Disability News and Research

RSS

Research has important implications for autism

New research from Melbourne's Howard Florey Institute helps to explain why children with autism spectrum disorders (autism) have problem-solving difficulties.

24 Oct 2005

No credible evidence behind claims of harm from the MMR vaccination

There was no credible evidence behind claims of harm from the MMR vaccination. This is the conclusion drawn by the Cochrane Review Authors, an international team of researchers, after carefully drawing together all of the evidence found in 31 high quality studies from around the world.

18 Oct 2005

Black women with chronic pain experience more psychological distress

Black women with chronic pain experience more psychological distress, physical impairments and post-traumatic stress disorder than white women with chronic pain, a finding that researchers say should help lead to a narrowing of the gap in the treatment of chronic pain between black and white women.

17 Oct 2005

Harvard study finds vaccines boost economies of poor countries

Immunization programs in impoverished countries not only save lives, they boost economies, finds a study by researchers with the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) published in the current edition of World Economics.

16 Oct 2005

Canadian adolescents and complementary or alternative medical treatment

While the study does not look at the effectiveness of these treatments, "what's concerning is that young people across the country have different levels of access to alternative therapies as publicly-funded services," says Dr. McColl. "There are noticeable differences in access and utilization based on education, income and geographic location."

13 Oct 2005

Innovative therapy lowering body temperature slows down the injury process caused by birth asphyxia

Infants born with oxygen loss who are given an innovative therapy that lowers their entire body temperature by four degrees within the first six hours of life, have a better chance of survival and lower incidence of brain injury

12 Oct 2005

Lowering infant's body temperature within the first six hours of life reduces the chances for disability

Lowering an infant's body temperature to about 92 degrees Fahrenheit within the first six hours of life reduces the chances for disability and death among infants who failed to receive enough oxygen or blood to the brain during birth. The research study findings appear in tomorrow's 2005 New England Journal of Medicine.

12 Oct 2005

Potential new treatment for stroke

"The study was designed to test if IL-1ra is safe in stroke patients and showed promising results," said Professor Rothwell, a world-renowned neuroscientist based in the University's Faculty of Life Sciences.

From The University of Manchester 10 Oct 2005

Top 12 health issues facing Australian children

Alarming levels of poorer health within indigenous children and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds tops a new list of 12 major issues threatening the future health of Australia.

10 Oct 2005

Significant new research centre - the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre

The centre, based at the UCL (University College London) Department of Human Communication Science, will see ESRC inject £4.5 million over an initial 5 year period into a study of deafness, linguistic systems and communication that will run over a 10 year programme.

10 Oct 2005

Employment gap may be due, in part, to the "poverty trap"

Between 2003 and 2004 the employment gap widened between the number of working-age Americans with disabilities who are employed and those workers without disabilities, a new report on Capitol Hill shows.

9 Oct 2005

Patients in level I trauma centers were nearly 20 percent less likely to die than those in level II centers

Patients who are taken to a level 2 trauma center after suffering serious injury are significantly more likely to die than comparable patients treated at a major level 1 trauma center, according to researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

9 Oct 2005

Recommendation that physicians be a little more cautious in deciding against tPA treatment

Although use of the clot-dissolving drug tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) has revolutionized the treatment of acute stroke patients, many of those who could receive the drug do not because their initial symptoms appear mild or improve soon after they arrive at the hospital.

9 Oct 2005

Brain abnormalities in people who habitually lie

While previous research has shown that there is heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex - the area of the brain that enables most people to feel remorse or learn moral behavior - when normal people lie, this is the first study to provide evidence of structural differences in that area among pathological liars.

3 Oct 2005

Survey highlights the need to increase folic acid fortification of the grain supply

Only one-third of childbearing age women are taking a multivitamin containing the B vitamin folic acid daily to prevent serious birth defects of the brain and spine in their future babies, according to a decade of March of Dimes surveys.

3 Oct 2005

New option for treatment of lower back pain

Abbott today announced that it has started enrolling patients in a new U.S. clinical study to evaluate the potential benefits of its Wallis Mechanical Normalization System, a new spinal implant technology for the treatment of mild to moderate degenerative disc disease designed to stabilize the spine and reduce pain while preserving range of motion.

28 Sep 2005

Possible therapy that could control blood pressure

A newly developed virus that introduces a blood pressure-lowering gene into cells and enables that gene to maintain blood pressure at healthy levels for four months promises to take gene therapy for the disorder a step closer to reality, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report released online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

27 Sep 2005

Racial discrimination is a major cause of poor health for American blacks

In the first national study of its kind, sociologists from Rice University and University of California (UC)-Irvine find that black immigrants who arrive in America from black-majority regions of the world are healthier than those from white-majority regions; but regardless of how healthy blacks immigrants are when they come to the U.S., the longer they stay, the more their health erodes.

27 Sep 2005

Scientists identifiy new type of pain-sensing neuron in rats

We all know that if you put your hand over an open flame it's very painful. What you may not know is that, for some people, just lying under a blanket is painful as well. They have neuropathic pain--annoying, chronic pain that comes from a diseased nerve cell rather than a specific stimulus. Feeling phantom pain in a missing limb is another, more famous, example.

26 Sep 2005

Potential oral drug for rheumatoid arthritis

A potential oral drug for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) may encourage women to treat their condition earlier rather than later because it is less arduous than currently available treatments. Early treatment is important because RA most often develops between the ages of 35 and 50 and is two- to three times more prevalent in women.

26 Sep 2005