What will retirement look like for you? Will you buy that 40-foot sailboat and sail between your summer home in Maine and your winter home in the Caribbean? Or will you plan for three daughters’ weddings, older parents, and other unexpected but unavoidable costs? One scenario pits you as being solidly independent; the other looks pretty interdependent. How consumers make such choices and set goals is the focus of an article in the September 2005 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. So, where are you going to eat tonight?! Repetition is a hallmark of advertising, but the advertisements to which consumers are exposed are not simply repeated without a plan. Instead, the idea of “spacing” or how often to repeat an advertisement is considered when trying to elicit a consumer response. Research in the September 2005 Journal of Consumer Research finds that such repetition must come with variation to
U-M Health System study finds patient education video is excellent teaching tool but doctors are better at calming fears
In an age when people often learn health information from surfing the Web and watching television shows set in hospitals, researchers have found that showing patients an educational video about their condition teaches them the facts about their disease even better than when their doctor tells them about the condition.
But the power of videotaped infor
A dramatic new approach to tissue engineering
An international team of biomedical engineers has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to grow healthy new bone reliably in one part of the body and use it to repair damaged bone at a different location.
The research, which is based on a dramatic departure from the current practice in tissue engineering, is described in a paper titled “In vivo engineering of organs: The bone bioreactor” published online next wee
Two recent studies suggest that multiple rare mutations within a single gene may increase risk for autism, according to investigators with the Vanderbilt Center for Molecular Neuroscience and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development
While debate still rages over the ’cause’ of autism, mounting evidence suggests that genetic factors play a major role in the disease. Two recent studies led by James Sutcliffe, Ph.D., and Randy Blakely, Ph.D., inves
Colwellia psychrerythraea 34H reveals its subzero secrets
At home in the deep, dark Arctic Ocean, the marine bacterium Colwellia psychrerythraea 34H keeps very cool–typically below 5° degrees Celsius. How does the bacterium function in this frigid environment? To find out, scientists at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and collaborators have sequenced and analyzed C. psychrerythraea’s genome.
That genome analysis, posted in the Proceedings of the National Acad
In a paper in this month’s PLoS Medicine, researchers from the Genome Institute of Singapore describe the identification of a human cellular protein that has a significant effect on the replication efficiency of Hepatitis B virus. Lisa F. P. Ng and colleagues found the protein–hnRNPK–when they noted an association between one particular sequence in the Hepatitis B virus and high levels of the virus in some infected patients. They discovered that how well the virus replicated is determined
A paper published in this month’s PLoS Medicine suggests that combination therapy based on artemisinins (one of the newer antimalarial classes of drug) might not be the ideal treatment for uncomplicated malaria in Africa. If used alone, artemisinins will cure the most severe type of malaria -falciparum malaria -in seven days. However, when used on their own, they have a high risk of the malaria coming back and hence must be combined with other antimalarials to work best. Artemisinins may als
A paper in this month’s PLoS Medicine concludes that socioeconomic position in adulthood can significantly affect later health. Nancy Krieger and colleagues from Harvard School of Public Health studied 308 pairs of adult female twins from San Francisco who had been raised together until at least age 14. They found that identical twins who had differing socioeconomic position in adulthood differed in their later health.
In identical twins who differed in social class in adulthood,
A systematic review of the evidence for the many drug treatments used in post herpetic neuralgia (the pain that persists after shingles) concludes that long-established treatments such as tricyclic antidepressants and some opioids are as effective as newer drugs such as gabapentin, tramadol, and pregabalin, and supports the use of tricyclic antidepressants as first line treatment. The review, from researchers led by Andrew Rice at Imperial College London, and published in PLoS Medicine in July also
Rates of breast biopsy (removal of tissue for diagnostic evaluation) remained stable over a 12 year period even as mammogram use increased and new and less invasive biopsy techniques were introduced, according to a study in the July 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Changes in the guidelines for breast cancer screening have resulted in increased use of mammography. However, some women screened by mammography may have a false positive res
A testosterone patch may produce modest increases in sexual desire and frequency of satisfying sexual experiences in women who develop distressful, low sexual desire following hysterectomy and removal of the fallopian tubes and ovaries, according to a study in the July 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Diminished sexual desire has been reported by 30 to 50 percent of women who undergo surgical menopause (menopause induced by the surgi
“Reporters are surpassing doctors as a source of health information,” says Maria Simbra, a medical reporter for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, United States, and a practicing physician, in a special debate in this month’s issue of the open access international medical journal PLoS Medicine.
For the debate, PLoS Medicine invited health journalists worldwide to give their views on the role that the media should play in spreading health messages to the public.
In her commentary,
Multiple strains of the flu virus, circulating in a population at the same time, can reshuffle their genes and create a new virus, one capable of infecting many more people, according to a new study in the open-access journal PLoS Biology. This finding may help scientists make better predictions about which viral strains will attack during upcoming flu seasons and design more effective flu vaccines.
In the first large-scale effort to sequence the flu genome, Edward Holmes, David Lipman, an
Technique may allow scientists to repair brain cells damaged by disease, trauma or stroke
Using customized nanoparticles that they developed, University at Buffalo scientists have for the first time delivered genes into the brains of living mice with an efficiency that is similar to, or better than, viral vectors and with no observable toxic effect, according to a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper describes how the UB
Two patients enrolled in Phase I clinical trials at Hopkins
Final results of a study conducted at Johns Hopkins show that stem cell therapy can be used effectively to treat heart attacks, or myocardial infarction, in pigs. In just two months, stem cells harvested from another pig’s bone marrow and injected into the animal’s damaged heart restored heart function and repaired damaged heart muscle by 50 percent to 75 percent.
The Hopkins findings, first presented
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