Culture

A professor from the University of Southampton has called on doctors around the world to give patients with persistent dizziness a booklet of simple exercises, after new research has shown that it is a very cost effective treatment for common causes of the condition.

Lucy Yardley, who has been researching dizziness for many years, will urge GPs at the international WONCA conference today (5 July) to ensure that the booklet is translated so that patients of all nationalities can benefit.

What is the purpose of a target no one can meet? The UN wants global emissions at 1990 levels, which means the developing world cannot grow food, and they want the number of hungry children to be half of 1990 levels by 2015, despite the fact that there are a lot more of them.

Tendon disorders cost the UK economy more than £7bn a year and now scientists at Queen Mary, University of London have identified a vital component of tendons which could help treat them.

The research, published in the highly regarded Royal Society journal Interface today (4 July), found that a component of tendons known as the interfascicular matrix (IFM) is essential for their function.

Researchers have taken a step toward personalized medicine for Parkinson's disease, by investigating signs of the disease in patient-derived cells and testing how the cells respond to drug treatments. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Istanbul, 4 July 2012: A policy of single embryo transfer (SET) reduces the risk of perinatal mortality in infants born as a result of IVF and ICSI. The conclusion emerged from an analysis of more than 50,000 births recorded in the Australian and New Zealand Assisted Reproduction Technology Database between 2004 and 2008, where the introduction of an SET policy has been associated with a reduction in overall perinatal mortality for IVF and ICSI babies.

"The obesity crisis is made worse by the way industry formulates and markets its products and so must be regulated to prevent excesses and to protect the public good," writes an advocate in this week's PLoS Medicine, which has apparently been taken over by social authoritarians, given the number of editorials asking for more government bans.

Under pressure from civil society organizations and social authoritarians, the Brazilian government has introduced legislation to mandate its food system. They are protecting public health from transnational food companies, argue advocates writing in this week's PLoS Medicine, who are convinced that poor people having access to cheap food makes them fat - rather than eating too much

CHICAGO – Although some have suggested that patients receiving medication for immune-mediated diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis may be at increased risk of herpes zoster (HZ; shingles) shortly after receipt of the vaccine, an analysis that included nearly 20,000 vaccinated Medicare beneficiaries finds that the live zoster vaccine is not associated with an increased risk of HZ shortly after vaccination in patients currently treated with biologics, and that it is associated with a significantly reduced longer-term risk of HZ in patients with an immune-mediated disease, accord

A study led by Hospital for Special Surgery researchers has demonstrated that women who have a specific type of antibody that interferes with blood vessel function are at risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes and that other antibodies in the same family thought to cause pregnancy complications do not put women at risk.

Unfair and exploitative political agreements allow Europeans to eat fish from the plates of developing countries, according to a study led by University of British Columbia researchers.

In the case of Madagascar, the European Union pays less than it did two decades ago while catching more fish. Since 1986, the EU's quotas for catching fish in Madagascar's waters have increased by 30 per cent while its access fees have decreased by 20 per cent. As a result, the total annual income for Madagascar decreased by almost 90 per cent between 1986 and 2010.

A slim waist and normal weight are usually associated with better health outcomes, but that's not always the case with heart failure patients, according to a new UCLA study.

Researchers found that in both men and women with advanced heart failure, obesity — as indicated by a high body mass index (BMI) — and a higher waist circumference were factors that put them at significantly less risk for adverse outcomes.

The study findings are published in the July 1 online issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.

A new study by medical scientists coordinated from the University of Manchester has for the first time used patients' results to establish that "safety indicators" for people taking anticoagulant drugs to regulate a common heart condition are correct.

More than 760,000 patients in the UK have atrial fibrillation (AF), a defect that causes an irregular heart rate. It is also known to increase the risk and severity of stroke.

WASHINGTON, July 3—Using the compound eyes of the humble moth as their inspiration, an international team of physicists has developed new nanoscale materials that could someday reduce the radiation dosages received by patients getting X-rayed, while improving the resolution of the resulting images.