Culture

Berlin, 5 May 2013. Peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) with radiolabeled somatostatin analogs, an established treatment for cancer patients, could offer a novel therapeutic approach to decrease levels of inflammation in the atherosclerotic plaques of patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), reported an abstract¹ study at the International Conference on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT, May 5 to 8 in Berlin, Germany.

Berlin, 5 May 2013. A new stress test protocol that investigates reducing the use of perfusion imaging in low risk patients undergoing SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging for possible angina symptoms was found to be diagnostically safe, revealed a US retrospective analysis.The study, reported as an abstract¹ at the International Conference on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT (ICNC11) May 5 to May 8 in Berlin, Germany, predicted that using exercise ECG stress testing alone in patients with high exercise capacity would have had no adverse effects on their prognosis at five years.

ITHACA, N.Y. – With more than a billion active accounts worldwide, it can be easy to forget that some people don't use Facebook.

A study by Cornell University researchers presented this week in Paris suggests that "non-use" of the social networking site is fairly common – a third of Facebook users take breaks from the site by deactivating their account, and one in 10 completely quit.

Study: https://cornell.box.com/FleeingFacebook

Philadelphia, Pa. (May 3, 2013) – Teenagers who are highly exposed to violent video games—three or more hours per day—show blunted physical and psychological responses to playing a violent game, reports a study in the May issue of Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine.

"High versus low experience of violent gaming seems to be related to different physiological, emotional and sleep related processes [after] exposure to violent video games," concludes the paper by Malena Ivarsson of the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University and colleagues.

In a promising development for diabetes treatment, researchers have developed a network of nanoscale particles that can be injected into the body and release insulin when blood-sugar levels rise, maintaining normal blood sugar levels for more than a week in animal-based laboratory tests. The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children's Hospital Boston.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have developed a new mouse model that answers the question of what actually happens in the body when type 2 diabetes develops and how the body responds to drug treatment. Long-term studies of the middle-aged mouse model will be better than previous studies at confirming how drugs for type 2 diabetes function in humans.

May 3, 2013 – Wind turbine noise, virtual concert halls, and buzzing cicadas will feature alongside bio-inspired microphones, sound-enhanced biofuel production, and acoustic oil spill detection next month at a major international meeting on the science of sound, in Montreal.

Surveys of the beliefs and knowledge of legal professionals about factors that affect eyewitness accuracy suggest that judges and police officers are no more knowledgeable about eyewitness testimony than are jurors or the general public.

A majority, or a substantial minority, of the legal professionals surveyed in the US, Norway, Estonia, China and Sweden harbor ideas about eyewitness memory that are not supported by available research, which suggests that many court decisions may be based on folklore with little support in memory science.

LOS ANGELES (May 2, 2013) – Patients with increasing accumulations of coronary artery calcium were more than six times more likely to suffer from a heart attack or die from heart disease than patients who didn't have increasing accumulations, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

What do all Twitter users want? Apparently, followers – and lots of them. But unless you're a celebrity, it can be difficult to build your Twitter audience.

Looking at a half-million tweets over 15 months, a first-of-its-kind analysis by Georgia Tech has created a set of reliable predictors for building a Twitter following.

The analysis was performed by Eric Gilbert, assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing. Gilbert found that Twitter users can grow their followers by such tactics as:

The new feature of the antidepressant drugs of the 1990s was that they had milder side-effects than their predecessors. Combined with aggressive marketing, this meant that annual sales in Sweden increased from just under EUR 18 million to over EUR 100 million in the space of just a few years.

The LAP-BAND® weight loss procedure is safe and effective in an expanded group of patients, not just in people who are morbidly obese. This conclusion is reported in a new study published in the scientific journal Obesity. The findings indicate that the procedure may help to intervene before obesity becomes life threatening to patients.

Reston, Va. (May 1, 2013) – Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, may be detected and monitored more effectively in the future with positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT), according to research published in the May issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Typically assessed by endoscopic and histologic evaluations, investigators demonstrated the ability of PET/CT to identify lesions along the complete intestinal wall that could be missed with traditional imaging techniques.

A growing number of college students are abusing the ADHD medication Adderall to give them an academic edge, and they're tweeting about it.

Thanks to Twitter, tracking roughly when and where Adderall use happens is now possible. So a group of BYU health science and computer science researchers did just that.

Their six-month study, appearing in the current issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, produced two major revelations about Adderall:

Not many would recommend taking medical practice advice from England's National Health Service - rich people go to the US for medical care instead - but they can at least address how to avoid the pitfalls of a 'triple failure' under Obamacare; the concern that worse health, worse care and higher cost will result.