Flavanols key to potential chocolate benefits
...ers pointed out that the cocoa drink they used was specially processed to retain much higher levels of flavanols than are typically found in commercially-available cocoa drinks; so it is unlikely that drinking more hot chocolate would produce a similar effect. Even though this study involved only 11 participan...Training local health workers improves TB control in South Africa
..., but training is of doubtful effectiveness. Eight specially trained nurses delivered educational outreach training to clinical staff in 20 primary care clinics in the Free State province, South Africa. Staff in another 20 clinics received no training. Detection and treatment of respiratory illness in almost 2...New screen-and-treat methods for cervical cancer significantly reduce cancer precursor lesions
...cally involves a colposcopy, where a doctor uses a specially designed microscope to look at the surface of the cervix. The study, intended to combat these financial and systematic hurdles, was approved by the institutional review boards of Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Cape Town (C...Can cooling affect exercise capacity of those with MS?
...e no cooling; cooling before exercise by wearing a specially designed, temperature-controlled cooling vest; cooling during exercise while wearing the vest, and cooling using a method of their choosing other than the vest. Before each condition, participants will swallow a "temperature pill," a plastic, vita...Heart care lacking for those with clogged leg blood vessels
...ures, which are minimally invasive, can be done by specially trained cardiologists, specially trained radiologists, and by vascular surgeons, who also perform open operations called bypasses on ...Dogs ease anxiety, improve health status of hospitalized heart failure patients
...sted 12 minutes. In the volunteer-dog team group, specially trained dogs (of 12 different breeds) would lie on patients' beds, so patients could touch them while interacting with the volunteer-dog team. Researchers monitored patients' hemodynamics -- the collective system of measurement for blood volume, hear...Mildly depressed people more perceptive than others
...r social world," says Dr. Harkness. "They might be specially motivated to scan their environment in a very detailed way, to find subtle social cues indicating what others are thinking and feeling." The idea that mild depression differs from clinical depression is a controversial one, the psychologist adds. Alt...Scientists use new techniques to narrow down impact of global warming on specific regions
...ata for six case study regions across Europe and a specially constructed dataset of 491 European wide daily station records to analyse climate trends over the past 40 years and likely changes at the end of the 21st century. The UK based teams' report reveals that by 2100 south-east and north-west England will ...World first trial to test human implant of HeartPOD
...trial to investigate whether the implantation of a specially designed HeartPOD TM monitoring system in heart failure patients can keep them out of hospital and lead to a better quality of life. The study, known as the HOMEOSTASIS study, aims to evaluate the safety and performance of the HeartPOD TM system, w...UQ researchers show traditional Chinese exercises can help combat diabetes
...re than 30 years, said the spiral movements of the specially designed exercises could stimulate the muscles more than conventional exercises, leading to greater uptake and utilisation of glucose. He said participants in the UQ study had reported many health benefits from the program including increased flexib...Mayo Clinic discovers two key players in cancer prevention and how they work
...he Mayo researchers saw this happen when they used specially bred mice and lowered the amounts of the two proteins Rae1-Nup98 -- which were not previously known to be involved in aneuploidy regulation. The results: Insufficient Rae1-Nup98 threw off the timing of the cell growth process that correctly distribut...New microchip technology for medical imaging biomarkers of disease
... used to image glucose metabolism in a mousewith a specially designed PET scanner for mice produced by Siemens, called amicroPET. The Science paper also illustrated that this technology can alsoproduce the amount of FDG required for human studies. More importantly, thepaper illustrates a new base technology ...Virtual reality could help diagnose heart conditions
...enerated 3D imagesof hearts (echocardiograms) in a specially designed four-walled room called theI-Space. In the I-Space, images are projected on three of the walls and thefloor, which results in an animated hologram floating in space in front of theviewers. The viewers wear a pair of glasses with polarising l...NIAID researchers show how promising TB drug works
...t strains of M. tb failed, so the team turned to a specially modified microarray-based technique, called comparative genome sequencing, developed by NimbleGen Systems, Inc. (Madison, WI). This was the first time the technique has been used to identify a protein involved in TB drug resistance, notes Dr. Barry. ...New cocoa evidence on why plant foods are beneficial to cardiovascular health
...earchers provided healthy male participants with a specially prepared cocoa drink that was either high or low in certain cocoa flavanols. Only the group consuming the flavanol-rich cocoa experienced increased blood vessel relaxation. The researchers demonstrated that the relaxation response mediated by cocoa...New compound stops brain cell degeneration in Alzheimer's disease
...an amyloid beta-induced glia activation in a mouse specially designed to develop many of the signs of Alzheimer's disease, including neuroinflammation, neuronal and synaptic degeneration and behavioral deficits. The compound also restored normal levels of markers of synaptic dysfunction in the hippocampus, th...Viral, gold nanoparticles can assemble themselves to potentially find and treat disease
...inding capability of these scaffolds is due to the specially engineered virus that displays a peptide that matches a protein receptor "zip code" on the tissue of interest. This homing technique was pioneered by the lead authors on the current study, Pasqualini and Arap. Their previous work revealed that the hu...OHSU research reveals the complexities of obesity/cortisol interactions
...elf." To conduct the research, scientists studied specially bred mice lacking the proopiomelanocortin (POMC) gene. Previous research has shown that mutations to the POMC gene in humans and mice cause obesity, but simultaneously decrease glucocorticoid levels. Because it was unknown whether the primary abnorma...Innovative PhD program receives $850,000 grant from Howard Hughes Medical Institute
...d core curriculum, a clinical mentor program and a specially designed course in principles of clinical research. Co-directors of the program will be John Lowe, M.D., Ph.D., chair and professor of pathology at the School of Medicine, and Roy Silverstein, M.D., professor of molecular medicine at the School of Me......ce the need for glasses by permanently placing the specially fitted artificial lens in front of the eye's natural lens, rather than replacing the natural lens as other implanted lens do, said Dr. Bowman, professor of ophthalmology. The lens, made of a special collamer material, corrects moderate to severe near...