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Acute stroke care and clinical outcomes have improved significantly at hospitals participating in the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get With The Guidelines–Stroke program, according to a large study in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a journal of the American Heart Association.
Animals have been found to have infected humans sometime in the past with the common respiratory disease Chlamydia pneumoniae, according to Queensland University of Technology infectious disease expert Professor Peter Timms.
Unlike the sexually-transmitted form of Chlamydia, Chlamydia pneumoniae is a major bacterial germ that causes widespread respiratory disease in humans.
A new survey finds that while both whites and African Americans know and think little about lung cancer, African Americans are more likely to hold beliefs and perceptions about the disease that could interfere with prevention and treatment. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the report indicates that public health messages regarding lung cancer should be targeted to all communities.
BOSTON - A new survey has found that African-Americans are more likely than whites to hold mistaken and fatalistic beliefs about lung cancer, as well as being more reluctant to consult a doctor about possible symptoms of the disease, according to researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and their collaborators.
The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the American Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) are working to innovate and reinforce their food security monitoring systems and to develop more efficient early warning tools. These efforts come as a response to the 2007-2008 global food crisis that increased significantly the number of countries under threat of famine.
SANTA CRUZ, CA--Flightless birds, blind cave shrimp, and other oddities suggest a "use it or lose it" tendency in evolution. In the microbial world, an unusual marine microorganism appears to have ditched several major metabolic pathways, leaving it with a remarkably reduced set of genes.
Atrial fibrillation is a cardiac arrhythmia – a chronic irregularity of heartbeat – which affects an estimated 1 million people in Germany. Although the condition is not acutely life-threatening, it does increase the risk of developing more serious illnesses, such as cardiac insufficiency, stroke and dementia. In the third of a series of genomewide asssociation studies, an international team of researchers, led by LMU physician PD Dr. Stefan Kääb, now reports the identification of a new gene locus that has a significant influence on risk for atrial fibrillation.
An international research team has identified a common gene variant associated with a form of the irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation. In their report in the journal Nature Genetics, being published online, the investigators describe finding that variations affecting a protein that may help control the heart's electrical activity appear to increase the risk of what is called lone atrial fibrillation (AF), a type seen in younger individuals with no other form of heart disease.
DURHAM, N.C. – Many people who undergo treatment for hepatitis C develop hemolytic anemia, a disorder that destroys red blood cells. In some cases, it is so severe they have to reduce their medication or stop therapy altogether. But now, scientists in Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) have discovered two genetic alterations linked to a benign enzyme condition that keep some patients anemia-free.
More than three million children have been born as a result of assisted reproductive technologies since the birth of the first "test tube baby" in 1978. While the majority of these children are healthy and normal, as a group they are at greater risk of certain kinds of birth defects and being low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes later in life.
DURHAM, NC – Cultural views of evolution can have important ethical implications, says a Duke University expert on theological and biomedical ethics. Because the popular imagination filters science through cultural assumptions about race, cultural history should be an essential part of biomedical conversations.
Amy Laura Hall, associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke University, argues that many popularized ideas about evolution assume that some human groups are more evolved than other human groups.
Once described by Jacques Cousteau as the "world's aquarium," the marine ecosystems of the Gulf of California are under threat. Destructive new fishing methods are depleting the sea's habitats, creating areas that are ghosts of their former existences (see Scripps explorations story "Threatened Gulf".
SAN DIEGO - Some say the world's population will swell to 9 billion people by 2030 and that will present significant challenges for agriculture to provide enough food to meet demand, says University of Idaho animal scientist Rod Hill.
Hill and Larry Branen, a University of Idaho food scientist, organized a symposium during the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting Sunday to explore ways biotechnology could provide healthy and plentiful animal-based foods to meet future demands.
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.