Removing user fees for primary health care changed health utilization behaviour but did not improve health outcomes among households with children under the age of five in Ghana, says a new study published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.

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A new way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and tackle climate change had been unveiled by leading economists.

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Females of all ages are less active than their male peers. Two studies, presented today (Tuesday 6 January) at a major academic conference, reveal the gender difference in activity levels among school children and the over 70s. Both studies show males to be more physically active than females.

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Men with type 2 diabetes and men with previous heart attack or stroke had a 3 to 4 fold risk of cardiovascular death compared to men without either disease in the years following the first acute event, according to a study in CMAJhttp://www.cmaj.ca/press/pg40.pdf.

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If you're committed to fitness, the decision to climb a couple of flights of stairs rather than take the elevator is clear. But if you develop chest pain on the way up, deciding how to treat the symptoms of clogged arteries in your heart is much more complicated.

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Experts estimate that 20 percent of women experience excessive or prolonged menstrual bleeding at some time during their lives, particularly as they approach menopause. A new, less invasive procedure called global endometrial ablation (GEA) preserves the uterus, while decreasing menstrual bleeding and shortening patients' recovery time. In an article published in the January issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Mayo Clinic researchers attempt to determine the percentage of women who do not achieve permanent symptom relief from GEA and identify several factors that put women at greater risk for this outcome.

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Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and at UC-San Francisco have succeeded in isolating stem cells from human testes. The cells bear a striking resemblance to embryonic stem cells — they can differentiate into each of the three main types of tissues of the body — but the researchers caution against viewing them as one and the same.

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Scientists at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) have demonstrated important new roles for the protein kinase complex Cdc7/Dbf4 or Cdc7/Drf1 (Ddk) in monitoring damage control during DNA replication and reinitiating replication following DNA repair. Since Ddk is often deregulated in human cancers, this new understanding of its role in DNA damage control could help shape new cancer therapies. The research was published in the December 24 issue of Molecular Cell.

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Individuals who experience trauma during childhood appear more likely to develop chronic fatigue syndrome as adults, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In addition, neuroendocrine dysfunction—or abnormalities in the interaction between the nervous system and endocrine system—appears to be associated with childhood trauma in those with chronic fatigue syndrome, suggesting a biological pathway by which early experiences influence adult vulnerability to illness.

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Women with bulimia nervosa appear to respond more impulsively during psychological testing than those without eating disorders, and brain scans show differences in areas responsible for regulating behavior, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

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In a six-month comparison of low-carb diets, one that encourages eating carbohydrates with the lowest-possible rating on the glycemic index leads to greater improvement in blood sugar control, according to Duke University Medical Center researchers.

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Just seeing someone smoke can trigger smokers to abandon their nascent efforts to kick the habit, according to new research conducted at Duke University Medical Center.

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Commonly used pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccines do not appear to be effective for preventing pneumonia, found a study by a team of researchers from Switzerland and the United Kingdom http://www.cmaj.ca/press/pg48.pdf.

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The study of ancient microbes may not seem consequential, but such pioneering research at the University of Oklahoma has implications for the state of modern human health. Cecil Lewis, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, says results of this research raise questions about the microbes living on and within people.

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Climate researchers have shown that big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics—but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20th century by rising global temperatures. Their paper, which shows that higher latitudes can be even more sensitive to volcanism, appears in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.

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Economists use leading indicators — the drivers of economic performance – to take the temperature of the economy and predict the future.

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Individuals who have persistent high blood pressure are at increased risks of a number of serious medical conditions, including heart failure. One of the factors that contributes to such heart failure is thickening of the muscle wall of the heart. Such thickening (known as hypertrophy) is a compensatory response of the heart to the high blood pressure. A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has provided new insight into both the signaling mechanisms by which high blood pressure leads to compensatory hypertrophy of the mouse heart and the molecular mechanisms by which a heart failure drug in clinical trials works.

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Scientists at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) have determined the structure of the interactions between proteins that form the heart of the death inducing signaling complex (DISC), which is responsible for triggering apoptosis (programmed cell death).

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About half of teens reference sex, substance use or other risky behaviors on their publicly available online profiles, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. However, a second article reports that a brief e-mail from a physician shows promise in reducing mentions of sex on social networking Web sites.

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Cancer and cell biology experts at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have identified a new tumor suppressor that may help scientists develop more targeted drug therapies to combat lung cancer.

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Digitalis-based drugs like digoxin have been used for centuries to treat patients with irregular heart rhythms and heart failure and are still in use today. In the Dec. 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine now report that this same class of drugs may hold new promise as a treatment for cancer. This finding emerged through a search for existing drugs that might slow or stop cancer progression.

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Physicists at Indiana University have developed a promising new way to identify a possible abnormality in a fundamental building block of Einstein's theory of relativity known as "Lorentz invariance." If confirmed, the abnormality would disprove the basic tenet that the laws of physics remain the same for any two objects traveling at a constant speed or rotated relative to one another.

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Government insurance programs that safeguard bank deposits should be reformed to ease taxpayers' undue stake in propping up the nation's banking system, according to research by a University of Illinois finance professor.

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Babies born to HIV-positive mothers and given the antiretroviral drug nevirapine through the first six weeks of life to prevent infection via breast-feeding are at high risk for developing drug-resistant HIV if they get infected anyway, a team of researchers report. But the investigators highlight the proven superiority of the six-week regimen in preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission in breast-fed infants.

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With a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicting that diabetic retinopathy will triple from 5.5 million in 2005 to 16 million in 2050, improved treatments are urgently needed for this leading cause of blindness in working-age people. The CDC study is the latest indicator of a world-wide diabetes epidemic that is motivating ophthalmic research around the globe. Hideharu Funatsu, MD, and colleagues at the Tokyo Women's Medical University, Japan, focused on diabetic macular edema (DME) a serious complication of retinopathy. Their findings on inflammatory factors associated with DME are presented in this month's Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

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