Hospital doctors who are frequently interrupted while working in a clinical environment spend less time on tasks and fail to return to almost a fifth of their jobs in hand, reveals research published ahead of print in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care.
Hospital environments are known for being busy areas with many interruptions and multi-tasking by staff and there are concerns that these can introduce potential for clinical errors to be made.
Infants who receive sweet solutions before being immunised experience less pain and are more comfortable, reveals research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Healthcare professionals should consider giving infants aged 1-12 months a sweet solution of sucrose or glucose before immunising a child, the international team of researchers recommended, because of the child's improved reaction to injections.
Vitamin A is critical to maternal health and child survival, yet in most developing countries Vitamin A deficiency is a leading cause of blindness and increased child mortality. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has long been a leader in vitamin A research, and scientists at the School recently discovered a link between offspring lung function and maternal vitamin A supplementation. The results are published in the May 13, 2010, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
Abstract
Researchers studying the common genetic disorder chromosome 22q.11 deletion syndrome have identified key proteins that act together to regulate early embryonic development. One protein is essential to life; in animal studies, embryos without the protein do not survive past the first few days of gestation.
A study forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy suggests that government regulation of nurses' pay leads to higher death rates in U.K. hospitals.
URBANA – Is breast milk so different from infant formula? The ability to track which genes are operating in an infant's intestine has allowed University of Illinois scientists to compare the early development of breast-fed and formula-fed babies. They say the difference is very real.
Biological differences between the sexes could be a significant predictor of responses to vaccines, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They examined published data from numerous adult and child vaccine trials and found that sex is a fundamental, but often overlooked predictor of vaccine response that could help predict the efficacy of combating infectious disease. The review is featured in the May 2010 issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
A simple, 10-minute "frailty" test administered to older patients before they undergo surgery can predict with great certainty their risk for complications, how long they will stay in the hospital and — most strikingly — whether they are likely to end up in a nursing home afterward, new research from Johns Hopkins suggests.
Using the same technique they developed to document the harmful effects of tobacco products, a team of researchers found that cigarettes made without tobacco or nicotine may be more carcinogenic because they actually induce more extensive DNA damage than tobacco products. The technique has been awarded U.S. patent No. 7,662,565.
KINGTON, ON – Researchers at Queen's University have developed a new way of performing lab tests that could improve the way doctors manage prostate cancer treatment. It will allow them to identify with unprecedented accuracy losses of a gene called PTEN that is associated with an aggressive group of prostate cancers.
Five times the tensile strength of steel and triple that of the currently best synthetic fibers: Spider silk is a fascinating material. But no one has thus far succeeded in producing the super fibers synthetically. How do spiders form long, highly stable and elastic fibers from the spider silk proteins stored in the silk gland within split seconds? Scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the University of Bayreuth have now succeeded in unraveling the secret. They present their results in the current issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature.
Waltham, MA—More than 150 years ago, Darwin proposed the theory of universal common ancestry (UCA), linking all forms of life by a shared genetic heritage from single-celled microorganisms to humans. Until now, the theory that makes ladybugs, oak trees, champagne yeast and humans distant relatives has remained beyond the scope of a formal test. This week, a Brandeis biochemist reports in Nature the results of the first large scale, quantitative test of the famous theory that underpins modern evolutionary biology.
Chemists at New York University and China's Nanjing University have created a DNA assembly line that has the potential to create novel materials efficiently on the nanoscale. Their work is reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
"An industrial assembly line includes a factory, workers, and a conveyor system," said NYU Chemistry Professor Nadrian Seeman, the study's senior author. "We have emulated each of those features using DNA components."
The assembly line relies on three DNA-based components.
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should apply the same rigor to evaluating the science behind claims of foods' and nutritional supplements' health benefits as it devotes to assessing medication and medical technology approvals, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. There are no scientific grounds for using different standards of evidence when evaluating the health benefits of food ingredients and drugs given that both can have significant impacts on people's well-being, said the committee that wrote the report.