A team of Swedish scientists have used national register information in more than one million Swedish children to study the association of early life contact with dogs and subsequent development of asthma. This question has been studied extensively previously, but conclusive findings have been lacking. The new study showed that children who grew up with dogs had about 15 percent less asthma than children without dogs.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- When cancer cells compete with immune cells for glucose, the cancer wins. As a result, the immune T cells are not healthy and don't have the weapons to kill the cancer.

"If we have a way to manipulate the metabolic pathway, the T cells may be healthier," says senior author Weiping Zou, M.D., Ph.D., Charles B. de Nancrede Professor of Surgery, Immunology and Biology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

The finding, published in Nature Immunology, suggests a potential metabolic pathway against cancer.

"We know that if we provide glucose, the tumor uses it. One question we have is, can we make T cells resistant to glucose restriction? In our study, we define a mechanism that we can use as a model to test this," Zou says.

It's not a bad guess to assume if your husband is sexting it isn't with you, but some married couples do report it. It's just much less common than in young relationships and consists more of intimate talk than sending nude or nearly nude photos via mobile phones, according to new survey results published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

DARIEN, IL - A new study of sleepwalkers found an intriguing paradox: Although sleepwalkers have an increased risk for headaches and migraines while awake, during sleepwalking episodes they are unlikely to feel pain even while suffering an injury.

Results show that sleepwalkers were nearly 4 times more likely than controls to report a history of headaches (odds ratio = 3.80) and 10 times more likely to report experiencing migraines (OR = 10.04), after adjusting for potential confounders such as insomnia and depression. Among sleepwalkers with at least one previous sleepwalking episode that involved an injury, 79 percent perceived no pain during the episode, allowing them to remain asleep despite hurting themselves.

Bats in northeast China are infected with the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, a deadly disease that has decimated bat populations in North America since it first appeared in upstate New York in 2006. A team of American and Chinese researchers found the fungus in caves where bats hibernate and found bats infected with the fungus.

Although infected bats had lesions characteristic of the disease and similar to lesions seen in North American bats, the researchers do not know the extent to which Chinese bat species are affected by the disease.

Between 1999-2012, overall prescription drug use increased among U.S. adults, with this increase seen for the majority of but not all drug classes, according to a study in the November 3 issue of JAMA.

Use of prescription drugs represents a major expenditure in the United States, and research suggests that use of prescription drugs is increasing. Yet much of the information about prescription use is derived from pharmacy databases or expenditure data, neither of which directly captures use at the population level. It is important to document patterns of prescription drug use to inform both clinical practice and research, according to background information in the article.