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Living longer with obesity can lead to both longer hospital stays and more avoidable trips to the hospital, according to two new studies from Purdue University.

Operating on an anterior cruciate ligament injury can lead to other damage to the knee and to changes that remain a full year after the first injury. If an operation is to be carried out, the patient may have to rest his/her knee longer than would have been necessary without an operation. "If operated young soccer players return to play after just a few months, the risk of osteoarthritis development in the knee will increase in the long term" says the researcher.

Margarita Curras-Collazo's lab at the University of California-Riverside has done research that shows that polybrominated diphenyl ethers, chemicals used as fire retardants, disrupt mechanisms that are responsible for releasing hormones in the body. Moreover, her lab has shown that like polychlorinated biphenyls, whose manufacture in the US was discontinued in 1977, PBDEs alter calcium signaling in the brain.

A new study suggests that a vaccine targeting Epstein-Barr virus may prevent infectious mononucleosis, commonly known as "mono" or "glandular fever." EBV is a member of the herpes virus family and one of the most common viruses in humans, with nearly all adults in developed countries such as the United States having been infected.

Cancer patients are suffering unnecessarily because they wrongly believe that morphine and other opioids are only used as "comfort for the dying" and as a "last resort" rather than seeing them as legitimate pain killers that can improve their quality of life, according to research published in Annals of Oncology.

Though a worldwide problem, arsenic contamination of drinking water does not have a universal solution.

Reperfusion injury takes place when an animal or an organ is starved of oxygen, then exposed to oxygen again. This occurs in strokes and organ transplants and causes many deaths per year. Now scientists have discovered that reperfusion injury can be induced in fruit-flies, a convenient, cheap, well-characterized model animal.

Children born with inherited metabolic disorders that cause organ failure and early death can be treated successfully with umbilical cord blood transplants from unrelated donors and, in some cases go on to live for many years, according to a study led by Duke University Medical Center researchers.

Researchers have discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up -- and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought -- indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.

Senior internal medicine residents who are trained in critical resuscitation skills on patient simulators become more skilled than residents who undergo traditional training, according to new research. Though prior studies have already shown that simulation training is effective in imparting such skills, this study sought to demonstrate the superiority of simulation training over traditional methods. In doing so, researchers found that simulation-trained residents out-performed their traditionally trained counterparts during a simulated scenario of respiratory arrest.