Halloween may seem like so much harmless fun, a time when adults enjoy laughing in the face of death, and implore their young children to do the same. According to a Penn State researcher, however, the humor of tombstones, monsters and other scary elements is often lost on kids at the ripe age of 6 or 7–many of whom don’t find the holiday the least bit funny.
Cindy Dell Clark, associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State’s Delaware County Campus,
Chronically high levels of insulin, as is found in many people with obesity and Type II diabetes, may block specific hormones that trigger energy release into the body, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine. Their findings, which may point to new approaches to developing improved treatment options for the disease, will be published in the September 22 issue of the journal Nature.
The research team, led by Roger Y. Tsien,
Periodontal disease — a progressive, eventually painful and disruptive condition in which bacteria attack gums and the hidden roots of teeth — develops much earlier than dentists and other health professionals thought, a major new study concludes.
Clinicians found a significant proportion of young adult patients examined had well-established periodontal disease despite no signs or symptoms. Affected pregnant women faced more than twice the risk of preterm birth and other pregnancy
Yale researchers report the first evidence that phantom pain following spinal cord injury is the result of hypersensitive neurons in the thalamic region of the brain that can be suppressed with specially designed molecular agents.
“A majority of people with spinal cord injury and limb amputations experience phantom sensations of excruciating pain at or below the level of their paralysis or loss,” said Bryan Hains, associate research scientist and co-author of the study.
Study may help find ways to prevent recurrence
Using a recently developed mouse model of breast cancer, a team from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has shown that Snail, a molecule normally important in embryonic development, can promote breast cancer recurrence. They also found that high Snail expression predicts more rapid tumor recurrence in women who have been treated for breast cancer. These observations suggest that Snail may represent a target for can
A large study funded by NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) provides, for the first time, detailed information comparing the effectiveness and side effects of five medications – both new and older medications – that are currently used to treat people with schizophrenia. Overall, the medications were comparably effective but were associated with high rates of discontinuation due to intolerable side effects or failure to adequately control symptoms. One new medication, olanzapine,
Salicylate causes membranes to thin, soften, rupture more easily
It’s well known that high doses of aspirin can cause ulcers and temporary deafness, but the biochemical mechanism responsible for these phenomena has never been deciphered. New research from Rice University offers clues, showing for the first time how salicylate — an active metabolite of aspirin — weakens lipid membranes. Researchers believe these mechanical changes disrupt the lining of the stomach, which functi
Because clinical depression is so disabling and affects more than 16 percent of adults in the United States at some time in their lives, researchers have worked hard to develop more effective treatments. But how much better are the newer pharmaceuticals?
Many second-generation antidepressants, despite differences in drug classification and cost, offer patients essentially the same benefits with little variation in risks, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have
The tobacco industry coordinated cross-industry campaigns to delay and weaken federal and international regulations on pesticide use, according to new findings by UCSF researchers.
The findings are reported in a study and commentary posted online at the pre-publication website of Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The information will be published in a future issue of the journal.
Based on an anal
Survivors of stem-cell transplantation for blood cancers can expect to be just about as healthy 10 years later as adults who have never had a transplant, according to a new study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Research Cancer Center.
The findings, to be published in the Sept. 20 edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, is the first of its kind to follow a large group of patients from before their transplant through the 10-year post-transplant period.
“In many area
Coinciding with National Stroke Week in Australia (19 – 25 September 2005) is the release of results from two recent stroke studies from the George Institute for International Health that investigate both the causative factors as well as a little studied outcome of stroke, that of depression. The studies are part of a larger project to determine the impact of prevention strategies and improvements in stroke healthcare.
A study of trends in stroke incidence, led by The George Inst
Drug should be tested as front-line therapy, say researchers
The tyrosine kinase inhibitor erlotinib (Tarceva®) showed encouraging activity with relatively tolerable side effects in elderly, previously untreated patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), reports a team led by investigators from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
The uncontrolled, Phase II results are sufficiently promising to merit a Phase III trial comparing erlotinib with single-
Computers can predict the detailed structure of small proteins nearly as well as experimental methods, at least some of the time, according to new studies by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers.
The findings, which were reported in the September 16, 2005, issue of the journal Science, provide a glimmer of hope that scientists eventually may be able to determine the structure of proteins from their genomic sequences, a problem that has seemed insurmountable.
An international team of 53 researchers has offered the most convincing evidence so far linking bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, to two chromosomal regions in the human genome. The finding gives scientists refined targets for further gene studies.
“Even though bipolar disorder affects millions of people around the world-sometimes throughout their lifetimes-what we understand to be biologically relevant at the genetic level is not terribly characterized,” said Matth
A team of researchers led by the University of Toronto has charted how and where a painful event becomes permanently etched in the brain – a discovery that has implications for pain-related emotional disorders such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress.
U of T physiology professor Min Zhuo and his colleagues Professor Bong-Kiun Kaang of Seoul National University in South Korea, and Professor Bao-Ming Li of Fudan University in China have identified where emotional fear memory an
With their long necks and tails, sauropod dinosaurs—famous as the Sinclair gasoline logo and Fred Flintstone’s gravel pit tractor—are easy to recognize, in part because they all seem to look alike.
The largest animals known to have walked the earth, sauropods were common in North America during the middle of the dinosaur era but were thought to have been pushed to extinction by more specialized plant-eaters at the end of that era. New discoveries, however, are showing that on
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