Medical Research News

RSS

Maternal stress during pregnancy could affect baby's sex and birth outcomes

It's becoming well established that maternal stress during pregnancy can affect fetal and child development as well as birth outcomes, and a new study from researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and NewYork-Presbyterian now identifies the types of physical and psychological stress that may matter most.

14 Oct 2019

Changes to state law reduce new opioid prescriptions by 22% in Penn Medicine’s New Jersey practices

The total amount of opioids dispensed per new opioid prescription decreased by 22 percent in Penn Medicine outpatient practices in New Jersey after the state passed a law limiting prescriptions to a five-day supply for new opioid prescriptions.

14 Oct 2019

Rutgers IFH study explores whether migrating at older age affects mental health

Immigrants age 65 and older tend to have poorer mental health than their counterparts born in the United States. Mental health is a major concern for this rapidly growing segment of the population, and researchers are trying to understand the protective and risk factors.

14 Oct 2019

How dementia spreads: new study says it’s through neural networks

Scientists have found out a way to forecast the spread of brain atrophy, using prior research that shows how brain networks connect with each other to form a continuously linked pathway.

14 Oct 2019

Rapid and sensitive tracking of fat molecules in the body

Fats have earned a bad name as the source of all that is wrong with our hearts and blood vessels, not to mention our appearance. The dysfunctional handling of lipids or fats in the body is deeply involved in a multitude of metabolic upsets, such as obesity and cancer.

14 Oct 2019

Risk of genetic seizure disorder: new scoring system

A Cleveland Clinic-led initiative has come up with a new risk scoring system for epileptic or seizure disorders of genetic origin. The researchers summed up the risks for a very large number of genes weakly implicated in some common forms of epilepsy, to create a polygenic risk score.

14 Oct 2019

New study blames vascular rather than nerve injury for concussion

Brain concussion occurs when the soft cottage cheese-like brain tissue is slammed against the hard skull surface, sustaining transient and reversible injury which causes brain dysfunction for a period.

14 Oct 2019

Study shows microbleeds after head injury signal danger to brain function

A new study published in the journal Brain shows that microbleeds appearing after trauma can cause patients with head injury to have poor outcomes. Advanced imaging techniques were used to establish this finding.

14 Oct 2019

Being overweight before 40 raises the risk of cancer

Obesity has been proven to be a major risk factor for several cancers. Weight gain during adulthood has been tied to increased cancer risk, but there is a little body of knowledge that has identified accurate timing and duration of weight gain.

14 Oct 2019

Antibody-based eye drops show promise in treating dry eye disease

Dry eye is a condition wherein a person doesn’t have enough tears to lubricate the eye. With the chronic lack of sufficient lubrication, moisture, and nourishment on the eye, it can lead to eye irritation, inflammation, and eventually, scarring.

14 Oct 2019

Signs of aging detected by a simple walking test at age 45

A new study has shown that the speed at which persons over 45 years of age walk could be an indicator of their brain and body age. The team of researchers from Duke University found that persons who walked slowly were more likely to have “accelerated aging” compared to those who walked faster.

14 Oct 2019

Snacking could be banned on local transport in a bid to curb childhood obesity

England’s outgoing Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dame Sally Davies, the top doctor in the country, believes that snacking ought to be banned on public transport and additional taxes should be placed on unhealthy foods to make them less affordable, in order to fight the menace of childhood obesity.

14 Oct 2019

New therapeutic approach for children born to mothers who used cannabis during pregnancy

As a growing number of U.S. states legalize the medicinal and recreational use of marijuana, an increasing number of American women are using cannabis before becoming pregnant and during early pregnancy often to treat morning sickness, anxiety, and lower back pain.

14 Oct 2019

Study evaluates hand-held technology to non-invasively fragment painful kidney stones

UC San Diego Health has enrolled its first patient to evaluate an investigational hand-held technology to non-invasively fragment painful kidney stones.

14 Oct 2019

Ludwig scientists develop robust method to refine personalized cancer immunotherapy

Ludwig Cancer Research scientists have developed a new and more accurate method to identify the molecular signs of cancer likely to be presented to helper T cells, which stimulate and orchestrate the immune response to tumors and infectious agents.

14 Oct 2019

Dementia spreads via synaptic connections between brain networks

In a new study, UC San Francisco scientists used maps of brain connections to predict how brain atrophy would spread in individual patients with frontotemporal dementia, adding to growing evidence that the loss of brain cells associated with dementia spreads via the synaptic connections between established brain networks.

14 Oct 2019

Default response to spinal disc injuries can be temporarily stopped to allow for better treatment

Researchers may have found a way to press pause on spinal disc injuries, giving doctors more time to treat them before worse issues develop.

14 Oct 2019

New system can help the immune system spot and eliminate tumors

Cancer cells are masters at avoiding detection, but a new system developed by Yale scientists can make them stand out from the crowd and help the immune system spot and eliminate tumors that other forms of immunotherapies might miss, the researchers report Oct. 14 in the journal Nature Immunology.

14 Oct 2019

Blood vessel damage is more widespread than expected in patients with TBI

The effects of a traumatic brain injury are pretty clear – problems with memory, headaches, and emotions – but what's unclear is the underlying pathological causes for those symptoms.

14 Oct 2019

New Penn Medicine study unravels the early makings of an exhausted T cell

The immune system struggles to defeat cancer or chronic infections because many of the T cells that leap into action end up "exhausted," rendering them ineffective against disease.

14 Oct 2019