at the MIND Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles. The sole inclusion criterion for the high-risk group was having a sibling with autism; low-risk participants had to have been born after 36 weeks gestation and have no autistic family members.

The children’s development was evaluated at 6, 12, 18, 24 and 36 months of age using a series of widely implemented diagnostic tools, including the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) and the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R). Examiners were not told which babies were at high- or low-risk when evaluating the participants’ development.

The researchers found that there were few discernable differences between the two groups at the outset but that after six months, 86 percent of the infants who developed autism showed declines in social communication that were outside the range for typical development. “After six months,” the study found, “the autism spectrum disorder group showed a rapid decline in eye contact, social smiling, and examiner-rated social responsiveness.” Group differences were significant by 12 months in eye contact and social smiling and all other measures by 18 months, the study found.

The study is notable because of the accuracy and precision of its prospective methodology, assiduously recording exact numbers of social and communicative behaviors during lab visits. Previously, researchers have constructed evidence of autism’s earliest manifestations by interviewing parents about when they believed their children’s symptoms first arose or by reviewing home movies for clues to when children begin exhibiting symptoms of autism.

"Until now, research has relied on asking parents when their child reached developmental milestones. But that can be really difficult to recall, and there is a phenomenon called the “telescoping effect” where people usually say that they remember something happening more recently than when it occurred,” Ozonoff said. In addition parents frequently will turn off the video camera when their children are behaving poorly — precisely when autistic symptoms may appear.

Ozonoff said that the study provides a deeper understanding for parents, caregivers and health-care providers and for future research of the developmental trajectory for very young children with autism.

“We need to be careful about how we screen, and we need to know what we’re looking for,” Ozonoff said. “This study tells us that screening for autism early in the first year of life probably is not going to be successful because there isn’t going to be anything to notice. It also tells us that we should be focusing on social behaviors in our screening, since that is what declines early in life.”

“This study also found that the loss of skills continues into the second and third year of life,” she said. “So it may not be adequate, as the American Academy of Pediatrics currently suggests, that providers screen for autism twice before the end of the second year. Autism has a slow, gradual onset of symptoms, rather than a very abrupt loss of skills.”

“Screening may need to continue into the third year of life, since symptom emergence takes place over a long time. If a child starts exhibiting a declining trajectory and a sustained reduction in social communication we want to refer them into therapy, especially if they are at risk,” Ozonoff said, “even before we might be able to make a definitive diagnosis.”

Ozonoff said that the study does not address the etiology of autism or causality. In this study, the infants who participated were at high risk due to having strong family histories of autism, suggesting that genetics plays a major role in the later autism diagnoses, despite the fact that their symptoms were not apparent at birth.

Silver nanoparticles may one day be key to devices that keep hearts beating strong and steady

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:59:12 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Diamonds and gold may make some hearts flutter on Valentine's Day, but in a University at Buffalo laboratory, silver nanoparticles are being designed to do just the opposite.

The nanoparticles are part of a new family of materials being created in the laboratory of SUNY Distinguished Professor and Greatbatch Professor of Advanced Power Sources Esther Takeuchi, PhD, who developed the lithium/silver vanadium oxide battery. The battery was a major factor in bringing implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) into production in the late 1980s. ICDs shock the heart into a normal rhythm when it goes into fibrillation.

Twenty years later, with more than 300,000 of these units being implanted every year, the majority of them are powered by the battery system developed and improved by Takeuchi and her team. For that work she has earned more than 140 patents, believed to be more than any other woman in the United States. Last fall, she was one of four recipients honored in a White House ceremony with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

ICD batteries, in general, now last five to seven years. But she and her husband and co-investigator, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Chemistry Kenneth Takeuchi, PhD, and Amy Marschilok, PhD, UB research assistant professor of chemistry, are exploring even-better battery systems, by fine-tuning bimetallic materials at the atomic level.

Their research investigating feasibility for ICD use is funded by the National Institutes of Health, while their investigation of new, bimetallic systems is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

So far, their results show that they can make their materials 15,000 times more conductive upon initial battery use due to in-situ (that is, in the original material) generation of metallic silver nanoparticles. Their new approach to material design will allow development of higher-power, longer-life batteries than was previously possible.

These and other improvements are boosting interest in battery materials and the revolutionary devices that they may make possible.

We may be heading toward a time when we can make batteries so tiny that they -- and the devices they power -- can simply be injected into the body, Takeuchi says. Right now, her team is exploring how to boost the stability of the new materials they are designing for ICDs. The materials will be tested over weeks and months in laboratory ovens that mimic body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius.

What's really exciting about this concept is that we are tuning the material at the atomic level, says Takeuchi. So the change in its conductivity and performance is inherent to the material. We didn't add supplements to achieve that, we did it by changing the active material directly.

She explains that new and improved batteries for biomedical applications could, in a practical way, revolutionize treatments for some of the most persistent diseases by making feasible devices that would be implanted in the brain to treat stroke and mental illness, in the spine to treat chronic pain or in the vagal nerve system to treat migraines, Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, even obesity.

And even though batteries are an historic technology, they are far from mature, Takeuchi notes. This spring, she is teaching the energy storage course in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the class is filled to capacity. I've never seen interest in batteries as high as it is now, she says.

TV entrepreneurs don't reflect real life, says survey

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Does Dragons' Den, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson and the way other celebrity entrepreneurs are depicted by the media show what it's really like to start up and run businesses?

The answer's no, according to most respondents in the two latest in-depth surveys of small business owners and business advisers from Nottingham University Business School.

For the Q4 2009 editions of the UK Business Barometer (UKBB) and UK Business Advisers Barometer (UKBAB) surveys, three questions about the media's portrayal of enterprise and entrepreneurs were added and the results reveal some frustration from people running small businesses that media portrayals don't match their experiences and the challenges they face.

When asked to what extent media reporting reflects their experiences, out of all participants in the UK Business Barometer, only 11 per cent thought media reporting reflected their experiences. Of the business advisers responding to the UKBAB, only 20 per cent were able to say that media reporting reflects their experiences highly or reasonably highly, while 35 per cent said that it does not reflect their experience at all, or not much.

Participants were also asked whether they thought that the media's portrayal of 'celebrity entrepreneurs' distorted the public perception of entrepreneurs in general. A total of 81 per cent of UKBB respondents and 75 per cent from the UKBAB panel thought this was the case to a high or reasonably high extent while only four per cent thought this didn't happen at all, or not much.

Over 70 per cent of respondents said that they thought it would be highly worthwhile or reasonably worthwhile for some business advisers to work directly with media to improve the quality and coverage of smaller businesses.

Not everyone felt celebrity entrepreneurs in the media have a negative effect. One business adviser said I work with schools, raising awareness of business enterprise to students under the age of 16 and I believe the 'celebrity entrepreneur' has had a positive impact with this group.

These unique quarterly surveys comparing responses from business people and business advisers are managed by The University of Nottingham Institute for Enterprise and Innovation (UNIEI).

The Director of UNIEI, Professor Martin Binks, said: If these views are representative of the general picture then they raise important questions as to where people can find accurate information on which to base decisions about being an entrepreneur. At a time when so much emphasis is placed on the crucial importance of entrepreneurship, this perception may have significant implications for informed decision making.

Other parts of the Barometer surveys addressed what business people and advisers feel about the health of the economy and recovery from recession.

2009 AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award goes to Diola Bagayoko

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Diola Bagayoko of the Southern University at Baton Rouge, La., has been honored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his extraordinary effort to significantly increase the number of African-American Ph.D.s in physics and chemistry.

Bagayoko, who serves as the Southern University System Distinguished Professor of Physics as well as chair for the department of physics at his university, will receive the 2009 AAAS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement during a 20 February ceremony at the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.

Through the creation and later the expansion of the Timbuktu Academy based at Southern University in Baton Rouge, the AAAS award selection committee reported, Dr. Bagayoko has created a resource center for encouraging students to pursue Ph.D. degrees across a wide range of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields and academic levels.

In addition, the committee noted, Bagayoko has reached undergraduate students on a one-on-one basis through mandatory weekly seminars, and he has worked tirelessly to advance education and research in general. He has personally mentored 21 undergraduate students at the Southern University at Baton Rouge. All have gone on to receive Ph.D. degrees in physics and chemistry.

Bagayoko received his B.S. degree in physics and chemistry in 1973 from Ecole Normale Superieure in Bamako, Mali. His master's degree in solid state physics was earned in 1978 from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. He received a Ph.D. degree in theoretical solid state physics in 1983 from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

In 1996, Bagayoko became one of the first recipients of the U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. The Timbuktu Academy received this presidential award, for programs, in 2002. The Timbuktu Academy is funded by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research (ONR), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Louisiana Space Consortium (LaSPACE), the ExxonMobil Foundation through the Bernard Harris Foundation, and the Siemens Foundation. Additionally, from 1984 until 2003, Bagayoko secured more than $12 million in grants that were used for instructional enhancement, mentoring, research, and related tasks.

He is an author on more than 80 mostly technical, refereed publications that deal with condensed matter theory related to the electronic, cohesive, magnetic, optional, and other properties of metals, semiconductors, oxides, clusters, and carbon nanotubes.

Bagayoko and colleagues introduced the Bagayoko, Zhao, and Williams (BZW) procedure that opened the way, for the first time, to predictive calculations of the electronic and related properties of semiconductors. In addition, he has been an author on more than 50 publications that deal with teaching, mentoring, and learning, and he was the lead author on the proposal and strategic plan that led to the establishment of a doctoral program in science and mathematics education at his university.

Established by the AAAS Board of Directors in 1991, the AAAS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement recognizes individuals who have, for more than 25 years, mentored significant numbers of underrepresented students toward the completion of doctoral studies and/or significantly affected the climate of a department, college or institution, or field in such a manner as to significantly increase the diversity of students pursuing and completing doctorates in the sciences. Also considered are nominees' demonstrated scholarship, activism and community building. The award includes a monetary prize of $5,000, a commemorative plaque, and complimentary registration for the AAAS Annual Meeting.

The AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award will be presented at the 176th AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, which will take place 18-22 February 2010. The awards ceremony and reception will be held at the San Diego Convention Center on Saturday, 20 February at 5:00 p.m.

Male college students also victims of violence at girlfriends' hands

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Thinking about a typical victim of college dating violence, you're probably imagining her, not him.

Researchers often think the same way, according to a Kansas State University expert on intimate partner violence. Sandra Stith, a professor of family studies and human services, said most research has looked at men as offenders and women as victims.

In the research on college students in particular, we're finding both men and women can be perpetrators, she said. In our growing-up years, we teach boys not hit their sister, but we don't teach girls not to hit their brother.

She and a K-State research team are looking at the impact that being a victim of violence has on male versus female college students in heterosexual relationships.

Most research shows female victims having higher levels of depression, anxiety and school problems than nonvictims, Stith said. Our research indicates that both male and female college students are being victims of violence, and we want to see how it affects both.

In 2008, Stith and her former student at Virginia Tech, Colleen Baker, published research in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma that found the biggest predictor of whether male and female college students would use violence against a partner was whether the partner was violent toward them.

It's a dramatically more important factor than anything else, Stith said. If your girlfriend hits you, that dramatically increases the likelihood that you're going to hit her, and vice versa.

In general, Stith said there are lower levels of violence among college couples than among married or cohabiting couples, and the violence is more likely to involve shoving and pushing by both men and women.

Previous research indicates that as young people grow up, the violence may become less frequent or severe or it may be eliminated, Stith said. Sometimes it's about immaturity.

Although alcohol is often a factor in violence among older couples who are married or in long-term relationships, Stith said drinking -- particularly binge drinking -- plays a big part in college student violence. Other factors include a lack of anger management skills and having grown up with parents who are violent with one another.

When students get angry with their boyfriend or girlfriend, violence sometimes seems to be the normal thing to do, she said.

Stith said when researching alcohol problems, she found that college students often had different standards for themselves when it came to what constitutes a drinking problem. Whereas they see themselves as just partying and participating in normal college life, they would say an older, professional adult behaving the same way has a problem with alcohol.

I think they might be normalizing their aggressive behaviors, too, she said. They may think that when they're drinking and get angry and she slaps him and he grabs her, that it's not domestic violence. They may think that domestic violence is what happens in married people's lives.

Stith said one of her basic philosophies is that society needs to work toward ending all violence, not just male violence.

We need to address female violence, too, she said. We need to say that when you're in a relationship with someone you care about, you don't hit and you don't kick.

LLNL research at Marshall Islands could lead to resettlement

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) LIVERMORE, Calif. - Through Laboratory soil cleanup methods, residents of Bikini, Enjebi and Rongelap Islands - where nuclear tests were conducted on the atolls and in the ocean surrounding them in the 1950s - could have lower radioactive levels than the average background dose for residents in the United States and Europe.

The National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists Bill Robison and Terry Hamilton calculated the radiation doses for people resettling Bikini, Enjebi, Rongelap and Utrok Islands. The two found that when it rains, a portion of the soluble cesium-137 (137Cs) - an isotope of cesium - is transported to the groundwater that lies about three meters below the soil surface. The groundwater eventually gets mixed with the ocean waters so the 137Cs is lost from the soil and is not available for uptake by growing vegetation on the island. The rate of this loss process is much faster than the loss by radiological decay.

In addition, treatment of food crops with potassium reduces the 137Cs concentration in edible fruits to about 5 percent of pretreatment concentrations. Potassium treatment and removal of the top 15 centimeters of soil around houses and community buildings prior to construction of new buildings to reduce external exposure where people spend most of their time - referred to as the combined option - could be used as a remediation strategy before resettlement, Robison said.

If this approach is taken, the natural background dose plus the nuclear-test-related dose at Bikini, Enjebi and Rongelap would be less than the usual background dose in the United States and Europe, Hamilton said.

The United States conducted 24 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll with a total yield of 76.8 megatons (MT). The Castle series of tests produced about 60 percent of this total yield and included the 15-megaton Bravo test that was the primary source of radioactive contamination of Bikini Island and Rongelap and Utrok Atolls. Pretest estimated yield for the Bravo test was about five megatons. The much larger yield resulted in vaporization of more coral reef and island than expected and the debris-cloud reached a much higher altitude than anticipated.

High-altitude winds were to the east at the time of detonation and carried the radioactive debris toward Rongelap Atoll. Utrok Atoll also received fallout from the Bravo test but at much lower air and ground-level concentrations than at Rongelap Atoll. Other atolls received Bravo fallout at levels below that of Utr_k.

Today, scientists in Lawrence Livermore's Marshall Islands Dose Assessment and Radioecology Program work to minimize exposure through ingestion and other pathways for the Marshallese now living on or wishing to return to their islands. The program continues research begun nearly 30 years ago to characterize radiological conditions on affected islands and develop strategies to minimize radiological exposure to a people who want to resettle. The program also supports Marshallese efforts to implement radiation protection programs for residents wishing to track their exposure to radionuclides from fallout contamination that still lingers on the islands.

Previous assessments showed that 137Cs accounts for about 98 percent of the total dose for returning resident at the various atolls. About 85 percent to 90 percent of the dose (depending on the atoll) is from consumption of locally grown foods such as coconut meat and fluid, copra meat and milk, Pandanus fruit and breadfruit. About 10 percent of the dose is due to external gamma radiation from 137Cs in the soil. Isotopes of strontium, plutonium and americium account for less than 5 percent of the estimated dose.

The research appears as the cover article in the journal,

Workplace gendered tradeoffs lead to economic inequalities for women

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Despite big changes over recent decades, workplace gender inequalities endure in the United States and other industrialized nations around the world. These inequalities are created by facets of national social policy that either ease or concentrate the demands of care giving within households and shape expectations in the workplace, according to University of Washington sociologists.

In a new book, Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook contend workplace equality for women boils down to not only whether women are included in the work force but on how they are included. Pettit is an associate professor of sociology and Hook is research scientist in the School of Social Work.

The book, which looks at levels of women's employment, number of hours worked, occupational integration, and wage equality, draws on the ongoing Luxembourg Income Study. The study is a repository of data collected in a number of countries, and for the book, the UW authors look at Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Canada, Australia, Austria, Russian Federation, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, Hungary, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Spain and the United States.

There are vast differences in women's economic fortunes in these countries and in no one country do women do well on all measures of equality. Italy, for example, ranks first in wage equality but is 20th in the number of women employed. Sweden is No. 1 in women's employment but is only 14th in full-time work and while Belgium is first in occupational integration and it is 18th in women's employment.

Policies governing gender equality and inclusion in the workplace vary drastically in these countries, and Pettit contends that in order to understand gender inequality in the workplace it is necessary to consider to how a nation's family policies affect the division of household labor.

Our argument is gender inequality in the workplace is in a large part due to bearing and rearing children. There are economically successful women everywhere but exactly how women manage the dual demands of work and home varies a lot. The biggest differences come when people have children and when those children are young, she said. Some countries support working women publicly by providing child care. What we have in the United States are private solutions to child care. People who have more resources can maximize their employment and pay for child care. Some nations are more generous and the US is way behind them in providing early childhood education, child care and paid maternity leave.

The evidence behind the health effects of hot weather

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Increasing concerns about climate change and deadly heatwaves in the past mean that the health effects of hot weather are fast becoming a global public health challenge for the 21st century. A Review published Online First looks at the evidence behind advice public bodies give to help people protect themselves against hot weather, and says there needs to be more awareness on how the action of certain drugs are affected by heat. The Review is by Dr Shakoor Hajat, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and colleagues.

The most common advice given by public bodies includes: avoid drinking alcohol; wear lightweight, loose fitting clothing; drink regularly without waiting for thirst; if you have no air conditioning at home, seek out an air-conditioned or cool environment ; stay indoors in an air-conditioned environment; wear a hat; avoid or reduce physical activities; protect yourself from the sun; know the symptoms of heat-associated illness and know how to respond; look in on susceptible people; do not leave children in a closed, parked car; avoid going out during the hottest part of the day; and take frequent baths or showers.

The authors say that the evidence behind use of fans to cool down in hot weather is conflicting. They say: Much confusion remains about the use of electric fans during hot weather. Results of most physiological studies support the use of air currents for cooling, but do not specifically address the issue of household fans. Certainly, there is little to recommend the use of a fan when other, effective, methods are available, such as taking a cool shower.

The authors also question the merits of other commonly given advice, such as avoiding the consumption of alcohol. They say: This advice is probably overemphasised, and should distinguish between moderate consumption of low-alcohol beverages (when evidence does not strongly support a diuretic effect) and spirits, which should be avoided.

Regarding use of drugs during extreme heat, the authors say: Drug use is often cited in the plans as a potential risk factor for heat-related illness, but practical advice for appropriate action or adjustment of treatment regimens is rarely provided to readers, other than to check with your doctor. The extent to which health professionals are informed about how to adjust the doses of drugs for a patient during hot weather is unclear.

Examples of drugs that could cause problems in intense heat are diuretics (used to treat heart failure and high blood pressure among other conditions), since water loss from the body can lead to decreased blood volume, low blood pressure, and to rapid heart rate and falls. Care should also be taken with antipsychotic drugs since these affect sweat production.

Are bees also addicted to caffeine and nicotine?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) *A study carried out at the University of Haifa has found that bees prefer nectar with a small concentration of caffeine and nicotine over nectar that does not comprise these substances at all. This could be an evolutionary trait intended to make the bee addicted, the researchers say.*

Bees prefer nectar with small amounts of nicotine and caffeine over nectar that does not comprise these substances at all, a study from the University of Haifa reveals. This could be an evolutionary development intended, as in humans, to make the bee addicted, states Prof. Ido Izhaki, one of the researchers who conducted the study.

Flower nectar is primarily comprised of sugars, which provide energy for the potential pollinators. But the floral nectar of some plant species also includes small quantities of substances known to be toxic, such as caffeine and nicotine. The present study, carried out by researchers at the Department of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Science Education at the University of Haifa-Oranim, headed by Prof. Ido Izhaki along with Prof. Gidi Ne'eman, Prof. Moshe Inbar and Dr. Natarajan Singaravelan, examined whether these substances are intended to entice the bees or whether they are byproducts that are not necessarily linked to any such objective.

Nicotine is found naturally in floral nectar at a concentration of up to 2.5 milligrams per liter, primarily in various types of tobacco tree (Nicotiana glauca). Caffeine is found at concentration levels of 11-17.5 milligrams per liter, mostly in citrus flowers. In the nectar of grapefruit flowers, however, caffeine is present in much higher concentrations, reaching 94.2 milligrams per liter. In order to examine whether bees prefer the nectar containing caffeine and nicotine, the researchers offered artificial nectar that comprised various natural sugar levels and various levels of caffeine and nicotine, alongside clean nectar that comprised sugar alone. The caffeine and nicotine concentrations ranged from the natural levels in floral nectar up to much higher concentrations than found in nature.

The results showed that bees clearly prefer nectar containing nicotine and caffeine over the clean nectar. The preferred nicotine concentration was 1 milligram per liter, similar to that found in nature. Given a choice of higher levels of nicotine versus clean nectar, the bees preferred the latter.

According to the researchers, it is difficult to determine for sure whether the addictive substances in the nectar became present in an evolutionary process in order to make pollination more efficient. It can be assumed, however, based on the results of the study, that the plants that survived natural selection are those that developed correct levels of these addictive substances, enabling them to attract and not repel bees, thereby giving them a significant advantage over other plants. The researchers emphasized that this study has proved a preference, not addiction, and they are currently examining whether the bees do indeed become addicted to nicotine and caffeine.

First blinded study of venous insufficiency prevalence in MS shows promising results

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) BUFFALO, N.Y. -- More than 55 percent of multiple sclerosis patients participating in the initial phase of the first randomized clinical study to determine if persons with MS exhibit narrowing of the extracranial veins, causing restriction of normal outflow of blood from the brain, were found to have the abnormality.

The results were reported today by neurology researchers at the University at Buffalo.

When the 10.2 percent of subjects in which results were border line were excluded, the percentage of affected MS patients rose to 62.5 percent, preliminary results show, compared to 25.9 percent of healthy controls.

These preliminary results are based on the first 500 participants in the Combined Transcranial and Extracranial Venous Doppler Evaluation (CTEVD) study, which began at UB in April 2009. Investigators are planning to examine 500 additional subjects, who will be assessed in the second phase of the study with more advanced diagnostic tools. Complete data on the first 500 will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in April.

Robert Zivadinov, MD, PhD, UB associate professor of neurology and principal investigator on the study, says he is cautiously optimistic and excited about the preliminary data. Zivadinov directs the Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center (BNAC), located in Kaleida Health's Buffalo General Hospital, where the study is being conducted.

The data encourage us to continue on the same course, he says. They show that narrowing of the extracranial veins, at the very least, is an important association in multiple sclerosis. We will know more when the MRI and other data collected in the CTEVD study are available. The analyses are being conducted by an independent statistician.

The investigation is the first step in determining if a condition called chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) is a major risk factor for MS. CCSVI is a complex vascular condition discovered and described by Paolo Zamboni, MD, from Italy's University of Ferrara. Zamboni's original investigation in a group of 65 patients and 235 controls showed CCSVI to be associated strongly with MS, increasing the risk of having MS by 43 fold.

Zamboni and Zivadinov hypothesize that this narrowing restricts the normal outflow of blood from the brain, resulting in alterations in the blood flow patterns within the brain that eventually cause injury to brain tissue and degeneration of neurons.

The first 500 patients, both adults and children, were grouped based on their diagnosis: MS, clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) and other neurologic diseases (OND), in addition to healthy controls.

All participants in the first phase underwent ultrasound (Doppler) scans of the head and neck in different body postures to view the direction of venous blood flow. MS subjects also underwent MRI scans of the brain to measure iron deposits in lesions and surrounding areas of the brain, using a method called susceptibility-weighted imaging. Iron findings on these images will be related to subjects' disability and neuropsychological symptoms.

Of the total participants, 97.2 percent were adults, with the 280 MS patients comprising the largest disease cohort examined in the study to date. The majority of MS subjects were diagnosed with the relapsing-remitting form of MS. There were 161 healthy controls.

Doppler scan results were reported on five specific criteria that affect venous blood flow. Patients who met at least two of the criteria were considered to have CCSVI. More detailed analysis of specific Doppler criteria and their association to disease status is underway.

When the 10.2 percent borderline subjects were included in the normal category (no venous insufficiency), the CCSVI prevalence was 56.4 percent in MS subjects and 22.4 percent in healthy controls.

In this large MS cohort, the presence of CCSVI did suggest an association with disease progression, a finding that was not shown in Zamboni's smaller cohort, Zivadinov notes.

The finding that 22.4 percent of healthy controls also met two CCSVI criteria requires continuing investigation, he says.

Bianca Weinstock-Guttman, MD, UB associate professor of neurology in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and a co-principal investigator on the study, notes that the results of the CTEVD research will pose new and provocative questions about the CCSVI theory.

Soothing infants with food focus of childhood obesity study

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Both genetics and parents who comfort their infants with food are the focus of a study funded for $1 million by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestion and Kidney Disease investigating risk factors for childhood obesity. The grant is part of the National Institutes of Health American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding.

When the infant cries, parents typically have a set of soothing techniques they'll use to comfort their child -- if one doesn't work, they move to the next -- and somewhere on that list is feeding, said Cynthia Stifter, professor of human development and family studies and principal investigator on the project. It may be, with some children, that using food as a means of soothing distress promotes the association of food with emotional comfort, a characteristic of emotional eaters that is associated with adult obesity.

One goal of Stifter's study is to provide a detailed description of how and when parents use feeding to soothe infants and its relation to weight gain in infancy. Rapid weight gain in infancy has been linked to childhood obesity.

There has been much speculation about the role of food in parent soothing of infant distress, but there is no research, said Stifter. What is known is that food, especially that containing sugar, has an immediate effect on infant distress and that many middle-income and lower-income mothers endorse using food to soothe an infant's distress.

To see how parents respond to their infants' distress, researchers will go with families to routine doctor appointments where infants receive vaccinations. These immunizations commonly cause distress. The researchers will also keep track of children's rate of weight gain and parents will complete a daily diary, at five minute intervals for three days, recording whether their child fussed, cried, slept, was content or was fed. Parents will also participate in a number of laboratory visits to assess the infants' emotional reactivity and regulation, and a variety of interviews including one conducted by Penn State's Diet Assessment Center, which will examine the food environment -- meal location, the context in which food is eaten -- whether the child was crying or fell asleep after eating and child feeding practices -- whether food was offered to soothe the child.

Stifter will also look at the brain's natural reward system, which releases dopamine into the brain, producing a feeling of pleasure.

Dopamine basically makes you want more of something, says Stifter.

Dopamine in the brain is associated with nicotine, alcohol and other addictions. Stifter and her colleagues will consider food as the object of an addiction for certain individuals. They will draw upon previous research pinpointing a set of genes that determine a person's dopamine system activity. Certain individuals may be genetically predisposed to be more sensitive to their brain's reward system.

We are hypothesizing that the parenting practice of feeding to soothe, or the use of food to soothe infant distress not related to hunger, may interfere with the development of the ability to read internal cues of hunger and fullness, which, in certain children with sensitive dopamine systems, may lead to increased energy intake, rapid weight gain in infancy, and subsequent childhood obesity, said Stifter.

No previous studies have examined parent feeding style in infancy and genetics as precursors to childhood obesity.

Multicenter study finds little effect of soy isoflavones on bone loss in postmenopausal women

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) AMES, Iowa -- A previous six-month study by Iowa State University researchers had indicated that consuming modest amounts of soy protein, rich in isoflavones, lessened lumbar spine bone loss in midlife, perimenopausal women. But now an expanded three-year study by some of those same researchers does not show a bone-sparing effect in postmenopausal women who ingested soy isoflavone tablets, except for a modest effect at the femoral (hip) neck among those who took the highest dosage.

The multi-center clinical trial of 224 postmenopausal women -- led by D. Lee Alekel, professor of nutrition and interim associate director of the Nutrition and Wellness Research Center (NWRC) at Iowa State, and supported by the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, one of the research institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) -- was the longest ever conducted on the effects of soy isoflavones on bone mineral density (BMD). It compared the effects of either ingesting daily 80-mg daily or 120-mg soy isoflavone tablets, compared to placebo tablets on BMD and other health outcomes.

Iowa State NWRC researchers collaborated with research physiologist Marta D. Van Loan and her colleagues at the USDA Agricultural Research Service's Western Human Nutrition Research Center, located at the University of California, Davis. The primary results of their study were published in the January issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Our six-month preliminary study, published in 2000, indicated that soy protein, rich in isoflavones, exerted the greatest impact in slowing the loss of bone mineral density in the lumbar spine, Alekel said. But we believed that we needed to replicate these results in a study with a greater sample size and longer duration, which is what we did with this three-year intervention.

In this longer study, we had sufficient power to detect change, she continued. We monitored adverse events, had excellent compliance throughout, and accounted for potential confounding factors.

NWRC research staff members Laura Hanson, Jeanne Stewart and Kathy Hanson also joined Kenneth Koehler and C. Ted Peterson from statistics as part of the eight-member ISU team that conducted the research.

The researchers ran statistical analyses to determine change in BMD at the lumbar spine, total proximal femur (hip), femoral neck and whole body. They accounted for treatment, age, whole body fat mass and bone removal (using a biochemical marker).

While the 120-mg dose soy isoflavones did reveal a small protective effect on femoral neck bone BMD, researchers found no significant effect of treatment on lumbar spine, total hip, or whole-body BMD.

This trial used isoflavones extracted from soy protein, compressed into tablet form, consumed over the course of three years, which is very different than either providing soy protein or soy foods, Alekel said. In our recent study, we did not demonstrate an important biological effect on BMD or bone turnover.

The new study calls into question the value of postmenopausal women consuming soy isoflavone tablets to help lessen bone loss and minimize the effect of osteoporosis.

The preponderance of studies that have been published -- particularly the longer term, more carefully conducted studies, like our own -- have shown little to no biological effects of soy isoflavones on BMD, she said. This field of research has attracted 'believers,' making it difficult to convince them otherwise. They may continue to believe what they want to believe, rather than what the evidence shows.

And when it comes to minimizing the consequences of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women, Alekel urges a more holistic approach.

People in general, would like an easy fix. We would all like soy isoflavones to be that magic pill, but this study has found that they are not, she said.

Results from other health outcomes from this research have been published in six manuscripts to date, with six additional manuscripts underway. The NWRC research team will continue to study factors that influence bone mineral density and health outcomes in postmenopausal women.

SNM's Conjoint Mid-Winter Meetings continue to advance molecular imaging

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Reston, Va.--Educators, researchers, physicians, technologists and medical experts from across the country converged on Albuquerque, N.M., last week to explore topics in nuclear medicine, molecular imaging, nanomedicine and clinical trials during SNM's 2010 Conjoint Mid-Winter Meetings.

Four meetings were held in succession, including the 2010 Annual Meeting and Educational Symposium of the American College of Nuclear Medicine (ACNM) and SNM's Mid-Winter Educational Symposium, Nanomedicine and Molecular Imaging Summit and Clinical Trials Network Community Workshop.

Throughout the meeting, attendees earned educational credit, networked with colleagues and learned from the top educators and innovators in the field. Participants at the mid-winter meeting enjoyed a valuable experience that provided them with the knowledge they need to advance the field and, ultimately, improve patient care, said Michael M. Graham, Ph.D., M.D., president of SNM.

The ACNM Annual Meeting and Educational Symposium took place first and featured lectures about the use of PET/CT in the brain and neck, genitourinary system, head and neck cancer and thyroid cancer. This was the first gathering of the organization since it officially merged in September with the American College of Nuclear Physicians.

SNM's Mid-Winter Educational Symposium began at the conclusion of ACNM's meeting, keeping attendees busy with a robust schedule of in-depth educational sessions and exhibits. The symposium included numerous educational sessions designed in collaboration with SNM's councils, centers of excellence, Technologist Section (SNMTS) and Clinical Trials Network.

At the session, Advances in MI of the Brain, clinicians and scientists wishing to gain experience in the clinical and research applications of molecular imaging in neurodegenerative disease learned about the critical role of molecular imaging in the diagnostic approach to patients with cognitive disorders. Integrated Imaging for Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment of Heart Failure in 2010 updated cardiologists, nuclear medicine physicians and scientists about current understanding and recent developments in the multimodality imaging assessment of heart failure. Back by popular demand, the two-day CT case review session challenged and instructed physicians with 100 cases and 16 hours of continuing education credits.

In the session, The Sharp Edges of Nuclear Medicine: See What's New, technologists were introduced to the newest techniques in fusion imaging, with a focus on patients with epilepsy. In addition, technologists attended a new session, cosponsored by SNMTS and the American Society of Radiologic Technologists, titled Nuclear Medicine Unfolded: What You Need to Know. The session focused on legislative and regulatory issues that nuclear medicine technologists face, including USP <797>, the recently reintroduced CARE bill and the Medicare Improvement Providers and Patients Act of 2008 (MIPPA).

We think this year's educational symposium provided attendees with the most comprehensive information in nuclear medicine and molecular imaging, said Peter Herscovitch, M.D., chair of SNM's Scientific Program Committee. We were pleased to offer yet another excellent opportunity for leaders in the field to come together in one place to share their ideas.

High prevalence of AF found among cross-country skiers

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Next month, in the Norwegian town of Rena, 12,000 elite cross-country skiers will line up for this year's Birkebeiner ski marathon, an annual endurance race which will take them through 54 kilometres of snow-covered countryside to the winter sports resort of Lillehammer. The race has been run almost every year since 1932, and in 1976 almost 150 participants were invited to take part in a long-term study designed to discover the extent of latent heart disease in these elite cross-country skiers. Now, after some 30 years, the results of the follow-up study have been published and suggest that long-distance competition skiers - as well as other endurance athletes - are at an unusually high risk of atrial fibrillation, the most common abnormality of the heart's beating rhythm.(1)

Results showed that participants in the study are at a high risk of atrial fibrillation (AF) without known structural heart disease or other known causes (a condition termed lone AF). A prevalence of 12.8% found among the skiers who completed the study's investigations in 1976, 1981 and 2004-2006, when echocardiographic (ECG) and heart rate tests were performed at rest and at exercise. In the general population studies have found the prevalence of AF to be as low as 0.5%, with rates only rising to around 15% in men over the age of 75.

When the study began in 1976 participants were classified according to age - group I 26-33 years, group II 43-50 years, and group III 58-64 years; all had been competing in long-distance skiing events and were in the top 25% for age related performance. When the final follow-up examinations were performed during 2004-2006, a large proportion from group III (28/39) had died, leaving 78 of the original 122 available for further tests and questioning.

This analysis showed that 13 of those 78 skiers (16.7%) had experienced AF at some time during the 28-30 years of follow-up, with a current prevalence of 12.8% AF with no other known heart disease. The latter, say the investigators, is the highest prevalence yet described in long-term endurance sport practitioners. In age group I the prevalence was found to be 18.2%. The mean age at which the AF occurred was 58 years.

The study also detected two characteristics in the skiers which may predict their risk of AF: a slow heart rate at rest (known as bradycardia) and a large left atrium of the heart.(2) Both have been suggested in previous studies as common findings in the hearts of endurance athletes. However, the study found no association between the years of training in cross-country skiing (an average of 36 years in this study) and the occurrence of AF. As a result, the authors advise that there is still not enough evidence to recommend a specific age to reduce training volume and/or intensity. However, they do recommend that after the appearance of AF practice should be stopped or reduced until rhythm control is attained.

Disturbances in heart rhythm, which are the most common cause of sudden cardiac death, represent one of the major cardiovascular reasons for hospital admission. Professor Josep Brugada, President of the European Heart Rhythm Association of the ESC (and Medical Director at the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona), has described their impact as enormous, noting that around 5% of all medical expenditure in Europe is related to atrial fibrillation, the most common arrhythmic condition.

So far, only three case-control studies have found a higher prevalence of AF in athletes than in controls. However, a population-based study from 2009 showed that those with the highest level of endurance training also had the highest prevalence of AF.

Studies aiming to find an explanation for a higher AF prevalence have also found that the size of the heart muscle and chambers was larger in athletes than in controls, and this seemed a predictor for AF.

Commenting on the findings from the Birkebeiner study, principal investigator Dr Jostein Grimsmo from the Feiring Heart Clinic in Norway, agreed that enlargement of the heart's left atrium - along with bradycardia - appeared to be an important risk factor for AF among long-term endurance cross-country skiers. This atrial enlargement, he said, is the heart's adaptation to endurance training.

As many as 20% of young competitive athletes have been found to have an enlarged left atrium in some studies, said Dr Grimsmo. But we are not aware of any documentation of such a high prevalence as we have found either in athletes or in controls under the age of 75!

But despite our findings, he added, we still can't say why some athletes end up with AF and others don't. Genetic factors predisposing to 'athlete's heart', with enlarged cardiac dimensions and a slow heart rate, may be important as risk factors. And while it may be that prolonged endurance training over many years may not always be good for the heart, we do not yet have sufficient evidence to make specific recommendations.

New UC Davis study: Climate 'tipping points' may arrive without warning, says top forecaster

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A new University of California, Davis, study by a top ecologicalforecaster says it is harder than experts thought to predict whensudden shifts in Earth's natural systems will occur -- a worrisomefinding for scientists trying to identify the tipping points thatcould push climate change into an irreparable global disaster.

Many scientists are looking for the warning signs that herald suddenchanges in natural systems, in hopes of forestalling those changes,or improving our preparations for them, said UC Davis theoreticalecologist Alan Hastings. Our new study found, unfortunately, thatregime shifts with potentially large consequences can happen withoutwarning -- systems can 'tip' precipitously.

This means that some effects of global climate change on ecosystemscan be seen only once the effects are dramatic. By that pointreturning the system to a desirable state will be difficult, if notimpossible.

The current study focuses on models from ecology, but its findingsmay be applicable to other complex systems, especially ones involvinghuman dynamics such as harvesting of fish stocks or financial markets.

Hastings, a professor in the UC Davis Department of EnvironmentalScience and Policy, is one of the world's top experts in usingmathematical models (sets of equations) to understand naturalsystems. His current studies range from researching the dynamics ofsalmon and cod populations to modeling plant and animal species'response to global climate change.

In 2006, Hastings received the Robert H. MacArthur Award, the highesthonor given by the Ecological Society of America.

Hastings' collaborator and co-author on the new study, Derin Wysham,was previously a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis and is now aresearch scientist in the Department of Computational and SystemsBiology at the John Innes Center in Norwich, England.

Scientists widely agree that global climate change is already causingmajor environmental effects, such as changes in the frequency andintensity of precipitation, droughts, heat waves and wildfires;rising sea level; water shortages in arid regions; new and largerpest outbreaks afflicting crops and forests; and expanding ranges fortropical pathogens that cause human illness.

And they fear that worse is in store. As U.S. presidential scienceadviser John Holdren (not an author of the new UC Davis study)recently told a congressional committee: Climate scientists worryabout 'tipping points' ... thresholds beyond which a small additionalincrease in average temperature or some associated climate variableresults in major changes to the affected system.

Among the tipping points Holdren listed were: the completedisappearance of Arctic sea ice in summer, leading to drastic changesin ocean circulation and climate patterns across the whole NorthernHemisphere; acceleration of ice loss from the Greenland and Antarcticice sheets, driving rates of sea-level increase to 6 feet or more percentury; and ocean acidification from carbon dioxide absorption,causing massive disruption in ocean food webs.

UB geographers help map devastation in Haiti

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) BUFFALO, N.Y.-- In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, University at Buffalo geography students are participating in a global effort to enhance the international response and recovery effort by helping to assess damage, using images hosted by Google Earth and the Virtual Disaster Viewer, which shares imagery of disasters from various sources.

Eight graduate and undergraduate students are conducting the research, under the direction of Chris Renschler, UB associate professor of geography, in his Landscape-based Environmental Systems Analysis and Modeling Laboratory (LESAM) in UB's Department of Geography in the College of Arts and Sciences.

A research scientist with the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at UB, Renschler also is a member of the Remote Sensing Task Force of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER), headquartered at UB, to conduct research on the resilience of communities to extreme events, that is, how well they can recover after a disaster.

During the days and weeks since the Haitian earthquake, UB students and researchers have been part of an effort organized by ImageCat Inc., an MCEER affiliate, involving more than 500 individuals from 100 organizations around the world, representing academia, government agencies, non-profit organizations and private industry, all of whom are working to classify the damage in Haiti, says Renschler.

As a result, he says, by Jan. 25, more than 10,000 buildings had been identified as having been either totally destroyed or heavily damaged.

Renschler and his students used the European Macroseismic Scale to classify images according to the amount of damage seen in them.

Those images, some of which were gathered by the Wildfire Airborne Sensing Program developed by Rochester Institute of Technology, are now being made available to the international emergency response community through the Virtual Disaster Viewer, an Internet-based graphical user interface developed by ImageCat Inc., a California-based advanced technology company that is an industry partner in two LESAM research projects.

According to ImageCat, World Bank representatives in the field and at its headquarters, have been using these images as soon as they became available on Google Earth shortly after the earthquake.

The initial satellite-based damage assessments, along with the more detailed aerial data, are together helping to provide a detailed picture of damage assessment to help create a picture of reconstruction and recovery needs and to inform the World Bank response, says Beverley Adams, managing director at ImageCat Inc.

The classification effort is helping the international community to better understand the scale of the disaster in Haiti and how best to begin recovery and reconstruction, Renschler says.

This extreme event occurred in one of the least resilient communities in the hemisphere with such enormous force that it is likely to emerge as the most tragic disaster since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, says Renschler. As active collaborators in the extreme events community, we knew we had critical capabilities that could provide enormous short- and long-term benefits to the emergency response in Haiti, as well as to the country's ongoing recovery and reconstruction effort.

In a related effort, Renschler and his MCEER colleagues, David Parisi, senior systems analyst, and Jane Stoyle Welch, publications manager, helped provide high resolution remote sensing and topographic imagery of a World Bank-ImageCat-RIT reconnaissance mission arranged by the Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response. IPLER is a National Science Foundation-funded partnership between UB and RIT, dedicated to innovation in disaster management.

The UB-RIT researchers coordinated the transfer of hundreds of recently gathered high-resolution images and topographical data of the areas affected by the earthquake from RIT to MCEER's Virtual Disaster Viewer at

Millimeter-scale, energy-harvesting sensor system developed

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) ANN ARBOR, Mich.-- A 9 cubic millimeter solar-powered sensor system developed at the University of Michigan is the smallest that can harvest energy from its surroundings to operate nearly perpetually.

The U-M system's processor, solar cells, and battery are all contained in its tiny frame, which measures 2.5 by 3.5 by 1 millimeters. It is 1,000 times smaller than comparable commercial counterparts.

The system could enable new biomedical implants as well as home-, building- and bridge-monitoring devices. It could vastly improve the efficiency and cost of current environmental sensor networks designed to detect movement or track air and water quality.

With an industry-standard ARM Cortex-M3 processor, the system contains the lowest-powered commercial-class microcontroller. It uses about 2,000 times less power in sleep mode than its most energy-efficient counterpart on the market today.

The engineers say successful use of an ARM processor-- the industry's most popular 32-bit processor architecture-- is an important step toward commercial adoption of this technology.

Greg Chen, a computer science and engineering doctoral student, will present the research Feb. 9 at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Our system can run nearly perpetually if periodically exposed to reasonable lighting conditions, even indoors, said David Blaauw, an electrical and computer engineering professor. Its only limiting factor is battery wear-out, but the battery would last many years.

The ARM Cortex-M3 processor has been widely adopted throughout the microcontroller industry for its low-power, energy efficient features such as deep sleep mode and Wake-Up Interrupt Controller, which enables the core to be placed in ultra-low leakage mode, returning to fully active mode almost instantaneously, said Eric Schorn, vice president, marketing, processor division, ARM. This implementation of the processor exploits all of those features to the maximum to achieve an ultra-low-power operation.

The sensor spends most of its time in sleep mode, waking briefly every few minutes to take measurements. Its total average power consumption is less than 1 nanowatt. A nanowatt is one-billionth of a watt.

The developers say the key innovation is their method for managing power. The processor only needs about half of a volt to operate, but its low-voltage, thin-film Cymbet battery puts out close to 4 volts. The voltage, which is essentially the pressure of the electric current, must be reduced for the system to function most efficiently.

If we used traditional methods, the voltage conversion process would have consumed many times more power than the processor itself uses, said Dennis Sylvester, an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering.

One way the U-M engineers made the voltage conversion more efficient is by slowing the power management unit's clock when the processor's load is light.

We skip beats if we determine the voltage is sufficiently stable, Sylvester said.

The designers are working with doctors on potential medical applications. The system could enable less-invasive ways to monitor pressure changes in the eyes, brain, and in tumors in patients with glaucoma, head trauma, or cancer. In the body, the sensor could conceivably harvest energy from movement or heat, rather than light, the engineers say.

The inventors are working to commercialize the technology through a company led by Scott Hanson, a research fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The paper is entitled Millimeter-Scale Nearly Perpetual Sensor System with Stacked Battery and Solar Cells.

This research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Focus Center Research Program and ARM.

Popular antidepressant blocks the beneficial effects of tamoxifen in breast cancer

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Women with breast cancer who take the antidepressant paroxetine at the same time as tamoxifen are at an increased risk of death, concludes a study published on bmj.com today.

However, the authors stress that their results should not lead patients to stop taking tamoxifen, and do not imply that paroxetine itself causes or influences the course of breast cancer. This is simply a situation in which paroxetine impairs the effectiveness of tamoxifen, they explain.

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women worldwide and the drug tamoxifen significantly improves survival. In order to work, however, tamoxifen must be converted into an active metabolite (endoxifen) by the liver.

But some drugs can interfere with this process. Antidepressants are of particular importance because they are commonly used in women with breast cancer, often for long periods of time. Although many antidepressants have little or no impact on tamoxifen's metabolism, paroxetine, a member of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class of drugs, is a potent inhibitor of the metabolic step that converts tamoxifen to endoxifen.

So Dr Catherine Kelly and colleagues at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) in Toronto set out to investigate whether SSRIs can reduce tamoxifen's effectiveness in practice.

They examined the healthcare records of 2,430 women aged 66 years or older with breast cancer who received tamoxifen between 1993 and 2005. About 30% of these women also received an antidepressant at some time during their treatment with tamoxifen, and paroxetine was the most commonly used agent.

The results show that use of paroxetine, but not other SSRIs, in combination with tamoxifen, was associated with an increased long-term risk of breast cancer death, in a fashion that correlated with the extent of drug overlap.

This supports the theory that paroxetine can reduce or abolish the benefit of tamoxifen in women with breast cancer.

The researchers estimate that treatment with paroxetine for 41 percent of the total time on tamoxifen (the median in this study) will result in one additional breast cancer death at five years for every 20 women so treated. The risk with more extensive overlap is greater.

Our findings indicate that the choice of antidepressant can significantly influence survival in women receiving tamoxifen for breast cancer, says Dr David Juurlink, one of the study's authors and a scientist at ICES. This observation is consistent with what we know about tamoxifen's metabolism. These results highlight a drug interaction that is extremely common, widely underappreciated and potentially life-threatening, yet uniformly avoidable.

Tamoxifen is a crucial element of therapy for patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer regardless of age or breast cancer stage, he adds. When co-prescription of tamoxifen with an antidepressant is necessary, preference should be given to antidepressants that exhibit little or no impact on tamoxifen's metabolism.

Virus-free technique enables Stanford scientists to easily make stem cells pluripotent

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) STANFORD, Calif. - Tiny circles of DNA are the key to a new and easier way to transform stem cells from human fat into induced pluripotent stem cells for use in regenerative medicine, say scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Unlike other commonly used techniques, the method, which is based on standard molecular biology practices, does not use viruses to introduce genes into the cells or permanently alter a cell's genome.

It is the first example of reprogramming adult cells to pluripotency in this manner, and is hailed by the researchers as a major step toward the use of such cells in humans. They hope that the ease of the technique and its relative safety will smooth its way through the necessary FDA approval process.

This technique is not only safer, it's relatively simple, said Stanford surgery professor Michael Longaker, MD, and co-author of the paper. It will be a relatively straightforward process for labs around the world to begin using this technique. We are moving toward clinically applicable regenerative medicine.

The Stanford researchers used the so-called minicircles - rings of DNA about one-half the size of those usually used to reprogram cell - to induce pluripotency in stem cells from human fat. Pluripotent cells can then be induced to become many different specialized cell types. Although the researchers plan to first use these cells to better understand - and perhaps one day treat-human heart disease, induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, are a starting point for research on many human diseases.

Imagine doing a fat or skin biopsy from a member of a family with heart problems, reprogramming the cells to pluripotency and then making cardiac cells to study in a laboratory dish, said cardiologist Joseph Wu, MD, PhD. This would be much easier and less invasive than taking cell samples from a patient's heart. Wu is the senior author of the research, which will be published online Feb. 7 in Nature Methods. Research assistant Fangjun Jia, PhD is the lead author of the work.

Longaker is the deputy director of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and director of children's surgical research at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Wu is an assistant professor of cardiology and of radiology, and a member of Stanford's Cardiovascular Institute. A third author, Mark Kay, MD, PhD, is the Dennis Farrey Family Professor in Pediatrics and professor of genetics.

The finding brings together disparate areas of Stanford research. Kay's laboratory invented the minicircles several years ago in a quest to develop suitable gene therapy techniques. At the same time, Longaker was discovering the unusual prevalence and developmental flexibility of stem cells from human fat. Meanwhile, Wu was searching for ways to create patient-specific cell lines to study some of the common, yet devastating, heart problems he was seeing in the clinic.

About three years ago Mark gave a talk and I asked him if we could use minicircles for cardiac gene therapy, said Wu. And then it clicked for me, that we should also be able to use them for non-viral reprogramming of adult cells.

The minicircle reprogramming vector works so well because it is made of only the four genes needed to reprogram the cells (plus a gene for a green fluorescent protein to track minicircle-containing cells). Unlike the larger, more commonly used DNA circles called plasmids, the minicircles contain no bacterial DNA, meaning that the cells containing the minicircles are less likely than plasmids to be perceived as foreign by the body. The expression of minicircle genes is also more robust, and the smaller size of the minicircles allows them to enter the cells more easily than the larger plasmids. Finally, because they don't replicate they are naturally lost as the cells divide, rather than hanging around to potentially muck up any subsequent therapeutic applications.

The researchers chose to test the reprogramming efficiency of the minicircles in stem cells from human fat because previous work in Wu and Longaker's lab has shown that the cells are numerous, easy to isolate and amenable to the iPS transformation, probably because of the naturally higher levels of expression of some reprogramming genes. They found that about 10.8 percent of the stem cells took up the minicircles and expressed the green fluorescent protein, or GFP, versus about 2.7 percent of cells treated with a more traditional DNA plasmid.

When the researchers isolated the GFP-expressing cells and grew them in a laboratory dish, they found that the minicircles were gradually lost over a period of four weeks. To be sure the cells got a good dose of the genes, they reapplied the minicircles at days four and six. After 14 to 16 days, they began to observe clusters of cells resembling embryonic stem cell colonies - some of which no longer expressed GFP.

They isolated these GFP-free clusters and found that they exhibited all of the hallmarks of induced pluripotent cells: they expressed embryonic stem cell genes, they had similar patterns of DNA methylation, they could become multiple types of cells and they could form tumors called teratomas when injected under the skin of laboratory mice. They also confirmed that the minicircles had truly been lost and had not integrated into the stem cells' DNA.

Altogether, the researchers were able to make 22 new iPS cell lines from adult human adipose stem cells and adult human fibroblasts. Although the overall reprogramming efficiency of the minicircle method is lower than that of methods using viral vectors to introduce the genes (about 0.005 percent vs. about 0.01-0.05 percent, respectively), it still surpasses that of using conventional bacterial-based plasmids. Furthermore, stem cells from fat, and, for that matter, fat itself, are so prevalent that a slight reduction in efficiency should be easily overcome.

This is a great example of collaboration, said Longaker. This discovery represents research from four different departments: pediatrics, surgery, cardiology and radiology. We were all doing our own things, and it wasn't until we focused on cross-applications of our research that we realized the potential.

We knew minicircles worked better than plasmids for gene therapy, agreed Kay, but it wasn't until I started talking to stem cell people like Joe and Mike that we started thinking of using minicircles for this purpose. Now it's kind of like 'why didn't we think of this sooner?'

Psychosocial problems are common in children with dental fear

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Children and adolescents with severe dental fear often come from families with a turbulent background. It is also more common that they have had counselling contact with a psychologist. These are the conclusions of research carried out at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Annika Gustafsson, specialist in child dentistry, has studied children and adolescents of school age who have received specialist dental care because they develop many cavities and also suffer from severe dental fear.

I wanted to investigate how children and adolescents with dental behaviour management problems who received specialist dental care differed from patients of the same age within ordinary dental care. I also wanted to discover why they cancel appointments and fail to attend appointments more often, says Annika Gustafsson.

Just over 250 children and adolescents with dental behaviour management problems and their parents have completed questionnaires describing their family situation and everyday life. Their answers have been compared with answers from the same number of patients within ordinary dental care.

The children and adolescents with dental behaviour management problems suffered significantly more from dental fear, and they lived in families with lower social class and poor economy. Most often, they lived in single-parent families, they had fewer leisure activities and more psychosocial problems than patients within ordinary dental care, says Annika Gustafsson.

Their parents, in turn, stated that they also suffered from severe dental fear and had greater problems with anxiety and worry than parents of children and adolescents within ordinary dental care.

I believe that it has a negative effect on a child or adolescent if their parent does not want to go to the dentist with them due to the parent's own fear, says Annika Gustafsson, who has compared the number of cancelled appointments and appointments that they failed to attend for the children and adolescents with dental fear and for those in ordinary dental care.

Children and adolescents that avoided dental appointments had had contact with a psychologist or counsellor four times as often, says Annika Gustafsson.

She believes that it is important that these patients are met with respect and understanding within the dental care system.

We must also become better at discovering at an early age which children and adolescents need help and support. We should collaborate more closely with the social services, says Annika Gustafsson.

About 5% of Sweden's population suffer from severe dental fear. The very thought of dental care produces severe anxiety in these patients. The fear may have been caused by frightening experiences of dental care during childhood. Fortunately, many types of help are available, including medication for anxiety, nitrous oxide gas, hypnosis and - in severe cases - anaesthesia.

Bone mineral density loss faster in those with kidney disease

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:20:08 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Even slight kidney impairment can speed up the loss of bone mineral density (BMD) among older people, putting them at risk of potentially disabling fractures, new research shows.

“Our findings highlight the importance of estimating kidney function when evaluating patients for fracture risk,” Sophie A. Jamal, MD, PhD, of the University of Toronto and her colleagues say in the February issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, the official journal of the National Kidney Foundation.

Most people who have chronic kidney disease (CKD), or who are at risk for this condition, don’t know it, points out Dr. Kerry Willis, senior vice president for scientific activities at the National Kidney Foundation. “The new findings show the potential impact of early identification of kidney disease in preventing complications that can cause disability and premature death,” Dr. Willis said.

When a person’s kidney function is completely lost—a condition known as end-stage renal disease—he or she is at much greater risk of sustaining a hip fracture, Dr. Jamal and her colleagues explain in their report.

To better understand the relationship between more modest kidney impairment and bone loss, the researchers followed 191 men and 444 women age 50 and older for five years. They used two different techniques—estimated creatinine clearance and estimated glomerular filtration rate—to gauge patients’ kidney function at the beginning of the study. The first test measures how quickly the kidneys clear creatinine (a waste product), from the blood, and the second gauges the speed at which fluid flows through the kidney. Study participants also had their BMD measured at the beginning of the study and five years later.
Dr. Jamal and her team found that the people with impaired kidney function lost BMD faster than those whose kidneys were working normally. For example, the study participants with the worst kidney function showed a 9.3 percent greater decrease in their lower spine BMD over a five-year period compared to those with normally functioning kidneys. The results were basically the same with either kidney function measure.

“Not only is this a substantial loss, but equally concerning is that the bone loss occurs with even modest impairment of kidney function,” Dr. Jamal and her colleagues say.

To date, the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Early Evaluation Program (KEEP) has screened 130,000 high-risk individuals for CKD, Dr. Willis said. Anyone 18 and older who has high blood pressure, diabetes or a family history of kidney disease should be screened for CKD, she added, which can be done with three simple tests: blood pressure measurement, a urine test for the presence of a protein called albumin, and a blood test for creatinine.

“Osteoporosis can lead to potentially disabling fractures of the spine and hip,” she added. “Physicians should understand that even a slight decline of kidney function in their older patients could mean an increased risk of osteoporosis.”

New regulatory pathway for cell division found

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:15:48 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Using an elaborate sleuthing system they developed to probe how cells manage their own division, Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered that common but hard-to-see sugar switches are partly in control.

Because these previously unrecognized sugar switches are so abundant and potential targets of manipulation by drugs, the discovery of their role has implications for new treatments for a number of diseases, including cancer, the scientists say.

In the January 12 edition of Science Signaling, the team reported that it focused efforts on the apparatus that enables a human cell to split into two, a complicated biochemical machine involving hundreds of proteins. Conventional wisdom was that the job of turning these proteins on and off — thus determining if, how and when a cell divides — fell to phosphates, chemical compounds containing the element phosphorus, which fasten to and unfasten from proteins in a process called phosphorylation.

Instead, the Johns Hopkins scientists say, there is another layer of regulation by a process of sugar-based protein modification called O-GlcNAcylation (pronounced O-glick-NAC-alation). "This sugar-based system seems as influential and ubiquitous a cell-division signaling pathway as its phosphate counterpart and, indeed, even plays a role in regulating phosphorylation itself," says Chad Slawson, Ph.D., an author of the paper and research associate in the Department of Biological Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Because the sugar molecule has some novel qualities — it is small, easily altered, and without an electrical charge — it is virtually imperceptible to researchers using standard physical techniques of detection such as mass spectrometry.

Suspecting that the sugar known as O-GlcNAc might play a role in cell division, the Hopkins team devised a protein-mapping scheme using new mass spectrometric methods. Essentially, they applied a combination of chemical modification and enrichment methods, and new fragmentation technology to proteins that comprise the cell division machinery in order to figure out and analyze their molecular makeup, identifying more than 150 sites where the sugar molecule known as O-GlcNAc was attached. Phosphates were found to be attached at more than 300 sites.

They noticed that when an O-GlcNAc molecule was located near a phosphate site, or at the same site, it prevented the phosphate from attaching. The proteins involved in cell division weren't phosphorylated and activated until O-GlcNAc detached.

"I think of phosphorylation as a micro-switch that regulates the circuitry of cell division, and O-GlcNAcylation as the safety switch that regulates the microswitches," says Gerald Hart, Ph.D., the DeLamar Professor and director of biological chemistry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Using a standard human cell line (HeLa cells), the scientists discovered abnormalities when they disrupted the cell division process by adding extra O-GlcNAc. Although the cell's chromosome-containing nuclei divided normally, the cells themselves didn't divide, resulting in too many nuclei per cell — a condition known as polyploidy that's exhibited by many cancer cells.

The researchers not only mapped O-GlcNAc and phosphorylation sites but also measured changes in the cell division machinery, because, Hart says, the chemical changes act more like "dimmer" switches, than simple on/off ones.

As important as the discovery is to a deeper understanding of cell division, Hart says, this extensive cross talk between O-GlcNAc and phosphorylation is paradigm-shifting in terms of signaling. Signaling is how a cell perceives its environment, and how it regulates its machinery in response to stimuli. The new sugar switches reveal that the cellular circuitry is much more complex than previously thought, he adds.

progesterone can prevent apoptosis in fetal membranes and therefore prevent pre-term birth

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:07:46 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers at Yale School of Medicine believe they may have discovered how the hormone progesterone acts to prevent preterm birth.

The findings will be presented at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) in Chicago by Errol Norwitz, M.D., professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale.

Preterm birth—delivery prior to 37 weeks gestation—has become increasingly common over the past 40 years. Currently, one in eight pregnancies in the U.S. are delivered prematurely. These premature infants are at least seven times more likely to die or have long-term neurologic injury compared with infants delivered at term. Efforts to date to prevent preterm birth have been largely unsuccessful. Several recent studies have suggested that progesterone supplementation from weeks 16-20 of gestation through 36 weeks may prevent preterm birth in about one-third of high-risk women, but the molecular mechanism by which progesterone acts was not known until now.

One-third of preterm birth is linked to premature rupture of the fetal membranes. Prior studies have suggested that rupture results from weakening of the membranes by apoptosis (programmed cell death). Norwitz and his Yale colleagues have shown for the first time that progesterone can prevent apoptosis in fetal membranes.

"We were able to demonstrate that progesterone prevents apoptosis in an artificial environment in the laboratory in which we stimulated healthy fetal membranes with pro-inflammatory mediators," said Norwitz. "Interestingly, and somewhat unexpectedly, we also saw an inhibition of apoptosis under basal conditions without the presence of pro-inflammatory mediators. This suggests that the same mechanism may also be important for the normal onset of labor at term."

Demographic profile suggests environmental role in etiology of Crohn's Disease

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:58:24 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Although inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) [comprising mainly Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC)] is thought to affect about 150 000 people in the United Kingdom, the prevalence of severe IBD is not known. Mortality following hospitalization for IBD is significant but little has been reported on long-term follow-up.

A research article to be published on January 28, 2010 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The research team from United Kingdom determined the hospitalized prevalence of severe IBD and subsequent 5-year mortality in Wales, and investigated associations between severe IBD and social deprivation, distance travelled to hospital, and other socio-demographic characteristics.

They found that hospitalization for severe CD was more common among women than men and it peaked among younger people aged 16󈞉 years. UC was similar among men and women and was more common among older people. There was no link between social deprivation and UC, but CD was more common among more deprived social groups.

The differing demographic profiles between CD and UC, suggest that environmental factors play a more significant role in the etiology of CD. The findings of this large population-based study on the prevalence and mortality of IBD are also important for service planning and provision.

First-generation artificial pancreas system used overnight can improve diabetes control

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:48:29 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) In a landmark study in children and teenagers with type 1 diabetes, JDRF-funded researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that using a first-generation artificial pancreas system overnight can lower the risk of low blood sugar emergencies while sleeping, and at the same time improve diabetes control.

Results from the studies are published in the February 5, 2010 issue of The Lancet, available online at www.thelancet.com.

The trials tested the safety and effectiveness of a first-generation artificial pancreas system used overnight in a hospital setting with participants between 5 and 18 years of age with type 1 diabetes. The system combined commercially available blood glucose sensors and insulin pumps, controlled by a sophisticated computer program that determined insulin dosage based on blood glucose levels while the participants slept.

Maintaining recommended blood sugar levels overnight is a major issue for people with type 1 diabetes - and particularly for the families of children with diabetes - because of the possibility of blood glucose dropping dangerously low during sleep and going unnoticed, which can lead to seizures, coma, and in some cases be fatal.

Notably, the Cambridge study showed that the children and teenagers spent twice as much time during the night within targeted blood glucose levels when their diabetes was regulated with the artificial pancreas system than when they followed conventional "manual" therapy. And low blood sugars were minimized.

"These studies show that automated systems not only can help people manage diabetes by maintaining good control, they will also improve quality of life for the people with type 1 diabetes and their families by lowering the risk for hypoglycemia," said Roman Hovorka, Ph.D., from the Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge, the principal investigator of the study and lead author of the paper. "These results suggest that closed-loop devices may be able to significantly lower the patient's risk of developing complications later in life by reducing or even overcoming the burden of hypoglycemia."

"Without a doubt, the biggest worry for parents of kids with type 1 diabetes is that their child will have a low blood sugar emergency during the night, when they're hard to identify," said Aaron Kowalski, Ph.D., Assistant Vice President of Metabolic Control at JDRF and Director of the JDRF Artificial Pancreas Project. "This study is proof of principle that diabetes in kids can be safely managed overnight with an artificial pancreas. We need to redouble our efforts to move the artificial pancreas from a concept in the clinic to a reality in the home of kids and adults with type 1."

The first phase of the Cambridge study compared the effectiveness of a simple artificial pancreas system used overnight with standard blood testing and insulin delivery using a pump. It showed that the time participants spent in target blood glucose levels (between 70 mg/dL and 140 mg/dL) improved from 39% to 52%. The second phase of the study evaluated the effects of a using the same artificial pancreas system overnight with the additional variable of the participants eating a particularly large meal, which can impact overnight blood glucose levels. The results were comparable to the first phase of the research. The third phase of the study evaluated the effects of moderately intense exercise, which can also impact blood sugar levels. Using the automated system in this setting showed the greatest improvement in blood sugar control, with the amount of time spent in the target range increasing from 48% to 78%.

"The pooled data from the closed loop studies showed that blood glucose levels were 61% in target, and even increased to 75% in target after midnight when closed-loop became fully effective," said Dr. Hovorka. "Based on these results, this study is a significant step towards an artificial pancreas."

The Cambridge studies were randomized, controlled trials involving 17 children and adolescents conducted at the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, United Kingdom over the course of 54 nights. Twelve subjects were used for the first study; 6 subjects were used for the second, and 9 for the third. Some 33 nights were on a closed-loop artificial pancreas system, while 21 nights were controlled (on standard therapy). During the closed-loop studies, continuous glucose measurements were fed into a computer program every 15 minutes, which calculated the insulin infusion rate; the insulin pump was adjusted manually by a research nurse. During control nights, the subject's standard insulin pump settings were applied.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks and kills off the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, a hormone that enables people to convert food into energy. It affects 3 million American children, adolescents, and adults.

To manage their disease, people with type 1 diabetes need to measure their blood sugar multiple times throughout the day (typically by pricking a finger for a drop of blood), and pump insulin or inject themselves multiple times daily to keep blood sugar levels within a healthy range. That daily routine continues for life, because insulin administration does not cure diabetes.

Research has shown that good blood sugar control is a key factor in reducing the risk of the devastating long-term complications of the disease, such as blindness and kidney disease - but that the fear of low blood sugar emergencies often prevents many people from achieving tight control, and remains a constant concern for those who manage their diabetes well. The landmark Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT) showed that with intensive insulin therapy, excellent blood glucose control was obtained, but at the expense of a considerable increase in hypoglycemia.

About JDRF's Artificial Pancreas Project
This study is the latest development within JDRF's Artificial Pancreas Project, and stems from the progress made since 2006 in the JDRF-funded Artificial Pancreas Consortium, a group of university-based mathematicians, engineers, and diabetes experts that has developed the computer programs needed for an artificial pancreas, and established their scientific feasibility. These academic studies within the Artificial Pancreas Project are an excellent complement, and essential to JDRF's work with industry participants to develop first -generation systems.

JDRF announced the first major non-exclusive industry initiatives of the Artificial Pancreas Project last month, when it entered into a non-exclusive partnership with Animas, a Johnson & Johnson company, to develop a first-generation artificial pancreas system. JDRF also announced a non-exclusive partnership with BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) aimed at developing novel insulin delivery products - a key component of developing safe and effective artificial pancreas systems.

The eventual, ultimate goal of the JDRF Artificial Pancreas Project is speeding the development of automated diabetes management systems. The goal of an artificial pancreas has also been embraced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which along with JDRF and National Institutes of Health, brought together scientists, regulators, industry, and patients for scientific workshops n the subject in 2005 and 2008; the FDA has designated an artificial pancreas as one of its "critical path" initiatives.

An artificial pancreas would measure blood sugar through a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), which continuously reads the glucose levels through a hair-thin tube inserted just below the skin, typically on the stomach. The CGM would beam those readings to an insulin pump. In an advanced system, the pump would house a sophisticated computer program that would automatically calculate the necessary amount of insulin, based on the CGM's glucose readings, and deliver the right amount of insulin.

The development of an artificial pancreas system is an essential step towards an ultimate cure for type 1 diabetes - a "bridge to a cure."

Seismology highlights from BSSA February issue

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Feb. 5, 2010 (San Francisco, CA) -- A new study identifies earthquakes through July 2007 that have produced 100 of the strongest peak accelerations (PGA) and 100 of the strongest peak velocities (PGV) ever recorded. The threshold for the first list is acceleration of the ground exceeding 7.31 m/s2 (74% of gravity), while the threshold for the second is velocity exceeding 0.65 m/s. Crustal earthquakes dominate the lists. Exceptionally strong ground motions exceeding these levels have been observed on sites with the softest soils and sites with the hardest rock. [A copy of the paper is attached below.]

Acceleration measures how fast speed (velocity) increases.

The size of these ground motions matter to the engineers as they design structures to resist earthquakes, said John Anderson of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory and Department of Geological and Engineering Sciences at the University of Nevada. But ground motions that have not yet been recorded also matter. There may be a limit that earthquake motions will never exceeded. Although we expect to eventually record earthquake shaking stronger than what I report in this paper, those higher motions appear to be quite rare, and a motivation for this study was to help to constrain upper limits.

Small earthquakes can generate exceptional peak accelerations (over 5 m/s2). This compilation includes earthquakes with magnitudes as small as 4.1. The smallest earthquake causing one of the 100 largest PGA on the list had a magnitude 4.8, and the smallest earthquake causing one of the 100 largest PGV was a magnitude 5.7.

Of the 255 time histories identified in this study, 40 records have PGV exceeding 1.0 m/s. The largest PGV is 3.18 m/s, recorded on the hanging wall of the thrust fault during the Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake on September 20, 1999 (Magnitude 7.6). Also, 35 records have PGA greater than gravity (9.8 m/s2, or 1 g). The largest acceleration in this data set is about 23.8 m/s2 (about 2.4 times gravity), recorded on the hanging wall of the thrust fault during the Nahanni earthquake in northern Canada on December 23, 1985 (Magnitude 6.9). It has already been exceeded by a 2008 record from Japan with PGA that was greater than 4.1 g,, but that later record was not available when this data was compiled. While motions that large appear to be quite rare, with recent expansions of instruments, more records as large as those in the current top 100 are being obtained every year.

Understanding past and future climate

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:59:36 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The notion that scientists understand how changes in Earth's orbit affect climate well enough for estimating long-term natural climate trends that underlie any anthropogenic climate change is challenged by findings published this week. The new research was conducted by a team led by Professor Eelco Rohling of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science hosted at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Understanding how climate has responded to past change should help reveal how human activities may have affected, or will affect, Earth's climate. One approach for this is to study past interglacials, the warm periods between glacial periods within an ice age, said Rohling.

He continued: Note that we have here focused on the long-term natural climate trends that are related to changes in Earth's orbit around the Sun. Our study is therefore relevant to the long-term climate future, and not so much for the next decades or century.

The team, which included scientists from the Universities of Tuebingen (Germany) and Bristol, compared the current warm interglacial period with one 400,000 years ago (marine isotope stage 11, or MIS-11).

Many aspects of the Earth-Sun orbital configuration during MIS-11 were similar to those of the current interglacial. For this reason, MIS-11 is often considered as a potential analogue for future climate development in the absence of human influence.

Previous studies had used the analogy to suggest that the current interglacial should have ended 2-2.5 thousand years ago. So why has it remained so warm?

According to the'anthropogenic hypothesis', long-term climate impacts of man's deforestation activities and early methane and carbon dioxide emissions have artificially held us in warm interglacial conditions, which have persisted since the end of the Pleistocene, about 11 400 years ago.

To address this issue, the researchers used a new high-resolution record of sea levels, which reflect ice volume. This record, which is continuous through both interglacials, is based on the 'Red Sea method' developed by Rohling.

Water passes between the Red Sea and the open ocean only through the shallow Strait of Bab-el-Mandab, which narrows as sea levels drop, reducing water exchange. Evaporation within the Red Sea increases its salinity, or saltiness, and changes the relative abundance of stable oxygen isotopes.

By analysing oxygen isotope ratios in tiny marine creatures called foraminiferans preserved in sediments that were deposited at the bottom of the Red Sea, the scientists reconstructed past sea levels, which were corroborated by comparison with the fossilised remains of coral reefs.