WASHINGTON -- The average monthly emergency department visit increased by 5.7 percent in Illinois after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), although the population remained essentially flat. In Massachusetts, while visits to emergency departments climbed steadily between 2005 and 2014, availability of on-call specialists (surgeons, psychiatrists and other specialists) declined "significantly." The results of two state-specific studies were published online last Thursday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Increased Emergency Department Use in Illinois After Implementation of the Affordable Care Act" and "Decline in Consultant Availability in Massachusetts Emergency Departments: 2005 to 2014").

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Potential voters who see the nation as being in dire economic straits view a presidential candidate as more "presidential" when he or she uses high-intensity, emotional language, a new study suggests.

But people who think the country is doing just fine think a candidate sounds more presidential when the language is more restrained.

The results of the experimental study may help explain the appeal of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to their supporters, said David Clementson, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in communication at The Ohio State University.

"The success of each may boil down to which candidate does better matching his or her language intensity with their audience," Clementson said.

Several scientific studies have indicated that nicotine may be beneficial for memory function. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS set out to shed further light on the properties attributed to nicotine - which is known to have an adverse effect on health - by determining the precise structure of the nicotinic receptors in the hippocampus region of the brain. Using mouse models for Alzheimer's disease, they identified the β2 subunit of the nicotinic receptor as a target that, if blocked, prevents the memory loss associated with Alzheimer's. These results were published in Neurobiology of Aging on August 12, 2016.

Sudden death in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is sometimes associated with exercise,  but that may be just medical reductionism looking for any answer. Instead, a number of factors could have been involved, since nearly 80% of patients in the study had no symptoms and only one in five had been diagnosed with HCM before their death, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2016 today by Dr Gherardo Finocchiaro, a cardiologist at St George's University of London.

Rome, Italy - 27 Aug 2016: A school intervention costing less than 20 cents per child has stopped unhealthy weight gain. The randomised study is presented at ESC Congress 2016 today by Ms Daniela Schneid Schuh, a nutritionist at the Institute of Cardiology of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil.1

"Obesity has reached a plateau in developed countries but continues to rise in many developing countries, such as Brazil," said Ms Schneid Schuh. "Thus, it is necessary to develop low-cost methods to prevent people become overweight, starting in childhood."

Healthy School, Happy School was a randomised controlled trial designed to test the effectiveness of an intervention stop obesity in children. It was conducted in Feliz, Brazil.

You recently saw how a build-up of microbes in bagpipes recently doomed a Scottish man. That could apply to all wind instruments, and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration microbiologist warns that several species of bacteria found in smokeless tobacco products have been associated with opportunistic infections.

Obviously that doesn't mean they caused them but associations are important in making health policy, and alternatives to cigarette smoking, in the interests of harm reduction and smoking cessation, are controversial, with the U.S. government being squarely against them, a legacy of the 'quit or die' mentality that has keep cigarette smoking as (not very) popular that it is.

A type of sugar found naturally in some women's breast milk may protect new born babies from infection with a potentially life threatening bacterium called Group B streptococcus. These bacteria are a common cause of meningitis in new borns and the leading cause of infection in the first three months of life in the UK and globally.

 The small study involved 183 women in The Gambia and published in the journal Clinical and Translational Immunology, suggests a sugar found in some women's breast milk protect babies against the bacteria. 

It's summertime, and the fields of Yolo County, Calif., are filled with rows of sunflowers, dutifully facing the rising sun.

At the nearby University of California, Davis, plant biologists have now discovered how sunflowers use their internal circadian "clocks," acting on growth hormones, to follow the sun during the day as they grow.

"It's the first example of a plant's clock modulating growth in a natural environment, and having real repercussions for the plant," said Stacey Harmer, a plant biologist at UC Davis and senior author of a paper reporting the discovery published this week in the journal Science.

Are e-cigarettes harmful? It's probably the wrong question. Caffeine is quite toxic but the Centers for Disease Control doesn't promote concern about Red Bull energy drinks. What is known to be harmful, the weight of evidence is indisputable, are cigarettes. With 200 toxic chemicals being inhaled into lungs, they are linked to every form of cancer and disease for good reason.

While preventing cancer is impossible, what will be possible soon is making cancer far more manageable, like diabetes, and treatment far less debilitating. A new drug delivery system called a "metronomic dosage regimen," uses significantly lower doses of chemotherapeutic drugs but at more frequent time intervals. This would have multiple goals of killing cancer cells, creating a hostile biological environment for their growth, reducing toxicity from the drug regimen and avoiding the development of resistance to the cancer drugs being used.