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A new sedative drug has been shown to improve the sleep quality and comfort levels of intensive care patients, compared to the most commonly-used medication, according to new research.

Investigators have uncovered a promising drug therapy that offers a ray of hope for children with Batten disease -- a rare neurodegenerative disease that strikes seemingly healthy kids, progressively robs them of their abilities to see, reason and move, and ultimately kills them in their young twenties. The study explains how investigators improved the motor skills of feeble mice that model the disease.

Scientists report that adult stem cells isolated from humans with muscular dystrophy can be genetically corrected and used to induce functional improvement when transplanted into a mouse model of the disease. The research represents a significant advance toward the future development of a gene therapy that uses a patient's own cells to treat this devastating muscle-wasting disease.

It is possible to suppress the development of epilepsy in genetically predisposed animals, which could open the door to treating epilepsy as a preventable disease. Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder that affects about 50 million people worldwide.

Does the consumption of green tea, widely touted to have beneficial effects on health, also protect brain cells? Green tea polyphenols protect dopamine neurons and this effect increases with the amount consumed, according to new research.

A direct link between obesity and bad breath has been found: the more overweight you are, the more likely your breath will smell unpleasant to those around you. While widespread obesity is a modern invention, bad breath is not. The phenomenon goes back thousands of years.

In addition to allowing us to see, the mammalian eye also detects light for a number of "nonvisual" phenomena. A prime example of this is the timing of the sleep/wake cycle, which is synchronized by the effects of light on the circadian pacemaker in the hypothalamus.

A plentiful ingredient found in human semen drastically enhances the ability of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to cause infection, according to a new report. The findings help to understand the sexual transmission of HIV and suggest a potential new target for preventing the spread of AIDS, the researchers said.

Twenty million nuclear medicine procedures that detect and evaluate heart disease, brain disorders and cancer -- and that use radiopharmaceuticals to treat overactive thyroids and some cancers -- are performed each year. Sometimes patients who have received these treatments inadvertently set off radiation alarms in public buildings.

A clinical study on the use of a drug to extend the survival of patients with the most common and aggressive type of brain cancer, has yielded results that were significantly better than expected.