Year: 2014

The special paste with almost four times the usual fluoride content helped prevent about a third of the chalky-looking spots among kids between the ages of 11 and 16 years old, researchers say. “To reduce this effect, several products are available on the market, but evidence of the effectiveness of the products is lacking,” said Mikael Sonesson, lead author of the study and an orthodontist at Malmö University. To see whether a high-fluoride toothpaste that patients could use at home would protect against the spots, more than 400 kids at five dental practices who were scheduled to get braces were recruited starting in 2008. They were randomly divided into two groups, with about half receiving a paste containing 5,100 parts per million fluoride to use at home and the other half receiving paste that was similar in every way, except it contained 1,450 ppm fluoride – the amount in most standard commercial brands, according to the researchers.

By Shereen Jegtvig NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Older women with higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had slightly less brain shrinkage than women with low fatty acid levels in a new study. “The brain gets smaller during the normal aging process – about 0.5 percent per year after age 70, but dementia is associated with an accelerated and localized process of brain shrinkage,” said James Pottala, who led the study. Pottala is an assistant professor at the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine in Sioux Falls and chief statistician for the Health Diagnostic Laboratory in Richmond, Virginia. He and his colleagues analyzed data from the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study to see whether omega-3s were associated with brain shrinkage in general, and in specific brain regions involved in memory and other cognitive processes.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama shone a light Wednesday on a college sexual assault epidemic that is often shrouded in secrecy, with victims fearing stigma, police poorly trained to investigate and universities reluctant to disclose the violence.

Concern among the top U.S. hog-producing states over a virus that is killing millions of baby pigs has reached such an extent that officials at an industry gathering in Minnesota this week swabbed the trade floor to test for the virus. Meeting organizers in Iowa are relying on producers’ knowledge of basic biosecurity measures to guard against spreading Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus, or PEDv. The Iowa Pork Congress, billed as the country’s largest winter swine trade show and conference, expects nearly 300 exhibitors and hundreds of hog producers to convene on Wednesday and Thursday in Des Moines. “We feel that we’ve gotten the word out about PEDv and the need for increased biosecurity enough in the last year,” said Ron Birkenholz, spokesman for Iowa Pork Producers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says sexual assault in the U.S. is an affront to basic decency and humanity.

The study found that unrelated male flies compete more fiercely for female attention than related flies, pestering them more often for sex and leaving them little time to sleep or eat. “Brothers don’t need to compete so much with each other for female attention since their genes will get passed on if their sibling mates successfully anyway,” said Dr Tommaso Pizzari of Oxford University’s zoology department, who led the study.

By Shereen Jegtvig NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Text messaging is a quick and effective way to get recreational athletes to report injuries, according to a new Australian study. What’s more, injury prevention strategies that work at the elite level aren’t necessarily relevant to recreational leagues – which have different types of players, different training loads and a different style of play, according to the study’s lead author. “Despite making up the broad base of sports participation, community level sport has largely been neglected in much of sports medicine research,” Christina Ekegren told Reuters Health in an email. She is a doctoral candidate at Monash University in Melbourne.

Novartis plans to axe around 500 jobs in shutting a U.S. plant that makes its blood pressure pill Diovan, marking the second reorganization of its operations in as many days. The decision to close the manufacturing site in Suffern, New York will affect 525 jobs, the company said in an emailed statement on Wednesday. The Basel-based firm attributed the closure to declining sales of Diovan, a best-selling drug that lost its patent rights in the United States in 2012, making it vulnerable to competition from cheaper, copycat drugs. "Changes in our current portfolio, namely the loss of exclusivity of Diovan, have significantly reduced the future production demand on the Suffern site," Novartis said.

(Reuters) – Evoke Pharma Inc said its inhaled version of a generic gastrointestinal drug was found to be superior in managing symptoms of bowel disease compared with the existing oral treatment, sending its shares up 45 percent. The results of the mid-stage study, published in a medical journal, tested an intranasal formulation of generic metoclopramide in 89 diabetic gastroparesis patients dosed four times a day for 6 weeks. (The story corrects headline, paragraphs 1 and 2 to say Evoke’s drug is an inhaled version of an existing oral generic drug, not a new version of the company’s drug.) (Reporting by Natalie Grover in Bangalore;

Pope Francis has used Twitter to back an annual anti-abortion rally, the March for Life, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of activists to Washington on Wednesday. "I join the March for Life in Washington with my prayers. May God help us respect all life, especially the most vulnerable," he said on his Twitter account in a message that was quickly re-tweeted thousands of times. The Argentinian-born pontiff has some 11.5 million followers on his Twitter account in several languages, @pontifex.