Studies and Analyses

Contrary to what you might think, advanced age does not increase the risk of surgical-site infections, according to a large long-term study reported in the April 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. The study, which involved prospectively collected data on thousands of patients in multiple hospitals undergoing various surgical procedures, found that the infection risk increased by about 1 percent per year between the ages of 17 to 65 years but then decreased by a

University of California scientists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have found that the successful use of bacteria to remediate environmental contamination from nuclear waste and processing activities may depend more upon how resistant the bacteria are to chemicals than to how tolerant they are to radioactivity. The results of a recent Laboratory study may help make bacterial bioremediation a more widespread method for cleaning up sites contaminated with actinides and other radionuclid

Pathological gamblers exhibit complex impairments in decision-making and executive function processes associated with the prefrontal cortex of the brain, according to research that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology 57th Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., April 9 – 16, 2005.

Researchers learned that decision-making functions and inhibitory control in chronic pathological gamblers appear to be altered and may influence the trade-off between short-term reward

Mayo Clinic researchers have found that people who score in the upper 25 percent in anxiety level on a personality test have a moderately increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease decades later. They also found a similar link between pessimistic personalities and Parkinson’s.

“This is the first study that took a group of people with documented personality characteristics but no symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and showed that those with high levels of an anxious or pessimi

Some adults with mild persistent asthma may be able to adequately control their asthma by taking corticosteroids only when needed, instead of taking anti-inflammatory medication daily, according to new results from the Improving Asthma Control Trial (IMPACT). Conducted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s (NHLBI) Asthma Clinical Research Network, the one-year, multi-center study found that participants who were treated with corticosteroids intermittently based on symptoms had

OPTOMETRY researchers at Aston University’s new £10 million Academy of Life Sciences are currently undertaking ground-breaking research into the vision problems caused by diabetics – one of the leading causes of blindness and vision loss in the UK. So far, the study has been very successful with a large number of diabetic volunteers stepping forward to take part in the study, but the researchers still require some more Type 1 diabetics (insulin dependent patients usually diagnosed under the age