Health | WPN World People News

Two new studies have found that large structural abnormalities in chromosomes, some of which have been associated with increased risk of cancer, can be detected in a small fraction of people without a prior history of cancer.

The American people have again responded overwhelmingly to the most recent DEA-led National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day. On April 28th, citizens turned in a record-breaking 552,161 pounds (276 tons) of unwanted or expired medications for safe and proper disposal at the 5,659 take-back sites that were available in all 50 states and U.S. territories. When the results of the four Take Back Days to date are combined, the DEA and its state, local, and tribal law-enforcement and community partners have removed over 1.5 million pounds (774 tons) of medication from circulation.

During breaks in trials when the rat was awake but inactive, areas in the brain’s memory hub emitted split-second bursts of ripple-like electrical activity (SWRs). This indicated that the rat was mentally replaying an earlier experience in the maze. Individual neurons in the areas become associated with a particular place. These place cells spike when the animal is in that place or – it turns out – is just mentally replaying the experience of being in that place. Embedded in the ripple-like signal above are place cells spiking in the same sequence as they did when the rat first walked through the maze. (Color-coded hatch marks match the path in the maze.) Rats’ performance in the maze task faltered when these awake mental replay events were blocked, revealing that they are important for memory-guided decision-making.

Infants born to women who used the anti-HIV drug tenofovir as part of an anti-HIV drug regimen during pregnancy do not weigh less at birth and are not of shorter length than infants born to women who used anti-HIV drug regimens that do not include tenofovir during pregnancy, according to findings from a National Institutes of Health network study. However, at 1 year of age, children born to the tenofovir-treated mothers were slightly shorter and had slightly smaller head circumference — about 1 centimeter each, on average — than were infants whose mothers did not take tenofovir.

The National Institutes of Health today unveiled a collaborative program that will match researchers with a selection of pharmaceutical industry compounds to help scientists explore new treatments for patients. NIH's new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has partnered initially with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly and Company which have agreed to make dozens of their compounds available for this initiative's pilot phase.

Malian infants have low birth weights, linked to inadequate maternal care, malnutrition and endemic poverty.

A combination of two diabetes drugs, metformin and rosiglitazone, was more effective in treating youth with recent-onset type 2 diabetes than metformin alone, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found. Adding an intensive lifestyle intervention to metformin provided no more benefit than metformin therapy alone.

South Korea will send a group of government officials, scholars and civic activists to the United States to look into the latest outbreak of mad cow disease amid growing food safety concerns at home, the farm ministry here said Sunday.

National Institutes of Health researchers have reversed behaviors in mice resembling two of the three core symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

U.S. Death rates from unintentional injuries among children and adolescents from birth to age 19 declined by nearly 30 percent from 2000 to 2009, according to a new Vital Signs report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.