The three most common forms of acute viral hepatitis in the United States ? hepatitis A, B and C ? declined dramatically between 1995 and 2005, with hepatitis A and B at the lowest levels ever recorded since the government began collecting surveillance data more than 40 years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Hepatitis B and C are diseases that can lead to liver cancer and death.
A single, socially stressful situation can kill off new nerve cells in the brain region that processes learning, memory and emotion, and possibly contribute to depression, new animal research shows.
In order to differentiate and specialize, stem cells require very specific environmental cues in a very specific order, and scientists have so far been unable to prod them to go through each of the necessary steps. But now, for the first time, a study in mice by Rockefeller University scientists shows that embryonic stem cells implanted in the brain appear to develop into fully differentiated granule neurons, the most plentiful neuron in the cerebellum.
Using advanced brain imaging techniques, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have watched how humans use both lower and higher brain processes to learn novel tasks, an advance they say may help speed up the teaching of new skills as well as offer strategies to retrain people with perceptual deficits due to autism.
Neurobiologists have discovered a mechanism by which the constantly changing brain retains memories — from that dog bite to that first kiss. They have found that the brain co-opts the same machinery by which cells stably alter their genes to specialize during embryonic development.
Obese men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer have more than two-and-a-half times the risk of dying from the disease as compared to men of normal weight at the time of diagnosis, according to a study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Obese patients have a significantly higher risk of complications following surgery, including heart attack, wound infection, nerve injury and urinary tract infection, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan Health System.
Researchers at Yale and at Johns Hopkins, led by Barry Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of Therapeutic Cognitive Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, have found that a simple blood test to measure uric acid, a measure of kidney function, might reveal a risk factor for cognitive problems and dementia in old age.
New evidence suggests that if you could choose your parents, you could reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Researchers from the long-standing Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, report that people whose parents live longer were more likely to avoid developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease in middle age than their peers whose parents died younger. They also found that the risk factor advantages persisted over time.
Almost one-third of returning veterans who received health care at Veterans Affairs facilities between 2001 and 2005 were given a mental health or psychosocial diagnosis, according to a report in the March 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.