Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While surgical procedures to treat kidney stones are fairly common these days, about one-in-seven results in complications that require additional, potentially expensive, care, according to a new study in the journal Surgery.

The study revealed that the average cost of these complications, in the form of emergency care, is about $30,000.

“Our findings provide a good starting point to understand why these complications are happening and how they can be prevented, because the costs to patients who suffer complications and to the health care system are substantial,” said study author Dr. Charles D. Scales, assistant professor of surgery at Duke University, in a recent statement.

Common therapies to treat kidney stones include using shock waves from outside the body to blast a stone, inserting a tube into the urethra and extracting any stones through a small incision made in the lower back. The total annual cost of these procedures in the United States is estimated at around $10 billion, according to the study team.

In the study, scientists from Duke, the RAND Corporation and UCLA reviewed the end results of greater than 93,000 privately-insured patients who experienced treatment for kidney stones. To determine if follow-up care was necessary after the initial procedure, the scientists looked at emergency room trips or hospital visitations within 30 days of the initial kidney stone treatment, a lengthier window than had been studied prior.

The study team found that patients who had their kidney stone operation at hospitals who regularly report high volumes of the procedure were significantly less likely to have difficulties.

When difficulties took place, they were least frequent after shock wave treatment, afflicting 12 percent of patients. Those who received ureteroscopy therapy, the next most frequent procedure, had even more future related visits, with 15 percent of patients. However, shock wave therapy did have the greater costs linked with the emergency appointments, at over $32,000. Charges for difficulties of incision-based surgery were highest, averaging more than $47,000 when a complication-related visit took place.

Scales said additional study is necessary to discover why these procedures resulted in distinct complication levels and costs, but mentioned patients may not be prepared for difficulties as a result of minimally invasive procedures.

“From the patient perspective, an unplanned emergency department visit or hospital admission after a low-risk ambulatory procedure is a significant event,” Scales said. “Kidney stones are excruciatingly painful and primarily affect people who are of working age. These patients face not only the cost of treatment, but also the financial difficulties from time off work due to pain and treatment.”

With the costs related to medical procedures currently under more scrutiny than ever, these findings are particularly relevant to public policy decisions, Scales said.

“Reducing unplanned emergency visits and hospitalizations associated with kidney stone treatments could result in significant cost savings if the causes can be identified and addressed,” Scales said.

He added that his future research will probably include determining why problems occur and how they can be prevented.

Indiana University
Trampoline accidents sent an estimated 288,876 people, most of them children, to hospital emergency departments with broken bones from 2002 to 2011, at a cost of more than $400 million, according to an analysis by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Including all injuries, not just fractures, hospital emergency rooms received more than 1 million visits from people injured in trampoline accidents during those 10 years, boosting the emergency room bills to just over $1 billion, according to the study.
The research, published online in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopedics, is the first to analyze trampoline fracture patterns in a large population drawn from a national database, said the study’s lead author, Randall T. Loder, M.D., chair of the IU School of Medicine Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and a surgeon at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health.
“There have not been any large-scale studies of these injuries,” Dr. Loder said. “We wanted to document the patterns of injury. This gives us an idea of the magnitude of the problem across the country.”
Dr. Loder and his colleagues retrieved data for all trampoline-related injuries for the decade beginning 2002 from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which collects data from a sample of 100 hospitals across the country. Using statistical techniques, they estimated there were just over 1 million emergency department visits, with 288,876 of them involving fractures.
About 60 percent of the fractures were upper-extremity injuries, notably fingers, hands, forearms and elbows. Lower-extremity fractures most commonly were breaks in the lower leg — the tibia and fibula — and ankles. Just over 4 percent involved fractures to the axial skeleton, including the spine, head, and ribs and sternum. An estimated 2,807 spinal fractures were reported during the period studied.
“Fortunately, there were fewer spine injuries than might have been expected, but those can be catastrophic,” said Meagan Sabatino, clinical research coordinator for pediatric orthopedic surgery and a study co-author.
While the average age for most of the injuries was about 9 years old, the average age for axial skeleton injuries was substantially higher at 16.6 years old.
“They’re probably jumping higher, with more force,” Dr. Loder said.
“And believe me, teenagers are risk takers. Younger kids may not understand potential outcomes of their actions, but they’re not so much risk takers. Teenagers, they’ll just push the limit,” he said.
Year by year, the researchers reported that emergency department visits rose steadily from just under 40,000 in 1991 to a peak of about 110,000 in 2004. Since then the numbers have fallen, to just over 80,000 in 2011.
“The number of injuries has declined, but not fast enough,” Dr. Loder said.
Because the data are collected only from hospitals, both the numbers of injuries and costs are likely significantly underestimated because some patients likely went to urgent care centers or family physicians for treatment. Moreover, the data do not include costs for non-emergency-room care, from surgery to subsequent physical therapy or other treatments for more serious injuries.
Nearly all of the fractures — 95 percent — occurred at the patient’s home. Noting that both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons strongly advise against home trampoline use, the researchers endorsed more education and better prevention strategies directed to homeowners.
In an interview, Dr. Loder went further, saying he would like to see home trampolines banned.
“I think trampolines should not be allowed in backyards. It’s that simple,” he said. “It’s a significant public health problem.”
Also contributing to the study was William Schultz, a medical student at the IU School of Medicine.
The IU Department of Orthopaedic Surgery provided support for the research.
—

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Marriage is hard work and can often lead to stress. A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reveals that such marital stress could make people more susceptible to depression.

According to the research team, people who experience chronic stress in their marriage are less able to savor positive experiences, and are more likely to report other depressive symptoms. The findings, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Psychophysiology, have important implications for researchers by helping them better understand what makes some people vulnerable to depression, and develop better tools to combat the issue.

The team was led by Dr. Richard Davidson, UW-Madison William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry. Davidson is also the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the UW’s Waisman Center.

“This is not an obvious consequence, if you will, of marital stress, but it’s one I think is extraordinarily important because of the cascade of changes that may be associated,” Davidson said in a recent statement. “This is the signature of an emotional style that reveals vulnerability to depression.”

Many prior studies have shown that married people are typically happier and healthier than their single counterparts. Other studies have shown that when marriage goes wrong, it can become one of the most significant long-term social stressors. This is why the UW-Madison research team thought that chronic marital stress might work as a model for how other common daily stressors might lead to depression and similar conditions.

“How is it that a stressor gets under your skin and how does that make some more vulnerable to maladaptive responses?” says UW-Madison graduate student Regina Lapate.

The research team recruited married adult participants for the longitudinal study, which was part of the National Institute on Aging-funded Midlife in the United States (MIDUS). The study subjects were asked to complete questionnaires, rating their stress on a six-point scale. The questions included such items as how often they felt let down by their partner, or how frequently they were criticized by their partner. The participants were also evaluated for depression.

The researchers repeated the questionnaire and depression assessment approximately nine years later.

As a means of measuring their resilience – which is how fast a person recovers from negative experiences – the participants were invited to the laboratory in year 11 to undergo emotional response testing.

The researchers measured the electrical activity of the corrugator supercilii, or the frowning muscle, while the participants were shown 90 images with a mix of negative, neutral and positive images to assess the intensity and duration of their response.

The frowning muscle has a basal level of tension at all times. During a positive emotional response, the muscle becomes more relaxed, while the tension is increased during a negative emotional response.

Prior studies have found that measuring how activated or relaxed the frown muscle becomes, and how long it takes to return to the basal level of tension, is a reliable method for assessing emotional response and depression.

“It’s a nice way to get at what people are experiencing without asking people for their emotional response: ‘How are you feeling?'” Lapate says.

According to previous research, people with depression have a fleeting response after positive emotional triggers. How long it takes for either the activation or relaxation response to subside is the focus of the current study.

“If you measure at just one time point, you are losing valuable information,” says Lapate.

The most significant time measurement, according to the team, was the five to eight seconds following a positive image exposure.

The researchers found shorter-lived responses to positive stimuli from those participants who had reported higher levels of marital stress than those who had reported more satisfaction in their marriages. For negative responses, however, there was no significant difference.

Davidson wants to focus his future research on finding ways to help people overcome this weakened ability to enjoy positive experiences, enabling them to develop more resilience to stress.

“To paraphrase the bumper sticker: ‘Stress happens,'” says Davidson. “There is no such thing as leading a life completely buffered from the slings and arrows of everyday life.”

Davidson hopes his results will lead to the discovery of better tools to stop this kind of stress from occurring in the first place.

“How we can use simple interventions to actually change this response?” he asks. “What can we do to learn to cultivate a more resilient emotional style?”

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

For years, cancer-research scientists have been using two-dimensional petri dish models to study and test potential treatments. But now, a team of scientists led by Drexel University’s Wei Sun has developed a method for 3-D printing living tumors – a development that could revolutionize cancer research.

According to a report on the development recently published the journal Biofabrication, the team was able to print out viable tumors by using a mixture of cervical cancer cells and a hydrogel substance that looks like a common ointment.

“This is the first time to report that one can build a 3D in vitro tumor model through 3D Printing technology,” said Sun, the director of Drexel’s research center at the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, in a recent statement. “This may lead to a new paradigm for cancer research and for individual cancer therapies. We have developed a technological platform and would like to work with biologists and pathologists to encourage them to use the developed platform for 3D biology and disease studies.”

Because tumors within the body have a distinct surface area, form and cellular structure, cell culture samples grown in a lab come with inherent limitations, meaning information from tests using these specimens will vary from the response of an actual tumor to a treatment. Until now, these cell cultures were their best choice.

“Two-dimensional cell culture models are traditionally used for biology study and drug screening,” Sun said. “However, two-dimensional culture models can not represent true 3D physiological tissues so it lacks the microenvironment characteristics of natural 3D tissues in vivo. This inherent inadequacy leads to shortcomings in cancer research and anti-tumor drug development. On the other hand, 3D tumor models can represent true tumor 3D pathological organizations and will lead to a new paradigm for cancer study.”

[ Watch the Video: Researchers Create Live Cancer Tumors With A 3D Printer ]

In the study, the researchers took several main variables into account: width of nozzle, pace and pressure of extrusion, design and dimensions of deposition, as well as viscosity and temperature of substrates. The team was able to produce cancer cells with a 90 percent survival rate that grew into spheroid-shaped tumors in about eight days.

“The keys to keeping the cells alive were controlling the temperature of the nozzle and using a hearty strain of cancer cells,” Sun said. “We chose the Hela cell, which is a robust form of cervical cancer that has been used in research for many years. Because of this, we had a good idea as to how it would behave under certain conditions. This allowed us to control the variables of the extrusion process until we were able to successfully create a model.”

The researchers compared their 3-D model against a two-dimensional culture sample with a standard anti-cancer drug. The 3-D printed tumors exhibited more resistance to the chemical treatment method than the very same cancer cellular material grown inside a petri dish – an example of the difference that exists between test outcomes and success rates of cancer remedies.

The researchers said they plan to work on printing tumors made from multiple different cells – a characteristic often present in those extracted from cancer patients. They said they also want to find ways to connect the 3-D models to tissues and blood vessels that they have also printed, which would help to replicate how tumors grow in the body.

“We will try to understand the cell-cell and cell-substrate communication and immune responses for the printed tumor-like models,” Sun said. “Our goal is to take this tumor-like model and make it into a more of an in vivo simulation. And to apply it to study the development, invasion and metastasis of cancer, to test the efficacy and safety of new cancer drugs, as well as the specific therapy for individual cancer patient”

Image 2 (below):  After eight days, the printed mixture of cervical cancer cells and hydrogel grows into living spheroid tumors -shown here in fluorescent dye. Credit: Wei Sun, Drexel University

[ Watch the Video: Are Alpha Waves The Future Of Brain Monitoring? ]

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Have you ever mistakenly driven through a red light or been unable to see a familiar face in a crowded room?

By using a unique method to test brain waves, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and City College of New York have detailed new information on how the mind processes sensory stimuli that may or may not be perceived, according to a new report in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

“When we have different things competing for our attention, we can only be aware of so much of what we see,” said study author Kyle Mathewson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC. “For example, when you’re driving, you might really be concentrating on obeying traffic signals.”

Mathewson said this lack of awareness is particularly important when it comes to recognizing an unexpected event – such as a small child running into the middle of the road.

“In the car, we may see something so brief or so faint, while we’re paying attention to something else, that the event won’t come into our awareness,” Mathewson said. “If you present this scenario hundreds of times to someone, sometimes they will see the unexpected event, and sometimes they won’t because their brain is in a different preparation state.”

In the study, the researchers used both electroencephalography (EEG) and the event-related optical signal (EROS) to evaluate 16 participants and chart the electrical and optical information onto individual MRI brain images.

While EEG documents the electric activity across the scalp, EROS uses infra-red light transferred via optical fibers to assess variations in optical properties in the working areas of the cerebral cortex. Due to the skull, EEG sensors are not the best option for determining where brain signals are created. EROS, which investigates how light is dispersed, can non-invasively identify activity inside the brain.

“EROS is based on near-infrared light,” the researchers said. “It exploits the fact that when neurons are active, they swell a little, becoming slightly more transparent to light: this allows us to determine when a particular part of the cortex is processing information, as well as where the activity occurs.”

The researchers’ methods allowed them to chart where suppressing alpha oscillations were coming from. They found that alpha waves are created in the cuneus, which sits an area of the brain that handles visual information.

However, by concentrating interest and being more aware, the executive function of the mind can engage and suppress the alpha waves, thus enabling seeing objects or events that might have been missed in a more laid back mental state.

“We found that the same brain regions known to control our attention are involved in suppressing the alpha waves and improving our ability to detect hard-to-see targets,” said study author Diane Beck, a member of the Beckman’s Cognitive Neuroscience Group.

“Knowing where the waves originate means we can target that area specifically with electrical stimulation” said Mathewson. “Or we can also give people moment-to-moment feedback, which could be used to alert drivers that they are not paying attention and should increase their focus on the road ahead, or in other situations alert students in a classroom that they need to focus more, or athletes, or pilots and equipment operators.”

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

According to a new government report, one in 13 US schoolchildren is taking at least one medication for emotional or behavioral disorders and more than half of the parents of these children maintain that the drugs used are actually working for their kids.

The report is released by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a research arm of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We can’t advise parents on what they should do, but I think it’s positive that over half of parents reported that medications helped ‘a lot,’” said report author LaJeana Howie, a statistical research scientist at NCHS.

For the report, which gleaned data from the National Health Interview Survey, Howie and her colleagues found that among children between the ages six and 17, 7.5 percent used prescribed medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties in 2011-2012.

Among those who were prescribed medications, males and non-Hispanic white children were more likely to be on such pills than females and children of other ethnic groups. Among females, the percentage of children who used prescribed medications was higher for older females (6.3 percent) than for younger girls (4.0 percent). There was no significant difference in percentages between younger and older males.

Prescriptions also varied based on health insurance status and poverty status. A higher percentage (9.9 percent) of children with Medicaid or CHIP coverage used prescribed medications compared with those who had private insurance (6.7 percent) or were uninsured (2.7 percent).

Children living in poverty (9.2 percent) used prescribed medicines more than children in families having income at 100-200 percent of the poverty level (6.6 percent). Prescribed medications in children in families having income 200-400 percent of the poverty level and those with incomes more than 400 percent the poverty level were similar – 7.3 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively.

The report also found differences among children in the parent’s perception of the benefit of medication for emotional or behavioral difficulties.

Overall, about 55 percent of the children had a parent report that the medication being used helped the child “a lot”; 26 percent said they helped “some”; and about 19 percent said the medications either helped “a little” or “not at all.”

Howie and her colleagues noted that they were not able to identify which specific disorders the children were being treated for. However, they believe there is a strong likelihood that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could be the main reason medications are prescribed, based on the fact that 81 percent of children with emotional or behavioral difficulties have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives.

The researchers were also unable to identify the specific medications prescribed to the children in the report.

An expert not involved in the research agreed that ADHD is likely one of the most common conditions involved.

“Although the authors don’t really talk about the diagnoses, ADHD is likely the most overwhelming diagnosis. Oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety and depression are other likely diagnoses,” Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, told HealthDay reporter Serena Gordon.

In regards to the findings in this report, Howie noted that it is difficult to speculate what factors would account for the differences seen.

For his part, Adesman said there are many factors that might contribute to more use of medications in people living under the poverty line and for those on government insurance programs.

“There may be parenting challenges, such as more single-parent households, medications may be more available than access to behavioral treatments, there may be more logistical issues with nonpharmaceutical interventions, like getting time off from work,” Adesman told HealthDay. “Many more families have access to prescription medications than to non-pharmaceutical interventions. There’s a lack of mental health treatment parity.”

“It’s encouraging that children who are identified as taking prescription medications are benefiting from those medications,” Adesman said. However, he added, “There are nonpharmaceutical treatments for virtually all psychiatric diagnoses in children. For households where a child has significant emotional or behavioral difficulties, counseling, behavior management and some forms of psychotherapy can be helpful as well.”

“Over the past two decades, the use of medication to treat mental health problems has increased substantially among all school-aged children and in most subgroups of children,” the researchers wrote in the report. “Data collected by national health surveys play a key role in monitoring and understanding the factors associated with the expanded use of medication for the emotional and behavioral problems of children.”

[ Watch The Video: Bionic Ear Delivers DNA To Regrow Auditory Nerve Cells ]

University of New South Wales

Researchers at UNSW Australia have for the first time used electrical pulses delivered from a cochlear implant to deliver gene therapy, thereby successfully regrowing auditory nerves.

The research also heralds a possible new way of treating a range of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, and psychiatric conditions such as depression through this novel way of delivering gene therapy.

The research is published today (Thursday 24 April) in the prestigious journal Science Translational Medicine.

“People with cochlear implants do well with understanding speech, but their perception of pitch can be poor, so they often miss out on the joy of music,” says UNSW Professor Gary Housley, who is the senior author of the research paper.

“Ultimately, we hope that after further research, people who depend on cochlear implant devices will be able to enjoy a broader dynamic and tonal range of sound, which is particularly important for our sense of the auditory world around us and for music appreciation,” says Professor Housley, who is also the Director of the Translational Neuroscience Facility at UNSW Medicine.

The research, which has the support of Cochlear Limited through an Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant, has been five years in development.

[ Watch The Video: Regenerated Auditory Nerves ]

The work centers on regenerating surviving nerves after age-related or environmental hearing loss, using existing cochlear technology. The cochlear implants are “surprisingly efficient” at localized gene therapy in the animal model, when a few electric pulses are administered during the implant procedure.

“This research breakthrough is important because while we have had very good outcomes with our cochlear implants so far, if we can get the nerves to grow close to the electrodes and improve the connections between them, then we’ll be able to have even better outcomes in the future,” says Jim Patrick, Chief Scientist and Senior Vice-President, Cochlear Limited.

It has long been established that the auditory nerve endings regenerate if neurotrophins – a naturally occurring family of proteins crucial for the development, function and survival of neurons – are delivered to the auditory portion of the inner ear, the cochlea.

But until now, research has stalled because safe, localized delivery of the neurotrophins can’t be achieved using drug delivery, nor by viral-based gene therapy.

[ Watch The Video: Cochlea After Gene Delivery ]

Professor Housley and his team at UNSW developed a way of using electrical pulses delivered from the cochlear implant to deliver the DNA to the cells close to the array of implanted electrodes. These cells then produce neurotrophins.

“No-one had tried to use the cochlear implant itself for gene therapy,” says Professor Housley. “With our technique, the cochlear implant can be very effective for this.”

While the neurotrophin production dropped away after a couple of months, Professor Housley says ultimately the changes in the hearing nerve may be maintained by the ongoing neural activity generated by the cochlear implant.

“We think it’s possible that in the future this gene delivery would only add a few minutes to the implant procedure,” says the paper’s first author, Jeremy Pinyon, whose PhD is based on this work. “The surgeon who installs the device would inject the DNA solution into the cochlea and then fire electrical impulses to trigger the DNA transfer once the implant is inserted.”

Integration of this technology into other ‘bionic’ devices such as electrode arrays used in deep brain stimulation (for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and depression, for example) could also afford opportunities for safe, directed gene therapy of complex neurological disorders.

“Our work has implications far beyond hearing disorders,” says co-author Associate Professor Matthias Klugmann, from the UNSW Translational Neuroscience Facility research team. “Gene therapy has been suggested as a treatment concept even for devastating neurological conditions and our technology provides a novel platform for safe and efficient gene transfer into tissues as delicate as the brain.”

—

University of Maryland
Maintaining hippocampus volume is key to delaying cognitive decline and onset of dementia symptoms in those with genetic risk for Alzheimer’s

A study of older adults at increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease shows that moderate physical activity may protect brain health and stave off shrinkage of the hippocampus– the brain region responsible for memory and spatial orientation that is attacked first in Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. J. Carson Smith, a kinesiology researcher in the University of Maryland School of Public Health who conducted the study, says that while all of us will lose some brain volume as we age, those with an increased genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease typically show greater hippocampal atrophy over time. The findings are published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
“The good news is that being physically active may offer protection from the neurodegeneration associated with genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Smith suggests. “We found that physical activity has the potential to preserve the volume of the hippocampus in those with increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, which means we can possibly delay cognitive decline and the onset of dementia symptoms in these individuals. Physical activity interventions may be especially potent and important for this group.”
Dr. Smith and colleagues, including Dr. Stephen Rao from the Cleveland Clinic, tracked four groups of healthy older adults ages 65-89, who had normal cognitive abilities, over an 18-month period and measured the volume of their hippocampus (using structural magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI) at the beginning and end of that time period. The groups were classified both for low or high Alzheimer’s risk (based on the absence or presence of the apolipoprotein E epsilon 4 allele) and for low or high physical activity levels.
Of all four groups studied, only those at high genetic risk for Alzheimer’s who did not exercise experienced a decrease in hippocampal volume (3%) over the 18-month period. All other groups, including those at high risk for Alzheimer’s but who were physically active, maintained the volume of their hippocampus.
“This is the first study to look at how physical activity may impact the loss of hippocampal volume in people at genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” says Dr. Kirk Erickson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. “There are no other treatments shown to preserve hippocampal volume in those that may develop Alzheimer’s disease. This study has tremendous implications for how we may intervene, prior to the development of any dementia symptoms, in older adults who are at increased genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”
Individuals were classified as high risk for Alzheimer’s if a DNA test identified the presence of a genetic marker – having one or both of the apolipoprotein E-epsilon 4 allele (APOE-e4 allele) on chromosome 19 – which increases the risk of developing the disease. Physical activity levels were measured using a standardized survey, with low activity being two or fewer days/week of low intensity activity, and high activity being three or more days/week of moderate to vigorous activity.
“We know that the majority of people who carry the APOE-e4 allele will show substantial cognitive decline with age and may develop Alzheimer’s disease, but many will not. So, there is reason to believe that there are other genetic and lifestyle factors at work,” Dr. Smith says. “Our study provides additional evidence that exercise plays a protective role against cognitive decline and suggests the need for future research to investigate how physical activity may interact with genetics and decrease Alzheimer’s risk.”
Dr. Smith has previously shown that a walking exercise intervention for patients with mild cognitive decline improved cognitive function by improving the efficiency of brain activity associated with memory. He is planning to conduct a prescribed exercise intervention in a population of healthy older adults with genetic and other risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and to measure the impact on hippocampal volume and brain function.
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[ Watch the Video: Basketball Injuries In High School Athletes On The Rise ]

Nationwide Children’s Hospital

Study calls for more access to on-site athletic trainers to properly assess injuries

Basketball is a popular high school sport in the United States with 1 million participants annually. A recently published study by researchers in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is the first to compare and describe the occurrence and distribution patterns of basketball-related injuries treated in emergency departments and the high school athletic training setting among adolescents and teens.

The study, published online in the Journal of Athletic Training, examined data relating to adolescents 13-19 years of age who were treated in US emergency departments (EDs) from 2005 through 2010 and those treated in the high school athletic training setting during the 2005—2006 through the 2010—2011 academic years for an injury associated with basketball. Nationally, 1,514,957 patients with basketball-related injuries were treated in EDs and 1,064,551 were treated in the athletic training setting.

The study found that in general, injuries that are more easily diagnosed and treated, such as sprains/strains, were more likely to be treated onsite by an athletic trainer while more serious injuries, such as fractures, that require more extensive diagnostic and treatment procedures were more commonly treated in an ED.

“Athletic trainers play a really important role in helping to assess those more mild or moderate injuries and that helps alleviate a burden on the health care system and on families,” said Lara McKenzie, PhD, the study’s lead author and principal investigator in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s. “They are right there on the sidelines. They are there when some of these things happen. And they can be a great resource for families to evaluate that injury immediately.”

In 1998, the American Medical Association recommended all high school sports programs enlist an athletic medicine unit consisting of a physician director and an athletic trainer, yet as of 2009, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association estimated only 42 percent of high school sports teams met this recommendation. With more than half of US high school athletes not having access to an athletic trainer during practice or competition, a vast majority of injured players wind up in urgent care facilities and emergency departments, some unnecessarily.

Dr. McKenzie, also a faculty member at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, said that while athletic trainers cannot treat every injury, they can make the system more efficient by only sending athletes to the hospital when it is necessary and helping athletes return to play when it is safe.

“We are there to prevent injuries, evaluate them quickly, treat them immediately and try our best to make sure that as we return them to play we do it in the most safe and efficient way possible,” said Kerry Waple, ATC, certified athletic trainer in Sports Medicine at Nationwide Children’s. “There are a lot of injuries that happen that are winding up in urgent cares and emergency departments that don’t need to be there.”

The Sports Medicine team at Nationwide Children’s partners with 13 high schools across central Ohio and provides on-site certified athletic trainers for athletes during both practice and competition. The athletic trainers provide immediate triage, diagnosis and treatment to injured athletes and help them return to play safely and at the right time. In addition, Nationwide Children’s Sports Medicine experts provide injury prevention techniques to high school and middle school athletes.

Data for this study were obtained from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), which is operated by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The NEISS database provides information on consumer product-related and sports- and recreation-related injuries treated in hospital emergency departments across the country. Data for this study were also obtained from the High School Reporting Information Online™ database.

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Gyms and McDonalds may seem like polar opposites, but the authors of research appearing in a recent edition of the Sports, Education and Society claim that fast food restaurants and fitness centers have more in common than you might think.
In the study, University of Gothenburg professor Thomas Johansson and Linnaeus University senior lecturer Jesper Andreasson describe how they analyzed how fitness professionals view their occupation in the framework of the global wellness industry, as well as a phenomenon known as “McDonaldisation” of the gym culture.
Their work was based in part on interviews with personal trainers and group fitness instructors, as well as an investigation of Les Mills, an industry leader that operates on a franchise model. Currently, more than 14,000 gyms in 80 different countries have paid for permission to run Les Mills fitness classes, with a total of four million participants taking part during an average week, the authors explained in a March 25 statement.
Like McDonalds and other franchise-based fast food restaurants, Les Mills “implies a standardized set of techniques that look basically the same in all forms of group fitness training,” Johansson explained. “It’s really a business empire built around group fitness.”
The business revolves around a head trainer presenting movements that are strictly adhered to, with music playing while people taking the class are performing the exercises. Updated instructions are delivered every three months to all instructors throughout each of the Les Mills-certified fitness centers, resulting in local educators having extremely little influence over the fitness classes they teach.
Since they are unable to change the movements, music or the delivery method of the exercise instruction, Andreasson noted that the instructors have few opportunities to tap into their entire field of experience. As a result, their talents are not fully utilized, because they must stay so closely to the pre-designated terminology and choreography since the gyms promote their services as a suite of services.
“Even though gym and fitness franchises differ from hamburger restaurant chains, there are crucial similarities, but also differences. One can, for example, discern a tendency towards the construction of predesigned and highly monitored programs,” the authors wrote. “Homogenization is also apparent when looking at the body ideals produced, as fitness professionals work on their own or clients’ bodies, which makes it possible to anticipate a global body ideal.”
“The social and cultural patterns of self-regulation and self-government found in gym and fitness culture can be understood and analyzed in a global context,” they added. “What we find is an intriguing and complex mixture of regulation, control and standardization, on the one hand, and a struggle to express the body, to be ‘free’ and to transgress the boundaries set by the commercial global fitness industry, on the other.”

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While several recent studies on the risk of a child developing an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have focused on paternal age or even the age of the grandfather, a new Sweden-based study has found that risk for ASD increases with the age of both parents – but particularly for would-be mothers.

The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, revealed that ASD risk with parental age increased linearly for older fathers, while risk increased rapidly for women after the age of 30.

“The open question at hand really is, what biological mechanisms underlie these age effects?” said Brian K. Lee, an assistant professor in the Drexel University School of Public Health, in a recent statement.

To reach their conclusion, the researchers reviewed a large population database sample of nearly 420,000 children born in Sweden between 1984 and 2003. The study team considered several possible confounding factors that could fluctuate with parental age and also affect risk, including family income and each parent’s psychiatric background. The study also used a detailed case-finding strategy, to determine more ASD cases than other research studies might, based on all routes to care in a socialized healthcare system.

The researchers said their objective was to analyze the effect of parental age in greater detail by investigating possible differing risks of ASD with and without mental disability – one of the most substantial coinciding diagnoses with ASD, with a substantial effect on well-being. The researcher said their study was the first population-based study with an ASD sample sufficiently large enough to analyze ASD risk in populations of children regardless of intellectual disability.

“When considering risk factors, we can’t necessarily lump all ASD cases together, even though they fall under a broad umbrella of autism,” Lee said. “We need to keep an open mind in case intellectual disability might be a marker of a different underlying mechanism.”

Upon discovering that ASD with intellectual disability had a stronger connection with older parents than ASD without intellectual disability, the study team said their work supports further investigation of possible different causes.

Lee mentioned that, even though age effects are critical indicators of risk at the population level, they aren’t very considerable for a couple’s family planning due to the fact that overall risk remains low.

“The absolute risk of having a child with ASD is still approximately 1 in 100 in the overall sample, and less than 2 in 100 even for mothers up to age 45,” Lee said.

Gerard LeBlond for www.redorbit.com – Your Universe Online

Are mental illness and crime linked?

According to a recent study published by the American Psychological Association, only 7.5 percent of all crimes were directly related to a serious mental disorder. In the analysis, researchers studied 429 crimes that were committed by 143 different offenders with three types of mental illness.

Based on the results, the study authors stated that three percent of the crimes these individuals committed were directly related to the symptoms of major depression, four percent with schizophrenia and 10 percent with bipolar disorder.

“When we hear about crimes committed by people with mental illness, they tend to be big headline-making crimes so they get stuck in people’s heads. The vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, not criminal and not dangerous,” said lead researcher Jillian Peterson, PhD, of Normandale Community College.

The study consisted of former defendants of a mental health court in Minneapolis completing a two-hour interview about their criminal background and mental health symptoms over an average of 15 years. The study, published online in the journal Law and Human Behavior, is the first to analyze the connection between mental illness and crime.

There were no predictable patterns discovered linking crime and mental illness in the study. Of the offenders who committed the crimes that were directly related to their illness, two-thirds stated they also had committed crimes unrelated to mental illness, like poverty, being unemployed, substance abuse or being homeless.

“Is there a small group of people with mental illness committing crimes again and again because of their symptoms? We didn’t find that in this study,” Peterson said.

There are more than 1.2 million people with mental illness currently in jails and prisons and two to four times the people on parole or probation as the people without any mental disorder.

The study assessed the crimes committed by people with the three major mental disorders and placed them into three categories: no relationship to the crime; mostly unrelated to the crime; and related or directly related to the crime.

When the study was complete, researchers found that when combining the latter categories, only 18 percent of the crimes were related to their disorder. The crimes committed by people with bipolar disorder resulted in 62 percent of them being directly or mostly related to their symptoms, with an additional 23 percent to schizophrenia and 15 percent to depression. Peterson also said that the bipolar result may have been inflated due to the fact the some persons may have been on drugs or alcohol.

The participants were mostly male with the average age of 40, were 42 percent white, 42 percent black and 16 percent other races. Of these offenders, 85 percent had substance abuse problems. Crimes of a violent nature were not included in the study, but the participants described other violent crimes they had committed. The study also did not cover how substance abuse interacted with mental illness to influence their behavior.

The researchers suggested that programs should be expanded to help mentally ill people with treatment to include cognitive-behavioral treatment about criminal thinking, anger management and other behavioral issues. Basic needs programs are also essential for offenders after incarceration that include drug treatment, housing and employment, according to Peterson.

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Codeine, or 3-methylmorphine, is an opioid that is used to treat mild to moderate pain and to suppress cough. While it is widely prescribed to adults, it is of great concern that US emergency rooms continue to prescribe it to children, despite its potentially harmful effects.
A report published in the May issue of the journal Pediatrics, offers some solutions to this dangerous practice. Solutions include provider prescription behaviors to promote the use of better alternatives to codeine, such as ibuprofen and hydrocodone.
“Despite strong evidence against the use of codeine in children, the drug continues to be prescribed to large numbers of them each year,” lead author Sunitha Kaiser, MD, UCSF assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, noted in a statement. “It can be prescribed in any clinical setting, so it is important to decrease codeine prescription to children in other settings such as clinics and hospitals, in addition to emergency rooms.”
There is much variability in how children process codeine. A third of all children receive no symptom relief from taking the drug and one in 12 can accumulate toxic amounts of the opioid, leading to breathing difficulties and possible death.
The use of codeine in children is highly unadvised by national and international organizations.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued guidelines in 1997 (reaffirmed in 2006) that warn of the dangers and lack of documented effectiveness of codeine use in children with cough and cold. As well, the American College of Chest Physicians issued a guideline in 2006, advising against the reliance of the drug for pediatric cough.
Previously, there was no information on to what extent codeine was being prescribed to children in ERs around the country. For the most part, it is generally prescribed for everything from a painful injury to cough due to cold in children.
To determine just how often codeine is prescribed in US emergency rooms, Kaiser and her colleagues used the National Hospital and Ambulatory Medical Care Survey from the National Center for Health Statistics. The study looked at codeine prescriptions to children ages three to 17 who visited the ER between 2001 and 2010.
The team found the rates of codeine prescriptions decreased from 3.7 percent to 2.9 percent during the 10-year period. However, they found that too many children are still being prescribed the drug, from 559,000 to 877,000 codeine prescriptions per year – averaging out to nearly 2,000 codeine prescriptions per day.
The team also found no decline in codeine prescriptions associated with the 2006 guideline.
Based on their findings, the authors said codeine prescriptions were higher in children between the ages of eight and 12 and in regions outside the Northeast, and lower in non-Hispanic children or those with Medicaid.
“Further research is needed to determine the reasons for these lower rates so we can reduce codeine prescriptions to all children,” Kaiser said.
“Many children are at risk of not getting any benefit from codeine, and we know there are safer, more effective alternatives available,” Kaiser added. “A small portion of children are at risk of fatal toxicity from codeine, mainly in situations that make them more vulnerable to the effects of high drug levels such as after a tonsillectomy.”
Instead of codeine, Kaiser thinks ERs should be prescribing ibuprofen, which is equal to or better for treating injury pain. As well, she maintains that hydrocodone is a much safer and more effective alternative to codeine. Also, dark honey has been shown to be better at suppressing cough than most over-the-counter medicines, and the AAP recommends it for children over 12 months of age.

By Marla Vacek Broadfoot, Duke University

Ten-year effort yields map for finding weaknesses in the fungus

Within each strand of DNA lies the blueprint for building an organism, along with the keys to its evolution and survival. These genetic instructions can give valuable insight into why pathogens like Cryptococcus neoformans — a fungus responsible for a million cases of pneumonia and meningitis every year — are so malleable and dangerous.

Now researchers have sequenced the entire genome and all the RNA products of the most important pathogenic lineage of Cryptococcus neoformans, a strain called H99. The results, which appear April 17 in PLOS Genetics, also describe a number of genetic changes that can occur after laboratory handling of H99 that make it more susceptible to stress, hamper its ability to sexually reproduce and render it less virulent.

The study provides a playbook that can be used to understand how the pathogen causes disease and develop methods to keep it from evolving into even deadlier strains.

“We are beginning to get a grasp on what makes this organism tick. By having a carefully annotated genome of H99, we can investigate how this and similar organisms can change and mutate and begin to understand why they aren’t easily killed by antifungal medications,” said study coauthor John Perfect, M.D., a professor of medicine at Duke who first isolated H99 from a patient with cryptococcal meningitis 36 years ago.

The fungus Cryptococcus neoformans is a major human pathogen that primarily infects individuals with compromised immune systems, such as patients undergoing transplant or those afflicted with HIV/AIDS. Researchers have spent many years conducting genetic, molecular and virulence studies on Cryptococcus neoformans, focusing almost exclusively on the H99 strain originally isolated at Duke. Interestingly, investigators have noticed that over time, the strain became less and less virulent as they grew it in the laboratory.

“Virulence, or the ability of this organism to cause disease in mice or humans, is not very stable. It changes, and can rapidly be lost or gained. When the organism is in the host it is in one state, but when we take it out of the host and begin growing it in the laboratory it begins mutating,” said Fred Dietrich, senior study author and associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine.

Dietrich and his colleagues decided that the best way to investigate how the virulence of this pathogen could change over time was to develop a carefully annotated genomic map of the H99 strain, both in its original state as well as after it had been cultured. In an effort that took ten years and dozens of collaborators, the researchers sequenced the original H99 and nine other cultured variants, analyzing both the genome, the genetic code written in the DNA, as well as the transcriptome, the RNA molecules that occupy the second step in the flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to protein.

The researchers found that the organism possessed a number of molecular tricks — such as the ability to produce genetic messages from both strands of DNA — that enable it to adapt and survive in changing conditions.

“Cryptococcus neoformans has to cope with a large number of different stresses and probably needs a very flexible metabolism. It is tempting to hypothesize that its complex RNA metabolism provides a mechanism to achieve such flexibility,” said Guilhem Janbon, Ph.D., lead study author and faculty in molecular mycology at the Pasteur Institute.

They also discovered that the original and cultured strains were surprisingly similar to each other. After scanning the 20 million A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s that make up the pathogen’s genetic code, they found only 11 single nucleotide variants and 11 insertions or deletions that could explain why cultured strains behaved differently.

“Our results provide the groundwork needed to understand how this organism causes disease, because the next step will involve mutating every gene one by one to see which ones are required for pathogenesis,” said Joseph Heitman, M.D., Ph.D., senior study author and professor and chair of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke.

The results will not only help researchers study this particular organism, but can also serve as a starting point for studies on other strains of Cryptococcus neoformans.

“This genome will serve as an important reference for the field, to enable a wide range of analysis from examining individual genes to comparing the genomes and transcriptomes of other strains and conditions,” said Christina Cuomo, Ph.D., study co-author and leader of the Fungal Genome Sequencing and Analysis Group at the Broad Institute. “We are already leveraging this genome to identify variants in the sequence of hundreds of additional isolates of Cryptococcus neoformans.”

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In a significant breakthrough a team of scientists from California and Seoul, South Korea have been able to create viable stem cells from an adult donor that perfectly match the donor’s DNA, according to a new report in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
The development, referred to as “therapeutic cloning,” involves the production of embryonic cells for scientific purposes and many object to this type of research based on moral or religious grounds. Debate over this type of work was stoked in 1997 with the announcement that it was used to create the clone of a sheep, called Dolly. In 2005, the United Nations called for a ban on cloning and the United States government currently prohibits the use of federal dollars for cloning research.
The scientists behind the latest development, which was partially funded by the government of South Korea, acknowledged that if the embryos in their study were implanted in a uterus they could have developed into a fetus.
“Without regulations in place, such embryos could also be used for human reproductive cloning, although this would be unsafe and grossly unethical,” study author Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientist of Massachusetts-based biotech Advanced Cell Technology, told Reuters reporter Sharon Begley.
To produce viable stem cells from an adult donor, the researchers first inserted DNA from an adult skin cell into a donated ovum. The scientists then delivered an electric shock to fuse the genetic material to the ovum. Eventually, the ovum divides and multiplies – becoming a viable embryo in five or six days. Pluripotent stem cells, which can become any type of cell in the body, are located on the interior of this embryo.
Last year, a team of Oregon scientists reported on their success in combining genetic material from fetal and infant cells with DNA-extracted eggs. The team was able to develop their eggs into approximately 150-cell embryos.
The Oregon team said a major aspect of their success was allowing the engineered eggs to sit for 30 minutes before hitting them with the charge of electricity that – like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster – set the eggs on the path to becoming alive.
In the new study, the researchers waited two hours before triggering the egg, which Lanza said allowed them to succeed.
“It gives you time for the massive amount of genetic reprogramming required” for the adult DNA to develop into an embryo, he told Begley.
Although the scientists were able to achieve success, the process is highly inefficient – with the team only able to produce 1 embryo out of 39 tries for each adult donor, ages 35 and 75. According to Lanza, the low success rate and high costs of the techniques means only extremely wealthy individuals would be able to generate stem cells from their own DNA as it currently stands.
The geneticist added that another major barrier to widespread adoption is the lack of donated human eggs – which are extracted through a sometimes painful procedure.
On a more positive note, Lanza said a unique stem cell for each person may not be necessary for stem cell therapies as only “100 human embryonic stem cell lines would generate a complete match for over half the (US) population.”

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

New research from scientists at Stanford University has revealed a genetic variant that raises the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in women, but not in men.

After analyzing information on numerous older individuals who were followed over time, the scientists recognized a genetic variant called ApoE4 that conveyed the sex-specific elevated risk level, according to their report in the Annals of Neurology.

While more women suffer from Alzheimer’s than men, women also tend to live longer increasing their odds of developing the cognitive disorder. However, the study researchers found the risk from the genetic variant remained even after considering age.

“Even after correcting for age, women appear to be at greater risk,” said Dr. Michael Greicius, study author and assistant professor of neurology at Stanford.

In the study, researchers considered records that had been stored in two large, openly available databases. In one repository, the scientists reviewed clinical assessments of 5,000 people whose cognitive test outcome was normal at the start and 2,200 people who had originally showed indications of mild cognitive impairment.

Within both groups, being an ApoE4 carrier showed higher probability of Alzheimer’s disease. Additionally, the team also saw that for those who began with normal cognitive function, the greater risk was only minimal for men, while women who had the ApoE4 variant had near double the odds of moving on to mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease as people who didn’t.

“Our study showed that, among healthy older controls, having one copy of the ApoE4 variant confers a substantial Alzheimer’s disease risk in women, but not in men,” Greicius said.

From the second database, researchers examined imaging information and measurements of a number of biomarkers from spinal fluid that signal mild cognitive impairment and ultimately Alzheimer’s disease. Evaluation of 1,000 patients’ files from this collection not only validated ApoE4’s sex-specific effect, but it also produced evidence that may assist investigators in exploring, and potentially explaining, the molecular components connecting ApoE4 to Alzheimer’s disease, Greicius said.

The ApoE gene codes for a protein vital for moving fatty substances all over the body. This is especially critical in the neurological system, as brain function relies on quick rearrangement of these kinds of fatty substances along and among nerve cell membranes. The ApoE gene can be seen in three varieties – ApoE2, ApoE3 and ApoE4 – which are inherited based on variants in the gene’s sequence. This means that the Apo protein also comes in three versions, whose constructions and performances differ.

Most people carry two versions of the ApoE3 gene variant – one from each parent. However, approximately 20 percent have at least one copy of the risk-elevating ApoE4 gene, and a small proportion has two ApoE4 copies. Several previous reports have validated that ApoE4 is a high-risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, with one copy of ApoE4 doubling or quadrupling that risk. Having two copies has been found to boost the risk of Alzheimer’s by 10 times.

Greicius said the results of the study means clinicians need to take different approaches to Alzheimer’s patients based on their sex.

“These days, a lot of people are getting genotyped either in the clinic or commercially,” he said. “People come to me and say, ‘I have an ApoE4 gene, what should I do?’ If that person is a man, I would tell him that his risk is not increased much if at all. If it’s a woman, my advice will be different.”

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Most people engage in extreme sports, such as climbing Mount Everest, in an attempt to gain insight about themselves. A group of researchers from the University of Southampton and University College London (UCL) climbed Mount Everest to gain new insights into the molecular process of how some people get Type II diabetes. Their findings, published in PLOS ONE, could lead to new ways of preventing people from getting the condition.

The study was designed to assess the mechanisms by which low oxygen levels in the body, called hypoxia, are associated with insulin resistance.

Insulin allows the body to regulate sugar levels, which is necessary for good health. When cells fail to respond to insulin in the body, the patient is said to have developed insulin resistance. This resistance causes there to be too much sugar in the body, which is toxic and leads to Type II diabetes.

Following sustained exposure—six to eight weeks—to hypoxia at high altitudes, the researchers found that several markers of insulin resistance were increased. The change in these biomarkers is related to increased blood levels of markers of inflammation and oxidative stress, as well.

The researchers collected their data as part of a study in 2007 called Caudwell Xtreme Everest. This study was coordinated by the UCL Center for Altitude, Space and Extreme environment medicine (CASE Medicine) and led by Southampton Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care, Mike Grocott.

Grocott is also the co-founder of UCL Case Medicine and currently leads the Critical Care Research Area within the Southampton National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit.

“These results have given us useful insight into the clinical problem of insulin resistance. Fat tissue in obese people is believed to exist in a chronic state of mild hypoxia because the small blood vessels are unable to supply sufficient oxygen to fat tissue. Our study was unique in that it enabled us to see things in healthy people at altitude that which we might normally only see in obese people at sea level. The results suggest possible interventions to reduce progression towards full-blown diabetes, including measures to reduce oxidative stress and inflammation within the body,” Grocott said in a statement.

Twenty-four participants traveled to Mount Everest, undergoing assessments of glucose control, body weight changes and inflammation biomarkers at Everest Base Camp. Half of the study group remained at Base Camp, at an altitude of approximately 17,400 feet, while half climbed to a maximum elevation of approximately 29,000 feet—the highest point on the mountain. Measurements were taken for both groups at six weeks and eight weeks into the trip.

The research team wanted to increase scientific understanding of critically ill patients, as well as achieve the first ever blood oxygen measurement for a human at 27,600 feet on the Balcony of Everest—a small platform past Camp IV where climbers can rest and take in the view at the top of the world.

Hypoxia is a fundamental problem for patients who are critically ill, and this study is part of an extensive and continuing program of research into hypoxia, improving the care of the critically ill, and human performance at extreme altitudes. The same team of researchers has continued this program with Xtreme Everest 2 in the spring of 2013.

Dr Daniel Martin, Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant, UCL Division of Surgery and Interventional Science and Director of UCL CASE Medicine, added, “These exciting results give us a unique insight into the possible mechanism of insulin resistance in diabetes and provide some clues as to where we should be thinking about focusing further research on novel treatments for this disease. It also demonstrates the value of using healthy volunteers in studies carried out at high altitude to patients at sea level. Our high altitude experimental model for investigating every day illnesses that involve tissue hypoxia is a fantastic way to test hypotheses that would otherwise be very difficult to explore.”

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Our taste in food is an intimately personal thing. Some foods we savor, and some we despise. Tastes, texture and temperature are just a few things that can make a difference.

A team of researchers wondered if the way we chew and eat our food could also impact our overall consumption? Their results, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, suggest that people perceive foods that are hard, or have a rough texture, to have fewer calories.

The research team included Dipayan Biswas and Courtney Szocs of the University of South Florida, Aradhna Krishna of the University of Michigan, and Donald R. Lehmann of Columbia University.

“We studied the link between how a food feels in your mouth and the amount we eat, the types of food we choose, and how many calories we think we are consuming,” the team wrote in a statement.

The research team conducted five laboratory studies where participants were asked to sample foods that were hard, soft, rough, or smooth and then measured calorie estimations for the food.

The research team required participants to watch and evaluate a series of television ads in one of the studies. The participants were given cups filled with bite-sized brownie bits as tokens of appreciation for their time during the tests. After watching the ads, half the participants were questioned about the caloric content of the brownies and half were not. Each of these two groups were split in half again, with half receiving hard brownie bites and half receiving soft brownie bites.

Participants who were not made to focus on caloric content consumed a higher volume of brownies when they were soft instead of hard. The group that was asked to focus on caloric content, however, consumed a higher volume of hard brownie bites rather than soft ones.

The researchers suggest that brands interested in promoting the health benefits of their products can emphasize texture, as well as drawing attention to low-calorie foods. “Understanding how the texture of food can influence calorie perceptions, food choice, and consumption amount can help nudge consumers towards making healthier choices,” the authors conclude.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
People can improve their diets, according to a new study from Baylor College of Medicine, simply by enjoying white or brown rice as part of their daily routine. The research, funded by the US Department of Agriculture and the USA Rice Federation, was published online in a recent issue of Food and Nutrition Sciences.
The researchers, led by Theresa Nicklas, DrPH, of Baylor College of Medicine, analyzed the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) datasets from 2005-2010 for the study. Then, using a nationally representative sample of 14,386 US adults, they evaluated the association of rice consumption with overall diet quality and key nutrient intakes.
“Our results show that adults who eat rice had diets more consistent with what is recommended in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, and they showed higher amounts of potassium, magnesium, iron, folate and fiber while eating less saturated fat and added sugars,” said Nicklas. “Eating rice is also associated with eating more servings of fruit, vegetables, meat and beans,” she added.
Americans consume approximately 27 pounds of enriched white and brown rice per person per year. Around 70 percent of rice consumption consists of enriched white rice. There are a variety of grain-based foods in the average American diet, with rice standing out because it is primarily eaten as an intact grain. Rice is naturally sodium free, with only trace amounts of fat, and no saturated fat. This allows consumers to control the addition of fat, salt and flavors at their own discretion.
The current study builds on the work of two prior studies that revealed the positive contribution of rice to diet quality. In 2009, an observational study used NHANES datasets and data from Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII) to find that significantly less fat was consumed by rice eaters. Rice eaters also consume more iron, potassium, fiber, meat, vegetables and grains. A follow-up study in 2010 also used the NHANES datasets, but included children in the study group. This study confirmed that rice consumption was associated with greater intake of a range of healthier foods and nutrients. Because the majority of rice consumed was white rice, the researchers suggest that when rice is consumed with other foods such as fruit, vegetables, meat and beans, it provides valuable nutrients while boosting the beneficial effects on an individual’s diet.
These studies taken together demonstrate that if you focus on eating the right combination of foods, it will help Americans get closer to meeting their nutrient needs. The key recommendation of the Dietary Guidelines is, after all, that our goal should be to aim for a healthy eating pattern. These studies show that rice eaters are doing this,” said Anne Banville, vice president of the USA Rice Federation.
A human clinical trial also found that including brown or white rice to a meal increased satiety and feelings of fullness more than a calorically equivalent glucose solution control. When considered with the results of the cross-sectional findings, the research team suggests that both enriched white rice and whole grain brown rice should be recommended as part of a healthy diet.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
The identification of two new biomarkers could help medical researchers identify autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in children as young as nine months old – one year earlier than the average screening age.
According to lead author Carole A. Samango-Sprouse, an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at George Washington University, head circumference and head tilting reflex are reliable ways to determine whether or not children between the ages of 9 and 12 months could be autistic.
While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that ASD can be identified in youngsters who are at least two years old, most children are not diagnosed until the age of four. While multiple research papers claim parents of autistic children have anecdotally noticed developmental problems during the first year of life, the investigators point out there has been no official diagnostic method to identify those children.
“While the ‘gold standard’ screening tool is the M-CHAT questionnaire, it must be read and completed by parents and then interpreted by a health care provider,” said Samango-Sprouse.
“What physicians are missing is a quick and effective screening measure that can easily be given to all infants regardless of background and identify ASD before 12 months. This screening is also helpful in identifying those babies who may not initially appear to be at risk and would otherwise be missed until much later in life,” she added.
The authors looked at the use of head circumference and head tilting reflex as biomarkers that could potentially be used during non-illness-related primary care providers. Nearly 1,000 patients underwent both screenings during their four, six, and nine-month well-baby visits, and evaluated at the end of nine months, they explained.
Infants with head circumferences at or above the 75th percentile, those with a head circumference discrepancy of at least 10 percent in comparison to the baby’s height, or those who did not pass a head tilting reflex test were deemed to be at-risk for ASD or a developmental language delay. A neurodevelopmental specialist and pediatric neurologist were then brought in to evaluate those children and differentiate between the two disorders.
Forty-nine infants displayed abnormal results without previous diagnosis. Of those, 15 were identified as at-risk for autism and 34 were at-risk for developmental language delay. Furthermore, 14 of the 15 children who were at-risk for ASD were clinically diagnosed with the disorder when they turned three years old.
“We will continue looking at the efficacy of the head circumference and head tilting reflex as a screening tool for these disorders,” said Dr. Andrea Gropman, a contributor to the study and division chief of neurogenetics at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC.
“As with all developmental delays, especially ASD, the sooner we can identify those children who are at risk, the sooner we can intervene and provide appropriate treatment. In other words, the sooner we identify these delays, the better the outcome for those affected,” she added.
In related news, research published earlier this month in the Journal of Pediatric Nursing found that children suffering from ASD could benefit from interacting with dogs. According to the authors, those pets could provide the youngsters with unconditional love, companionship, stress relief and opportunities to learn responsibility.
Gretchen Carlisle, a research fellow at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine’s Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction, and her co-authors interviewed 70 parents with autistic children and found that nearly two-thirds of those families had pet dogs. Of those families, 94 percent said that the kids had bonded with their pets, and even 70 percent of non-dog owners said that their children liked dogs.