Fortifying the U.S. food supply with folic acid was not associated with a decline in certain birth defects that researchers expected to see in California, a finding likely to contribute to an ongoing debate about the future of the fortification program.

The study of more than 1.3 million California births and pregnancies spanning two decades is published in Birth Defects Research Part A. The research examines neural tube defects, which affect a baby's brain and spine, and which were the intended target of fortification with folic acid, a B vitamin. However, neural tube defects were already becoming less common before fortification began, and their decline slowed substantially after fortification was introduced, the study found.

MINNEAPOLIS - A drug commonly used to treat pain, epilepsy, anxiety and other brain health disorders may be associated with an increased risk of major birth defects, according to a study in Neurology. 

The drug pregabalin is approved by the FDA to treat epilepsy, fibromyalgia and neuropathic pain, such as pain from diabetic neuropathy or pain after shingles or spinal cord injury. It is also used for generalized anxiety disorder and other mental health issues. This is called off-label prescribing.

It used to be a truism that when people stopped smoking, they were likely to gain weight, but the reasons for it were cloudy. Did people replace the mechanism of smoking with candy and food, or did nicotine suppress body weight gain independent of food intake. In other words, was it speeding up metabolism

A new paper in Nicotine&Tobacco Research using rats says it is the latter. Caution is always warranted in these sorts of studies, since mainstream media tends to hype animal model findings without ever noting that rats are actually not little people.

In rats self-administering a maximally-reinforcing dose of nicotine, body weight gain during the 20-day study period was attenuated by ~40% despite no change in food intake.  

Hot molecules, which are found in extreme environments such as the edges of fusion reactors, are much more reactive than those used to understand reaction studies at ambient temperature.

Detailed knowledge of their reactions is relevant for modeling nuclear fusion devices and simulating the reaction that takes place on a spacecraft's heat shield at the moment when it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. In a new in EPJ D paper, Masamitsu Hoshino from Sophia University, Tokyo, and colleagues reveal a method for controlling the likelihood that these reactions between electrons and hot molecules occur, by altering the degree of bending the linear molecules, modulated by reaching precisely defined temperatures.

Some broad-spectrum antibiotics that disrupt the gut microbiome may raise the risk of complications from stem cell transplantation, according to a new study evaluating data from more than 850 transplant patients, as well as from mice.

The findings suggest that selecting antibiotics that spare "good" bacteria may help protect against graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), which occurs when transplanted donor cells, recognizing their new home as foreign, attack the recipient's body.

Transplant patients vulnerable to life-threatening bacterial infections are often treated with broad-spectrum antibiotics.

It has been one hundred years since the publication of Einstein's general theory of relativity in May 1916.

People are still trying to find ways to make him wrong, but mostly they just find new ways to show right, as in a recent EPJ Plus article which demonstrated that the rotational motion in the universe is also subject to the theory of relativity.

Tobacco kills nearly half of all long-term smokers and in the UK alone accounts for the deaths of 100,000 people annually, according to the public health charity ASH. This is the harsh reality behind plain packaging for tobacco, which comes into force in the UK on May 20 2016.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (http://www.ucr.edu) -- When you're paid to sell things, it doesn't hurt to be able to stretch the truth or prey on people's emotions once in a while. Most advertisers probably don't spend too much time thinking about karma, then, but perhaps they should--at least if they want to get better at their jobs.

ATS 2016, SAN FRANCISCO - Home-based pulmonary rehabilitation may be equally effective in improving fitness and quality of life as a traditional center-based program for COPD patients, according to new research presented at the ATS 2016 International Conference.

"We know that pulmonary rehab is a highly effective treatment for COPD because it improves exercise capacity and symptoms and keeps people out of the hospital," said Anne Holland, PhD, professor of physiotherapy at Alfred Health and La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. "But less than 10 percent of all COPD patients in developed countries enter a pulmonary rehab program."

An international team of researchers under the leadership of the LIMES Institute and the excellence cluster ImmunoSensation of the University of Bonn unraveled a new regulatory mechanism how food components and environmental factors influence the immune system. Various substances present in the intestines can bind to an important controller, the Ah receptor. This system is in turn regulated by the Ah receptor repressor and as a result, it influences the degree of the immune response. If the controller is not properly adjusted during bacterial infections, there can be life-threatening septic shock, for example. The results are now being published in the journal Scientific Reports.