Culture

Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine have created a comic influenced by the Japanese manga style to help busy medical staff who treat patients suffering from bleeding.

Professor Ian Roberts devised a storyline to highlight the latest research into the life-saving benefits of tranexamic acid (TXA) in a way which he hopes will appeal to doctors, nurses and paramedics on the front-line of medicine.

Press releases and news stories reporting the results of randomized controlled trials often contain 'spin' or the much more pleasant sounding 'framing' — specific reporting strategies emphasizing the beneficial effect of the experimental treatment — but such spin often comes from the abstract of the study rather than being related to misinterpretation by the media, according to an editorial in PLOS Medicine.

Preoperative 3-dimensional visualization of sentinel lymph nodes (SLNs) with a technique known as single-photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography was associated with a higher rate of detection of positive SLNs and a higher rate of disease-free survival among patients with melanoma, according to a study in the September 12 issue of JAMA.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new method for forecasting seasonal hurricane activity that is 15 percent more accurate than previous techniques.

"This approach should give policymakers more reliable information than current state-of-the-art methods," says Dr. Nagiza Samatova, an associate professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. "This will hopefully give them more confidence in planning for the hurricane season."

Forgetfulness, lack of orientation, cognitive decline… about 700, 000 Germans suffer from Alzheimer's disease (AD). Now researchers from the University of Ulm, among them the Epidemiologist Professor Gabriele Nagel and the Neurologist Professor Christine von Arnim, have discovered that the serum-concentration of the antioxidants vitamin C and beta-carotene are significantly lower in patients with mild dementia than in control persons. It might thus be possible to influence the pathogenesis of AD by a person's diet or dietary antioxidants.

Immigrant parents' education before migrating is more strongly tied to their children's achievement in the United States than any other social, economic, or linguistic parental attribute, either before or after migration. That's the conclusion of a new study in a special section of the September/October 2012 issue of Child Development on the children of immigrants.

The study was carried out by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University.

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – September 10, 2012) Early treatment response is a powerful predictor of long-term outcome for young patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The information can help physicians decide whether a more intensive approach is needed. Research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators has identified the best test for measuring that response and guiding therapy.