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Body-mass index (BMI) and aerobic capacity in late adolescence were important factors associated with the long-term of risk of hypertension in adulthood for military conscripts in Sweden, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Hypertension is a common medical disorder that affects 1 in 4 adults in the United States and worldwide. Its prevalence has increased during the past 20 years along with increased rates of obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.

Making water more available in New York City public schools through self-serve water dispensers in cafeterias resulted in small -- but statistically significant -- declines in students' weight, according to new findings.

The study, publishing January 19 in the online issue of JAMA Pediatrics, was conducted by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center, New York University's Institute for Education and Social Policy, and the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

The first international comparative study of end-of-life care practices finds that the United States actually has the lowest proportion of deaths in the hospital and the lowest number of days in the hospital in the last 6 months of life among seven developed countries. The study appears in the January 19 issue of JAMA.

Two studies in the January 19 issue of JAMA compare the intensity of end-of-life treatment and the likelihood of dying in a hospital between physicians and the general population.

In one study, Joel S. Weissman, Ph.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and colleagues examined whether physicians receive higher or lower intensity end-of-life treatments compared with nonphysicians.

New York, NY--January 19, 2016--Columbia Engineering researchers have shown, for the first time, that electrical stimulation of human heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) engineered from human stem cells aids their development and function. The team used electrical signals, designed to mimic those in a developing heart, to regulate and synchronize the beating properties of nascent cardiomyocytes, the cells that support the beating function of the heart.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Jan. 19, 2016 - Bradycardia - a slower than normal heartbeat - does not increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, according to a study conducted by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The study is published in the Jan.19 online edition of the Journal of American Medical Association Internal Medicine.

Only a few mammals and some birds are as long-lived as humans, and many of these species share interesting characteristics in how they age. A new paper in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology explores lifetime reproductive patterns in African elephants. Led by Phyllis Lee of the University of Stirling in the UK, the study analysed data from 834 female elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. This population has been continuously monitored since 1972, and data collected on more than 3000 elephants since the study began.

Some may believe that chance brings you together with your loved one, but scientists have found a far less romantic reason. Mate choice is influenced by our genes, in part by those responsible for our height, according to research published in Genome Biology.

An analysis of the genotype of more than 13,000 human heterosexual couples found that genes that determine your height also influence your choice of mate by height. This provides more understanding into why we choose partners of a similar height.

The study, of over 1300 adults with high blood pressure in the Cape Town area, compared text message reminders and interactive text messaging to a control group receiving standard care. The results appear online in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

Professor Andrew Farmer, from Oxford's Department of Primary Health Care Sciences explained: 'High blood pressure is a common condition that can be managed successfully with tablets. Yet, even in health systems where that medication is freely available, people can struggle to keep taking the tablets regularly.

An interdisciplinary team of Oxford University researchers has devised a new technique to speed up the development of novel vaccines.

Many vaccines are based around virus-like particles (VLPs). VLPs resemble viruses, but importantly don't carry pathogenic genetic material and thus cannot cause disease. These particles are engineered to display one part of a pathogen to the immune system, which can elicit strong protection upon any subsequent exposure to that pathogen.

It has been proven that the countries with high capital depreciation have in the long term a high growth rate. A UPV/EHU researcher has built an economic model that takes this positive correlation into consideration. Her research has been published in the journal Economic Modelling.

Apart from the hereditary information that is encoded in the sequence of bases in DNA, there is a second code of life: Chemical alterations in DNA or in its packaging proteins form an additional regulatory level that determines which genes are read. The most important element of this "epigenetic" code is the labeling of specific DNA areas with methyl groups.

Women who carry an inherited fault in the gene BRIP1 are over three times more likely to develop ovarian cancer than those without the fault, according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute*.

Around 18 women in every 1,000 develop ovarian cancer, but this risk increases to around 58 women in every 1,000 for women with a fault in the BRIP1 gene. It's estimated that one in every 1,000 UK women have the gene fault.

Jülich/Münster, 18 January 2016 - For the first time, and using physical methods, scientists have demonstrated how red blood cells move. There had been real fights between academics over the question of whether these cells are moved by external forces or whether they actively "wriggle". An international team of biophysicists from Münster, Paris and Jülich have now proven that both opinions are correct.

Mobilisation, coordination and cooperation are among the pillars of the Unifying European Biodiversity Informatics (BioUnify) project, described in a Grant proposal, submitted to the COST Association and published in the open-access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO). Both short-and long-term plans are clearly set to bring together the biodiversity informatics community and simultaneously synthesise the available data from across the relevant disciplines.