Streptococci and E. coli continue to put newborns at risk for sepsis
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Bloodstream infections in newborns can lead to serious complications with substantial morbidity and mortality. What’s more, the pathogens responsible for neonatal infections have changed over time. In recent years, however, antibiotic prophylaxis given to at-risk mothers has reduced the incidence of early-onset group B streptococcal infections among their babies.
A new nationwide, multi-site study aimed at determining current early-onset sepsis rates among newborns, the pathogens involved, and associated morbidity and mortality demonstrates that the most frequent pathogens associated with sepsis are group B streptococci (GBS) in full-term infants and Escherichia coli in preterm infants.
The study, which included nearly 400,000 newborns, also found that infection rates in newborns increased with decreasing gestational age and birth weight. The overall rate of infection was 0.98 per 1,000 live births; 0.41 per 1,000 live births involving GBS and 0.28 per 1,000 live births involving E. coli.
Blocking crucial molecule could help treat multiple sclerosis, Jefferson neuroscientists say
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Reporting in Nature Immunology, Jefferson neuroscientists have identified a driving force behind autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), and suggest that blocking this cell-signaling molecule is the first step in developing new treatments to eradicate these diseases.
Researchers led by Abdolmohamad Rostami, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, found that GM-CSF, which stands for Granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, appears to be the key culprit in the onset of MS, because without it, T helper 17 cells (Th17) cells did not induce the MS-like disease in an experimental animal model.
Th17 cells have been shown to play an important pathogenic role in humans and experimental models of autoim¬mune diseases, but the mechanisms behind this have remained elusive until now.
Penn Research Using Frog Embryos Leads to New Understanding of Cardiac Development
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During embryonic development, cells migrate to their eventual location in the adult body plan and begin to differentiate into specific cell types. Thanks to new research at the University of Pennsylvania, there is new insight into how these processes regulate tissues formation in the heart.
A developmental biologist at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, Jean-Pierre Saint-Jeannet, along with a colleague, Young-Hoon Lee of South Korea’s Chonbuk National University, has mapped the embryonic region that becomes the part of the heart that separates the outgoing blood in Xenopus, a genus of frog.
Xenopus is a commonly used model organism for developmental studies, and is a particularly interesting for this kind of research because amphibians have a single ventricle and the outflow tract septum is incomplete.
Addiction to sunbeds gave me skin cancer… and left me with a gaping hole in my leg
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A woman who admits her sunbed addiction left her looking like an ‘Oompa Loompa’ was left with a gaping hole in her leg after a battle with skin cancer.
Doctors were forced to gouge away part of Stacey Pickess’s leg when her twice-weekly sunbed habit left her with a malignant melanoma.
The 28-year-old beautician managed to beat the cancer - but has been left with a hole the size of a golf ball in her lower leg as a constant reminder.
Playing music as a child helps you stay sharp in old age
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Endless hours of piano practice can be the bane of a child’s life - but there might be an added benefit of sticking with it.
A study has found that learning a musical instrument as a child could keep you sharp into old age.
Pensioners who had piano, flute, clarinet or other lessons as a youngster, did better on intelligence tests than others.
Scientists take steps to making “bionic” leg
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As 20-year-old Hailey Daniswicz flexes muscles in her thigh, electrodes attached to her leg instruct a computer avatar to flex its knee and ankle—parts of Hailey’s leg that have been missing since 2005.
Daniswicz, a sophomore at Northwestern University who lost her lower leg to bone cancer, is training the computer to recognize slight movements in her thigh so she can eventually be fitted with a “bionic” leg—a robotic prosthesis she would control with her own nerves and muscles.
“We’re really integrating the machine with the person,” said Levi Hargrove, a research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago’s Center for Bionic Medicine who is leading the project.
UK immigrant screening misses most latent TB: study
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British tuberculosis screening for new immigrants fails to detect most imported cases of latent disease and screening should be widened to include more people from the Indian subcontinent, scientists said on Thursday.
Britain has recently been dubbed “the tuberculosis (TB) capital of Europe” and is the only country in Western Europe with rising rates of disease.
Current British border policies require immigrants from countries with a TB incidence higher than 40 per 100,000 people to have a chest X-ray on arrival to check for active TB.
White House announces plans to reduce prescription drug abuse
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President Barack Obama’s administration unveiled on Tuesday a plan to fight what it calls a prescription drug abuse epidemic.
Between 2002 and 2009, the number of Americans aged 12 and older abusing pain relievers increased by 20 percent, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
“Unintentional drug overdose is a growing epidemic in the U.S. and is now the leading cause of injury death in 17 states,” Center for Disease Control Director Dr. Thomas Frieden was quoted as saying in a statement from the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Breastfeeding tied to stronger maternal response to baby’s cry
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A new study from the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry finds that mothers who feed their babies breast milk exclusively, as opposed to formula, are more likely to bond emotionally with their child during the first few months after delivery. The breastfeeding mothers surveyed for the study showed greater responses to their infant’s cry in brain regions related to caregiving behavior and empathy than mothers who relied upon formula as the baby’s main food source. This is the first paper to examine the underlying neurobiological mechanisms as a function of breastfeeding, and to connect brain activity with maternal behaviors among human mothers.
The fMRI-based findings suggest that breastfeeding and factors associated with breastfeeding, such has high levels of hormones (oxytocin, prolactin), stress, and culture may all play an important role for mothers’ brain activity and parenting behaviours during the early postpartum period. The research shows that up to three or four months after delivery some of the brain regions originally observed at one month postpartum (amygdala, putamen, globus pallidus, and superior frontal gyrus) continued to activate and were correlated with maternal, sensitive behavior among the same group of mothers.
The findings highlight the dramatic relationship between breastfeeding, brain activity and parenting behaviours during the early postpartum period.
Spring-cleaning the mind?
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Lapses in memory occur more frequently with age, yet the reasons for this increasing forgetfulness have not always been clear. According to new research from Concordia University, older individuals have reduced learning and memory because their minds tend to be cluttered with irrelevant information when performing tasks. Published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, these findings offer new insights into why ageing is associated with a decline in memory and may lead to practical solutions.
“The first step of our study was to test the working memory of a younger and older population and compare the results,” says Mervin Blair, first author and a PhD student in Concordia’s Department of Psychology and a member at the Centre for Research in Human Development. “In our study, working memory refers to the ability of both retaining and processing information.”
Some 60 participants took part in the study: half were an average of 23 years old, while the other half was about 67 years old. Each participant was asked to perform a working memory task, which included recalling and processing different pieces of information.
Blood Test Could Predict Metastasis Risk in Melanoma
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Scientists at Yale University have identified a set of plasma biomarkers that could reasonably predict the risk of metastasis among patients with melanoma, according to findings published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
“The rate at which melanoma is increasing is dramatic, and there is a huge number of patients under surveillance,” said Harriet Kluger, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. “Our current method of surveillance includes periodic imaging, which creates huge societal costs.”
Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in men and the seventh most common cancer in women. It is estimated that 68,130 people in the United States were diagnosed in 2010, and 8,700 died. With proper screening, melanoma can often be caught early enough to be removed with surgery, and mortality typically comes when the cancer metastasizes. The risk of metastasis varies from less than 10 percent for those with stage 1A melanoma, to as high as 70 percent with stage 3C.
A cancer marker and treatment in 1?
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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say antibodies to a non-human sugar molecule commonly found in people may be useful as a future biomarker for predicting cancer risk, for diagnosing cancer cases early and, in sufficient concentration, used as a treatment for suppressing tumor growth.
The work was led by Richard Schwab, MD, assistant clinical professor of medicine, and Ajit Varki, MD, professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine, with other faculty at the UCSD Moores Cancer Center and the UCSD Glycobiology Research and Training Center. Collaborators include researchers from the groups of Xi Chen at UC Davis, Inder Verma at the Salk Institute and scientists from Sialix, Inc., a biotechnology company based in Vista, CA.
It is published in the April 19 online issue of the journal Cancer Research and in the May 1 print edition.
Obama to Republicans: ‘You think we’re stupid?’
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President Barack Obama said he challenged Republicans to try to repeal his landmark healthcare reform in private budget talks last week, taunting his opponents with a question: “You think we’re stupid?”
In one of three political fund-raisers for his re-election campaign on Thursday night, Obama spoke candidly to supporters about the closed-door White House conversations that led to a deal that barely avoided a shutdown of the U.S. government.
He said he warned Republicans he would veto any legislation passed by Congress that sought to defund his 2010 healthcare overhaul. Republicans, who took control of the U.S. House of Representatives later that year, had vowed to kill the law.
Rising star of brain found to regulate circadian rhythms
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The circadian system that controls normal sleep patterns is regulated by a group of glial brain cells called astrocytes, according to a study published online on April 14th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Neuroscientists from Tufts University School of Medicine found that disruption of astrocyte function in fruit flies (Drosophila) led to altered daily rhythms, an indication that these star-shaped glial cells contribute to the control of circadian behavior. These results provide, for the first time, a tractable genetic model to study the role of astrocytes in circadian rhythms and sleep disorders.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, more than 40 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders. Some sleep disorders arise from changes to the internal clock that is modulated by environmental signals, including light. Biologically, the internal clock is known to be composed of a network of neurons that controls rhythmic behaviors. Rob Jackson and his team previously had found that normal circadian rhythms require a glial-specific protein. In the new study, the team demonstrates that glia, and particularly astrocytes, are active cellular elements of the neural circuit that controls circadian rhythms in the adult brain.
“This is significant because glia have been traditionally viewed as support cells rather than independent elements that can regulate neurons and behavior. Neurons have had center stage for some time but current research is establishing the role of glial cells in brain function,” said Rob Jackson, PhD, professor of neuroscience at Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM) and member of the genetics and neuroscience program faculties at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts. Jackson is also the director of the Center for Neuroscience Research (CNR) at TUSM.
Minimally invasive thyroid surgery effective in children
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Surgical approaches that reduce incision size and recovery time from thyroid surgery work well in children, physician-scientists report.
“It brings parents comfort to know it’s going to be a small incision, an outpatient surgery with no drains or staples on the skin. We just use some glue for the skin and the recovery is very rapid,” said Dr. David Terris, Chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Georgia Health Sciences University.
The results should bring comfort as well with complication rates of minimally invasive thyroid surgery on par with the standard surgical approach that can leave a several-inch scar at the base of the neck. Terris and Dr. Melanie W. Seybt, endocrine-head and neck surgeon at GHSU, co-authored the study published in Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology.
