ScienceDaily: Top Health News

Collegiate football athletes with a decade or more of experience with the sport have related abnormalities in inflammation, energy production and coordination that are apparent before the football season and across the season, a new study has found. The abnormalities are related to routine repetitive head impacts from tackling and blocking.

Our brains can distinguish highly similar patterns, thanks to a process called pattern separation. How exactly our brains separate patterns is, however, not full,y understood yet. Using a full-scale computer model of the dentate gyrus, a brain region involved in pattern separation, researchers found that inhibitory neurons activated by one pattern suppress all their neighboring neurons, thereby switching off 'competing' similar patterns.

Researchers have discovered that a nanoparticle therapeutic enhances cancer immunotherapy and is a possible new approach in treating malignant pleural effusion (MPE). MPE is the accumulation of fluid between the chest wall and lungs and is accompanied by malignant cells and/or tumors.

A new study warns 1,500 endangered languages could no longer be spoken by the end of this century.

Researchers have shown that blocking IL-6 and TNF cytokines provides a more effective approach to preventing life-threatening graft-versus-host-disease, an inflammatory condition that develops in patients after their allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

New results from a long-term epidemiologic study reveal that one of the oldest racially based diagnostic formulas in medicine is no better than a race-neutral equation.

Since the first sequencing of the human genome more than 20 years ago, the study of human genomes has relied almost exclusively on a single reference genome to which others are compared to identify genetic variations. Scientists have long recognized that a single reference genome cannot represent human diversity and that using it introduces a pervasive bias into these studies. Now, they finally have a practical alternative. Researchers have introduced a new tool, called Giraffe, that can efficiently map new genome sequences to a 'pangenome' representing many diverse human genome sequences.

Many IBS sufferers avoid certain types of food and often exclude gluten. However, a large new study does not show a relationship between high intake of gluten and increased IBS symptoms. The researchers did find that a certain type of carbohydrate called 'fodmaps' can aggravate intestinal problems, however, the overall results indicate that they also have less influence than previously thought.

HIV replication in the human body requires that specific viral RNAs be packaged into progeny virus particles. A new study has found how a small difference in the RNA sequence can allow the viral RNA to be packaged for replication, creating potential targets for future HIV treatments.

What you eat influences your taste for what you might want to eat next. So claims a University of California, Riverside, study performed on fruit flies. The study offers a better understanding of neurophysiological plasticity of the taste system in flies.

Mindfulness -- the ability to intentionally focus attention on the present moment -- can be effective for reducing mind wandering, though results do differ depending on the research methodology.

A molecular switch influences addiction behavior and determines how strong the response to addictive drugs is. A research team made the discovery in mice treated with cocaine. The researchers demonstrated that the protein Npas4 regulates the structure and function of nerve cells that control addiction behavior in mice. If the quantity of Npas4 was reduced in an experiment, the animals' response to cocaine was much weaker.

If you're feeling more sudden urges to run to the bathroom as you age, you're not alone. A new study suggests postmenopausal women aged 45 to 54 years are more likely to have overactive bladder (OAB) syndrome. Additionally, obesity and multiple births put a woman at greater risk for stress urinary incontinence (SUI).