EAST LANSING, Mich. — A few minutes of exercise can help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder perform better academically, according to a new study led by a Michigan State University researcher.
The study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, shows for the first time that kids with ADHD can better drown out distractions and focus on a task after a single bout of exercise. Scientists say such “inhibitory control” is the main challenge faced by people with the disorder. (more…)
New treatment may have fewer side effects than traditional cancer therapy
COLUMBIA, Mo. — Currently, large doses of chemotherapy are required when treating certain forms of cancer, resulting in toxic side effects. The chemicals enter the body and work to destroy or shrink the tumor, but also harm vital organs and drastically affect bodily functions. Now, scientists at the University of Missouri have proven that a new form of prostate cancer treatment that uses radioactive gold nanoparticles, and was developed at MU, is safe to use in dogs. Sandra Axiak-Bechtel, an assistant professor in oncology at the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, says that this is a big step for gold nanoparticle research.
“Proving that gold nanoparticles are safe to use in the treatment of prostate cancer in dogs is a big step toward gaining approval for clinical trials in men,” Axiak-Bechtel said. “Dogs develop prostate cancer naturally in a very similar way as humans, so the gold nanoparticle treatment has a great chance to translate well to human patients.” (more…)
Playing football (soccer) could be the best way for people with high blood pressure, known as hypertension, to improve their fitness, normalise their blood pressure and reduce their risk of stroke, according to research published today (Monday 15 October 2012) in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.
Research from Universities of Exeter and Copenhagen, and Gentofte University Hospital in Denmark suggests football training prevents cardiovascular disease in middle-aged men with hypertension and is more effective than healthy lifestyle advice currently prescribed by GPs.
After six months of football training, three out of four men in this study had blood pressure within the normal, healthy range. (more…)
Scientists have observed the neurological mechanism behind temperature-dependent — febrile — seizures by genetically engineering fruit flies to harbor a mutation analogous to one that causes epileptic seizures in people. In addition to contributing the insight on epilepsy, their new study highlights the first use of genetic engineering to swap a human genetic disease mutation into a directly analogous gene in a fly.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In a newly reported set of experiments that show the value of a particularly precise but difficult genetic engineering technique, researchers at Brown University and the University of California–Irvine have created a Drosophila fruit fly model of epilepsy to discern the mechanism by which temperature-dependent seizures happen.(more…)
ANN ARBOR — The University of Michigan has established the largest digital collection of materials relating to the 1918 influenza epidemic in the United States.(more…)
UCLA researchers have for the first time measured the activity of a brain region known to be involved in learning, memory and Alzheimer’s disease during sleep. They discovered that this region, called the entorhinal cortex, behaves as if it’s remembering something, even during anesthesia–induced sleep — a finding that counters conventional theories about sleep-time memory consolidation.(more…)
Physicians are about half as willing to prescribe drugs tested in pharmaceutical-industry funded trials than those in NIH-funded studies, a new study finds.
Physicians are less likely to trust the results of clinical trials when they know those trials were funded by pharmaceutical companies, regardless of the quality of the research, a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows.
The study, led by Dr. Aaron Kesselheim of the Harvard Medical School in Boston and co-authored by University of Arizona associate professor of law Christopher Robertson, evaluated physicians’ confidence in the results of drug trials conducted with a high, medium or low level of methodological rigor. It then looked at how their confidence in those same results changed when a trial’s funding source was revealed as either the National Institutes of Health or a company in the pharmaceutical industry, versus when no funding source was disclosed. (more…)
