A study has found that poor mental health is linked with poor diet quality — regardless of personal characteristics such as gender age, education, age, marital status and income level. The study, published Feb. 16 in the International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition, revealed that California adults who consumed more unhealthy food were also...
Post
Unnecessary testing for UTIs cut by nearly half
Tests to detect urinary tract infections (UTI) often are performed routinely in hospitals, even when patients don’t have symptoms. Such testing “just to be safe” can return results that lead doctors to prescribe antibiotics when there’s little to no evidence to warrant such treatment. Now, new research indicates that making a simple change to the...
Post
An intricate interaction: Dietary fatty acid intake influences hypertension risk
Hypertension is an important public health problem that can lead to life-threatening cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke. Many studies have attempted to understand the complex relationship between dietary factors and hypertension; none have provided a clear explanation of the interaction between hypertension and dietary intake of n-6 fatty acids (a building block of...
Post
Plazomicin noninferior to meropenem for complicated UTI
Florian M.E. Wagenlehner, M.D., from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, and colleagues randomly assigned 609 patients with complicated UTIs, including acute pyelonephritis, to receive intravenous plazomicin or meropenem for a total of seven to 10 days of treatment. The researchers found that with respect to the primary efficacy end point (composite cure, including clinical...
Post
Are all cancer cells the same?
Take two cancer cells and compare their genomes. Surprisingly, they can be quite different. This genetic variation is one of the hallmarks of cancer, and one reason why treating cancer is so hard. If a tumour is made up of cells with many different genomes, a single drug might not kill them all. But knowing...
Post
New DNA coding basis
DNA Gets a New — and Bigger — Genetic Alphabet DNA is spelled out with four letters, or bases. Researchers have now built a system with eight. It may hold clues to the potential for life elsewhere in the universe and could also expand our capacity to store digital data on Earth In 1985, the...
Post
Could saffron be as effective as stimulant medicines in treating ADHD?
New Rochelle, NY, February 21, 2019–A new short-term pilot study in children and teens 6-17 years old with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has shown saffron to be as effective at controlling symptoms as methylphenidate, the commonly prescribed drug Ritalin. Saffron may be a promising herbal alternative for treating ADHD, particularly for the 30% of patients...
Post
How diabetes causes muscle loss
Diabetes mellitus is associated with various health problems including decline in skeletal muscle mass. A research group led by Professor Wataru Ogawa at the Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine revealed that elevation of blood sugar levels leads to muscle atrophy and that two proteins, WWP1 and KLF15, play key roles in this phenomenon. These...
Post
What’s the right age to test for osteoporosis?
When bone density drops but isn’t yet at the level of osteoporosis, it’s called osteopenia. Osteopenia affects more than 33 million Americans over age 50, men and women, while 10 million have osteoporosis. Yet the DEXA scan, the painless X-ray-based test that measures bone density, isn’t recommended for women until age 65, when they may...