The English NHS should "proceed cautiously" in introducing payment for performance schemes aimed at improving the quality of care in hospitals, warn researchers from the University of York on bmj.com today.
They believe that the effects of incentive schemes on healthcare systems are still unclear and that the cost of implementing them may not be justified.
Yiping Han, a researcher from Department of Periodontics at Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine, reports the first documented link between a mother with pregnancy-associated gum disease to the death of her fetus.
The findings are discussed in the article, "Term Stillbirth Caused by Oral Fusobacterium nucleatum," in the February issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
The higher a person's degree of obesity, the higher their risk of stroke — regardless of race, gender and how obesity is measured, according to a new study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Living organisms have good reason for engaging in sexual, rather than asexual, reproduction according to Maurine Neiman, assistant professor of biology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and researcher in the Roy J. Carver Center for Genomics.
By combining the tools of medicinal chemistry and zebrafish biology, a team of Vanderbilt investigators has identified compounds that may offer therapeutic leads for bone-related diseases and cancer.
The findings, reported in ACS Chemical Biology, support using zebrafish as a novel platform for drug development.
What could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold? Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recent experiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinous fungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technological systems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks.
This revelation comes after a team of Japanese and British researchers observed that the slime mold connected itself to scattered food sources in a design that was nearly identical to Tokyo's rail system.
For the first time, researchers have shown how transmission of MRSA from one person to another can be precisely tracked in a hospital setting. The team have developed a remarkable new method that can 'zoom' from large-scale inter-continental transmission events to the much finer detail of person-to-person infection of MRSA within a single hospital.
The ability to track strains in this way will enable researchers to understand how strains can spread so rapidly, and should lead to novel infection control strategies, not only for MRSA but also for other emerging superbugs.
Scientists at The Royal Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne in Australia have discovered the cells that cause a common type of childhood leukaemia – T cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (T-ALL). Targeting of these cells may lead to improved treatments for this disease and help prevent relapse.
The team, led by Dr Matthew McCormack and Dr David Curtis of the Rotary Bone Marrow Research Laboratories and the University's Department of Medicine at The Royal Melbourne Hospital, made the discovery whilst studying mice prone to developing this leukaemia.
New video footage of a virus infecting cells is challenging what researchers have long believed about how viruses spread, suggesting that scientists may be able to create new drugs to tackle some viruses.
Previously, viruses were thought to spread by entering a cell, replicating there, and then being released to infect new cells, so that the rate of spread of a virus would be limited by how quickly it could replicate in each cell.
A new scientific paper co-authored by a University of Adelaide researcher reports strong evidence that humans, not climate change, caused the demise of Australia's megafauna -- giant marsupials, huge reptiles and flightless birds -- at least 40,000 years ago.
A microbe commonly found in the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways emits a poison not just to protect itself but to stun and immobilize the prey it plans to eat, a team of researchers from four universities has discovered. The findings about algae linked to massive fish kills could lead to new ways to slow the growth of these tiny but toxic marine creatures.
We normally think of pollinators as providing a valuable service to plants, and they certainly do. In exchange for nectar, pollinators like the well-known honey bee carry pollen from one plant to the other and thus promote cross-fertilization. But what happens when the pollinators aren't satisfied with their nectar rewards and decide to eat their generous plant partners? Just such a scenario arises in a number of plant-pollinator mutualisms in which the pollinator deposits eggs on the plant, which then develop into herbivorous larvae.
Epidemiological studies indicate that being overweight or obese is associated with increased cancer risk. The most dramatic effect of obesity on cancer risk has been noted for a common form of liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma or HCC. Modeling the effect of obesity in mice, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have conclusively demonstrated that obesity is tumor-promoting and have obtained evidence that this effect depends on induction of low-grade, chronic inflammation.
Butterflies and moths are welcome visitors to many plant species. Plants attract insect pollinators with the colors, forms, nectars and scents of their flowers to ensure fertilization and reproduction. However, female moths are also threatening to the plant: Once attracted by the flower's scent, they lay their eggs on the green leaves, and shortly voracious young caterpillars hatch. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology have now discovered how tobacco plants successfully solve this dilemma.
A study investigating how a cellular enzyme affects blood glucose levels in mice provides clues to pathways that may be involved in processes including the regulation of longevity and the proliferation of tumor cells. In their report in the January 22 issue of Cell, a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-based team of researchers describes the mechanism by which absence of the enzyme SIRT6 induces a fatal drop in blood sugar in mice by triggering a switch between two critical cellular processes.