Culture

Alva-Amco Pharmacal Companies, Inc. is recommending that parents give their children a placebo - something real doctors would never do. The product they are selling is called Nauzene and they are promoting it for gastroenteritis, the inflammation of the stomach and intestinal tract that can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal cramping and is commonly called "stomach flu."

Want to hit a fastball like the New York Mets do? It won't surprise you much to learn that baseball players don't think much about hitting the ball - much of it comes from trained muscle memory and a great deal of visual ocularity.

The latest episode of “It’s Okay to Be Smart” outlines the combination of practice, strength, brainpower, and good eyesight that helps players predict the correct time to swing the bat. Fortunately none of those things will make you field the ball like David Murphy, even if you hit like him.

As a result of these difficulties they could not undertake a review to assess the outcomes of these drugs on patients.

The UK team, led by Robert Fleetcroft from Norwich Medical School at the University of East Anglia, argues that "difficulty accessing data from clinical trials means that only part of the evidence base is available" and this may lead to "erroneous clinical decisions."

Researchers from the University of East Anglia are calling for medical trial data to be kept in national repositories.

A BMJ study published today reveals how a series of barriers stopped researchers from reviewing the effects of heart failure drugs such as beta blockers on patients.

Now they are calling for greater transparency in research and recommend that access to data should be a mandatory requirement of funding.

They warn that the risks of not doing so, could lead to "erroneous clinical decisions".

Countries are loosely interpreting the legal meaning of "rational use" of natural resources to escalate fishing efforts in Antarctic waters and hinder efforts to establish marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean, scientists and legal scholars say.

The findings, published online in the journal Marine Policy, come as 24 countries plus the European Union convene in Hobart, Australia, this week for the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) to set fisheries management rules in the Southern Ocean.

Consumers in the developing world are some of the world's best customers - emerging economy markets have contributed more than half of the Coca-Cola Co.'s global revenue since 2006, and Mexico, China, and Brazil were the three largest non-US contributors. But the best way for large consumer packaged goods companies to reach these markets remains a challenge. New research suggests that different combinations of package sizes, price, and merchandising work more effectively depending on whether the products are moving through mom-and-pop stores or large, self-service chains.

Small and hungry prawns are more likely to be resourceful in the face of adversity than their less desperate counterparts according to new research published today in the journal PLOS ONE. However the study found that size and hunger have different effects depending on whether the prawns are acting alone or in a group. Small individuals were more likely to innovate when alone, but when in a group, size didn't matter and it was the hungry prawns that tended to be most resourceful.

SALT LAKE CITY - Truck drivers who are frequently fatigued after work, use cell phones while driving, or have an elevated pulse pressure - a potential predictor of cardiovascular disease - may be at increased risk for getting into truck accidents, according to a study by the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (RMCOEH) at the University of Utah School of Medicine and published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM).

After more than 30 years of steady growth, the number of postdocs in the biological and biomedical sciences is on the decline in the United States, according to a new paper in The FASEB Journal. The study shows that despite continuing increases in the number of PhD students, there was a 5.5 percent loss in the postdoctoral population from 2010-13, the most recent survey year. The findings have important implications for the biomedical workforce.

CHICAGO (October 21, 2015): Patients undergoing oncologic liver operations who participated in an enhanced recovery program returned sooner to their normal life function and adjuvant cancer therapies than patients who were treated with a traditional approach to perioperative care, according to a new study published online on the Journal of the American College of Surgeons website in advance of print publication.

The estimated prevalence of adults who used marijuana in the past year more than doubled in the United States between 2001 and 2013 to 9.5 percent, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

Laws and attitudes about marijuana are changing, with 23 states having medical marijuana laws and four of these states having also legalized marijuana for recreational use.

The term "rational use," as applied to fishing rights in Antarctic waters, has been misused by certain countries, an analysis by a team of researchers has concluded. Its work, which comes ahead of the 34th international convention where these matters are negotiated, posits that some nations mistakenly see the term as a license for unrestricted fishing--an interpretation the study's authors say is not supported by language in international accords.

The option of watching television online will not influence the amount of time a person spends viewing TV, but it does make the experience more pleasurable, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Dallas.

"Some media reports predict that because people now have access to watch anything they want, anytime they want, they will spend more time watching TV," said Dr. Stan Liebowitz, a managerial economics professor in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and one of the study's authors.

Between 5 and 30 percent of those who receive a new hip prosthesis will require a re-operation during their lifetime. New research shows that a high-resolution X-ray method can predict which patients have the greatest risk of re-operation.

In Sweden, around 16,000 hip prosthesis operations are done annually, and about an additional 1,100 re-operations are done where part or all of the prosthetic must be replaced or removed.

Varies with age

Los Angeles, CA (October 21, 2015) Sepsis is an inflammatory response to infection that's known to develop in hospital settings and can turn deadly when it's not discovered early on. In a new study, a hospital surveillance program focusing on reducing the risks of sepsis, known as the two-stage Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system, was found to reduce the risk of adverse outcomes, such as death and hospice discharge for sepsis patients, by 30% over the course of one year. This study is published today in the American Journal of Medical Quality (A SAGE Journal).