West Orange, NJ. December 14, 2011. Monitored by scientists at Kessler Foundation, six people with traumatic spinal cord injuries tested Ekso, the robotic exoskeleton from Ekso Bionics that enables wheelchair users to stand and walk. The six participated in one week of preliminary testing in October 2011. Five patients have paraplegia and one has quadriplegia; they ranged in age from 27 to 45 and had durations of injury from 4 months to 2 years.
Culture
Contrary to the ideal of a completely engaged electorate, individuals who have the least interest in a specific outcome can actually be vital to achieving a democratic consensus. These individuals dilute the influence of powerful minority factions who would otherwise dominate everyone else, according to new research published in the journal Science.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- North Americans and Western Europeans love a good mix of alpha-terpineol, 4-methylpentanoic acid and ethyl propionate for dinner, flavor compounds shared in popular ingredients like tomatoes, parmesan cheese and white wine. Authentic East Asian recipes, on the other hand, tend to avoid mixing ingredients with many shared flavor compounds, according to new complex networks research from Indiana, Harvard, Cambridge and Northeastern universities.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A patient's education level is not a fail-safe predictor of how well they will manage symptoms related to complicated chronic diseases, such as heart failure, according to a Purdue University study.
European PredictAD project, lead by Principal Scientist Jyrki Lötjönen from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, has developed a decision support tool for objective diagnostics of Alzheimer's disease. The tool compares measurements of a patient to measurements of other persons available in large databases and provides a simple index about the severity of the disease. The project has shown that the tool improves the accuracy of diagnosis and clinicians' confidence about their decision, making earlier diagnosis possible.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues today issued its report concerning federally-sponsored research involving human volunteers, concluding that current rules and regulations provide adequate safeguards to mitigate risk. In its report, "Moral Science: Protecting Participants in Human Subjects Research," the Commission also recommended 14 changes to current practices to better protect research subjects, and called on the federal government to improve its tracking of research programs supported with taxpayer dollars.
People with low levels of iron in the blood have a higher risk of dangerous blood clots, according to research published in the journal Thorax today. A study of clotting risk factors in patients with an inherited blood vessel disease suggests that treating iron deficiency might be important for preventing potentially lethal blood clots.
High hospital readmission rates in different regions of the U.S. may have more to do with the overall high use of hospital services in those regions than with the severity of patients' particular conditions or problems in the quality of care during and after hospital discharges, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
The study appears in the December 15, 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
More than half of the older, anemic patients in a New England Journal of Medicine study did not need blood transfusions as they recovered from hip surgery, according to new research co-authored by University of Maryland School of Medicine scientists. The findings could immediately change the way such patients are treated.
A combination of two common drugs, lamotrigine and valproate, is more effective in treating difficult-to control epilepsy than other anti-epileptic regimens, according to a University of Washington report to be published online this week in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
More than 3 million Americans have epilepsy, and about one million of these have a difficult-to-treat form.
If this year's holiday period is anything like the last, seniors should be advised that, along with seasonal elevations of joy and good cheer, the risk of falling victim to elder financial abuse is also increasing. Older adults need to know the warning signals of financial abuse and exploitation, how to prevent it, and what to do if it does occur.
Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) occurs when fat builds up in the liver. This accumulation of fat damages the liver and leads to cirrhosis. NASH is rapidly increasing in the U.S. mainly related to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes. As a result, the proportion of liver transplantations performed for NASH cirrhosis rose dramatically from roughly 1% in 1997-2003 to more than 7% in 2010.
The rising cost of a college education and limited access to financial aid may create a less productive workforce and steeper wealth inequity, according to a study by North American economists.
Students with low-income parents are discovering that it is more difficult to find funds to pay for a college education now compared to students of similar economic backgrounds in the 1980s, said Alexander Monge-Naranjo, assistant professor of economics, Penn State.
Philadelphia, PA, December 13, 2011 – Guidelines for clinical management of patients with low back pain (LBP) encourage health care practitioners to advise staying active and returning to work. Despite this, most practitioners believe work factors can cause or exacerbate LBP, and a recommendation for a "short break from work" to allow healing is common.
CHICAGO – Common causes for stillbirth include obstetric complications and placental abnormalities, while factors that could be known at the start of pregnancy, such as previous stillbirth or pregnancy loss, were associated with an increased risk for stillbirth, although these and other factors accounted for only a small proportion of the overall risk, according to two studies in the December 14 issue of JAMA.