MedsNews

Scientists have long believed that human speech is processed towards the back of the brain's cerebral cortex, behind auditory cortex where all sounds are received - a place famously known as Wernicke's area after the German neurologist who proposed this site in the late 1800s based on his study of brain injuries and strokes. But, now, research that analyzed more than 100 imaging studies concludes that Wernicke's area is in the wrong location...

One of the largest studies to investigate lumbar spine disc degeneration found that adults who are overweight or obese were significantly more likely to have disc degeneration than those with a normal body mass index (BMI). Assessments using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) show elevated BMI is associated with an increased number of levels of degenerated disks and greater severity of disc degeneration, including narrowing of the disc space...

Most parents report that they typically require their child to use a life-saving booster seat, but more than 30 percent said they do not enforce this rule when their child is riding with another driver. The study, conducted by child health experts at University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, also revealed that 45 percent of parents do not require their kids to use a booster when driving other children who do not have one...

Coroners are more likely to hold inquests for deaths involving younger people or people who died of fatal complications from medical care, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Australian researchers compared characteristics of deaths investigated through inquests with characteristics of the much larger number of investigations that take place behind closed doors. They looked at data on 20 379 deaths in five Australian states over seven and a half years; 1252 (6...

Imagine a contraceptive that could, with one or two painless 15-minute non-surgical treatments, provide months of protection from pregnancy. And imagine that the equipment needed were already in physical therapists' offices around the world. Sound too good to be true? For years, scientists thought so too. But new research headed by Dr. James Tsuruta in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, published Monday in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, is gaining the contraceptive method increased respect...

Divorce at a younger age hurts people's health more than divorce later in life, according to a new study by a Michigan State University sociologist. Hui Liu said the findings, which appear in the research journal Social Science & Medicine, suggest older people have more coping skills to deal with the stress of divorce. "It's clear to me that we need more social and family support for the younger divorced groups," said Liu, assistant professor of sociology...

A national study of Medicaid data shows most young people who present to emergency departments with deliberate self-harm are discharged to the community, without receiving an emergency mental health assessment. Even more, a roughly comparable proportion of these patients receive no outpatient mental health care in the following month. These are the findings from a study conducted by researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital that appears in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry...

A study published in this week's PLoS Medicine shows that commercial electronic prescribing systems (commonly known as e-prescribing, in which prescribers use a computer to order medications for their patients through a system with the help of prompts, aids, and alerts) could substantially reduce prescribing error rates in hospital in-patients...

In a cross-sectional analysis of WHO-AIMS data published in this week's PLoS Medicine, Ryan McBain of Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA and colleagues investigated the associations between health system components and access to psychotropic drugs in 63 low- and middle- income countries (LAMICs). The authors' findings indicate that access to psychotropic medicines in LAMICs is related to key components within the mental health systems of these countries but that availability and affordability are affected to different extents by these components...

Comprehensive work studying the burden of ill-health and death resulting from specific conditions, injuries, and risk factors - the Global Burden of Disease project - has shown that the burden of ill-health around the world is highly inequitable. In this week's PLoS Medicine, the editors review progress towards the journal's goal of reflecting and addressing this inequity...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Teun Bousema of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK and colleagues argue that targeting malaria "hotspots," small groups of households at a substantially increased risk of malaria transmission, is a highly efficient way to reduce malaria transmission at all levels of transmission intensity. The authors state: "Malaria hotspots appear to maintain malaria transmission in low transmission seasons and are the driving force for transmission in the high transmission season...

The current issue of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases presents a new collection of articles on the use of genetically modified (GM) insects for controlling some of the most widespread infectious diseases. Articles from across the PLoS journals describe the technological advances these tools represent, the regulatory framework, and the societal dialogue that is necessary for their wide-scale application for disease control. Diseases transmitted by insects form a huge burden on human and animal populations...

Neuroscientists may one day be able to eavesdrop on the constant, internal monologs that run through our minds, or hear the imagined speech of a stroke or a locked-in patient with inability to speak, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The work, conducted in the labs of Robert Knight at Berkeley and Edward Chang at UCSF, is reported in the open-access journal PLoS Biology. The report will be accompanied by an interview with the authors for the PLoS Biology Podcast...

Repeated screening by flexible sigmoidoscopy (FSG) increased the detection of colorectal cancer or advanced adenoma in women by one-fourth and in men by one-third, according to a study published Jan. 31 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Endoscopic methods are known to have a higher sensitivity than fecal occult blood testing in detecting colorectal cancer and adenoma and repeated screening detects a higher number of colorectal adenomas and carcinomas when compared to a single screen...

Australian researchers have found evidence that heart failure is associated with a decline in people's mental processes and a loss of grey matter in the brain. These changes can make it more difficult for heart failure (HF) patients to remember and carry out instructions such as taking the correct medication at the right times...

In response to recent actions of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which recommended that two scientific journals withhold crucial details in upcoming reports about experiments with a novel strain of the bird flu virus, H5N1, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) will publish a special series of commentaries by prominent scientists, including the acting chair of the NSABB, weighing in on whether the recommendations were necessary and what role biosecurity considerations should play in the dissemination of research findings...

Researchers from the U.K. determined that preoperative cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) is a specific predictor of 90-day survival following liver transplantation. Study results available in the February issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, shows that the CPET measurement - the anaerobic threshold or fitness level - significantly predicts mortality in patients post-transplantation...

Scientists from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) in Brussels identified a new target for cancer therapy, an enzyme which prevents the immune system from recognizing and destroying certain types of tumors. Called tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase or TDO, the enzyme works by depriving immune cells of tryptophan, an amino acid essential to their activity. TDO is produced by a significant number of human tumors. Scientists also show that blocking TDO activity with a novel TDO inhibitor promotes tumor rejection in mice...

Could some cases of asthma actually be caused by an allergic reaction to a common environmental bacteria? New research findings published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that this idea may not be as far-fetched as it seems. In a research report appearing in the February 2012 print issue, researchers show a link between common environmental bacteria and airway inflammation...

New research published online in the FASEB Journal details a new antibody, called "OPN-305" that may significantly improve survival outcomes for those receiving donated kidneys and other organs. OPN-305 works by preventing inflammation triggered by oxygen deprivation in the donated organ, allowing for better recovery after transplantation. Specifically, it binds to sensors on transplant tissue, called "toll-like receptors" or "TLR-2," in the circulating blood and turns off signals that provoke inflammation...