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Unhealthy habits put Brit teens ”at increased premature death risk”

April 30, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, Apr 30 (ANI): Increasing binge drinking and smoking habits are putting British teenage girls at increased risk of premature death, a worldwide study has claimed.

The study claimed that British teenage girls are more likely to die early than those in Slovenia and Albania.

To reach the conclusion, boffins calculated the probability of 15-year-old girls and boys in each country dying before they reach the age of 60.

Such deaths are considered ”premature” as healthier lifestyles, vaccines, improved road safety and modern medicine means more people than ever before are reaching old age, reports The Telegraph.

Published in The Lancet, the study found that girls in Britain were as likely to die before the age of 60 as girls in Slovenia and Albania whilst boys in Britain were as likely to die early as those in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

The study was conducted by a team at University of Washington.

Prof Ian Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “We really need to be tackling the preventable causes of premature death and that is to do with health inequalities. In the UK the people who are hit by premature death tend to be the most deprived in our communities.” (ANI)

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Decaf coffee, nicotine-free tobacco may offer Parkinson”s protection

April 24, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, Apr 24(ANI): In a new study, researchers found that coffee and cigarettes could protect the brain of flies with a form of Parkinson’s disease, but the benefit was not because of caffeine and nicotine.

Leo Pallanck, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose team led the new study, said that if they could identify the compounds that put up this brain defence, they could offer a preventive Parkinson”s treatment where none currently exists.

“We think that there”s something else in coffee and tobacco that”s really important,” New Scientist quoted him as saying.

Epidemiological studies have suggested that coffee-drinkers and smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson”s than abstainers.

“A lot of the field has gravitated to the idea that it”s caffeine and nicotine [that protects their brains],” said Pallanck.

To see if ingredients other than caffeine and nicotine might be providing the benefit, Pallanck”s team turned to fruit flies with a condition similar to Parkinson”s disease.

The flies have mutations that kill off dopamine-producing neurons, which causes them to develop movement and cognitive problems like those characteristic of Parkinson”s in people.

The same mutations are linked to hereditary forms of Parkinson”s in humans.

The researchers prepared several fly foods spiced up with normal coffee, decaffeinated coffee, smokeless “dipping” tobacco designed to allow nicotine absorption via the mouth, or a commercial nicotine-free tobacco.

Then the researchers raised groups of flies on the various diets.

Normally, dopamine-producing neurons in the mutant flies die off as they age.

However, a diet featuring coffee and tobacco kept the neurons alive in all the flies tested at 20 days old, whether or not their food contained caffeine or nicotine.

In addition, when pure caffeine or nicotine were added to the meals of other groups of flies, their dopamine neurons died off – just like those of flies whose food had no additive at all.

“We didn”t see any protective effects at all of caffeine and nicotine,” said Pallanck.

His team went on to identify a compound found in both decaf and normal coffee called cafestol that seems partially responsible for its neuro-protective effects.

Cafestol activates a protein produced by flies called Nrf2, and the team found that blocking Nrf2 diminished coffee”s protective effect on dopamine neurons.

Blocking Nrf2 in flies fed tobacco also reduced its protective effects.

And now, the scientists are searching for tobacco ingredients that activate Nrf2 – and other ones that do the same in coffee.

These compounds might one day be given to people to protect against Parkinson”s.

Alternatively, new drugs could mimic the protective neural processes triggered by coffee and cigarettes.

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: absorption, brains, coffee and cigarettes, coffee drinkers, cognitive problems, compounds, diets, Dipping Tobacco, dopamine neurons, epidemiological studies, Free Tobacco, Fruit Flies, mutations, neuroscientist, New Scientist, nicotine, Smokeless Tobacco, smokers, study researchers, University of Washington

Infertile men at higher prostate cancer risk

March 22, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, March 22 (ANI): Infertility increases a man”s risk of prostate cancer, a new research has found.

The study showed that infertile men have an increased risk of developing high-grade prostate cancer, which is more likely to grow and spread quickly.

The study”s results suggest that because infertility may be an identifiable risk factor for prostate cancer, early screening may be warranted in infertile men.

Research focusing on the number of children a man has have pointed to male fertility”s potential associated with risk for prostate cancer.

However, studies on the topic have generated conflicting results: some have found that men with children had a higher risk than childless men; some have found that men with fewer children had a higher risk than men with more children; still others failed to identify any association between the number of children fathered and a man”s risk for prostate cancer.

Because the number of children a man has may not accurately reflect his ability to cause a pregnancy, Thomas Walsh, of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues designed a more accurate study to evaluate the association between male infertility and prostate cancer.

They studied the risk for prostate cancer in a group of 22,562 men evaluated for infertility from 1967 to 1998 in 15 California infertility centers.

The incidence of prostate cancer in these men was compared with the incidence in a sample of men in the general population who were of similar ages and from similar geographic locations.

The researchers identified 168 cases of prostate cancer that developed in men who were evaluated for infertility.

That number not significantly different from the expected rate (185 cases), suggesting that overall, men evaluated for infertility were not at a higher risk of being diagnosed with any type of prostate cancer compared with men in the general population.

However, men who were evaluated and found to be infertile were 2.6 times more likely to be diagnosed with high-grade prostate cancer than men who were evaluated but were found not to be infertile.

The authors say if these results are confirmed in other studies, it may be appropriate for infertile men to be considered for early prostate cancer screening, given their elevated risk for aggressive disease.

They add that the results should stimulate research on possible common biological pathways underlying infertility and prostate cancer.

The study has been published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: Accurate Study, cancer research, cancer screening, Childless Men, colleagues, infertile men, infertility, male fertility, male infertility, population, pregnancy, prostate, Prostate Cancer, prostate cancer risk, Prostate Screening, risk factor, seattle, Thomas Walsh, University of Washington

Baldness at young age cuts prostate cancer risk

March 16, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, March 16 (ANI): Men who go bald at an early age have less chances of suffering from prostate cancer, according to a new study.

An American team observed 2,000 men aged between 40 and 47, half of whom had prostate cancer.

It was learnt that those who had their hair thinned by the age of 30 were 45 per cent less likely to get prostrate cancer, compared to those who did not suffer hair loss.

“At first, the findings were surprising. But we found that early onset baldness was associated with a 29 per cent to 45 per cent reduction in their relative risk of prostate cancer,” the Telegraph quoted Professor Jonathan Wright, an expert in prostate cancer at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, as telling the Daily Mail.

The study also found that most men think going bald makes them feel old and less attractive.

The study has been published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology. (ANI)

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Timing is the key in visual memory

March 16, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 16 (ANI): Visual memory might not be dependent on a person’s attention level or what a scene contains, but it is the timing of when the scene is presented which is important, says a new study.

The study by researchers at the University of Washington shows how visual scenes are encoded into memory at behaviourally relevant points in time.

The ability to remember a briefly presented scene depends on a number of factors, such as its saliency, novelty, degree of threat, or behavioural relevance to a task.

It is believed that attention is the key, i.e., people can only remember part of a visual scene when paying attention to it at any given moment.

In the study, participants performed an attention-demanding “target detection task at fixation,” while also viewing a rapid sequence of full-field photographs of urban and natural scenes.

Participants were then tested on whether they recognized a specific scene from the sequence they had been shown or not.

“Usually, the addition of a secondary task decreases performance on the first task. However, in this particular case, adding a second task (letter identification) actually enhanced performance in the first task (scene memory) when targets were accurately detected in the second letter identification task,” said Jeffrey Lin, the lead author of the study.

The study adds to the understanding of how selective attention can influence the ability to remember specific features of our environment.

The results indicate a brain mechanism that automatically encodes certain visual features into memory at behaviorally relevant points in time, regardless of the spatial focus of attention.

Timing may not be everything, but it”s more important than we realize.

The study has been published in this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology. (ANI)

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Researchers operate biomedical robots from different locations worldwide via Internet

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 18 (ANI): Experts from the University of Washington and SRI International have jointly developed a new software protocol, to standardize the way biomedical robots are managed over the Internet.

Nine research teams from universities and research institutes around the world recently made a successful demonstration of biomedical robots operated from different locations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia with the help of the ‘Interoperable Telesurgical Protocol’.

In a 24-hour period, each participating group connected over the Internet, and controlled robots at different locations.

The tests performed demonstrated how a wide variety of robot and controller designs can seamlessly interoperate, allowing researchers to work together easily and more efficiently.

The demonstration also evaluated the feasibility of robotic manipulation from multiple sites, and was conducted to measure time and performance for evaluating laparoscopic surgical skills.

“Although many telemanipulation systems have common features, there is currently no accepted protocol for connecting these systems. We hope this new protocol serves as a starting point for the discussion and development of a robust and practical Internet-type standard that supports the interoperability of future robotic systems,” said SRI’s Tom Low.

The protocol is expected to allow engineers and designers that usually develop technologies independently, to work collaboratively, determine which designs work best, encourage widespread adoption of the new communications protocol, and help robotics research to evolve more rapidly.

Its early adoption may encourage robotic systems to be developed with interoperability in mind, and avoid future incompatibilities.

“We’re very pleased with the success of the event in which almost all of the possible connections between operator stations and remote robots were successful. We were particularly excited that novel elements such as a simulated robot and an exoskeleton controller worked smoothly with the other remote manipulation systems,” said Professor Blake Hannaford of the University of Washington. (ANI)

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The pen may be mightier than the keyboard for schoolkids

September 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 17 (ANI): It may not be wrong to say that the pen is mightier than the keyboard, for a new study on schoolchildren so suggests.

Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of Educational Psychology, looked at the ability of second, fourth, and sixth grade children to write the alphabet, sentences, and essays using a pen and a keyboard.

“Children consistently did better writing with a pen when they wrote essays. They wrote more and they wrote faster,” said Berninger.

The researcher further said that only for writing the alphabet was the keyboard better than the pen.

Results were mixed for sentences.

However, when using a pen, the children in the three grade levels produced longer essays and composed them at a faster pace.

The study also showed that fourth and sixth graders wrote more complete sentences when they used a pen, and that this ability was not affected by the children’s spelling skills.

The research also showed that many children don’t have a reliable idea of what a sentence is until the third or fourth grade.

“Children first have to understand what a sentence or a complete thought is before they can write one. Talking is very different from writing. We don’t talk in complete sentence. In conversation we produce units smaller and larger than sentences,” Berninger said.

She, however, added: “We need to learn more about the process of writing with a computer, and even though schools have computers they haven’t integrated them in teaching at the early grades. We need to help children become bilingual writers so they can write by both the pen and the computer. So don’t throw away your pen or your keyboard. We need them both.”

She further said: “We need more research to figure out how forming letters by a pen and selecting them by pressing a key may engage our thinking brains differently.” (ANI)

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Organic electronics that allows transport of both positive and negative charges developed

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 18 (ANI): A new research from the University of Washington scientists has described an approach to organic electronics that allows transport of both positive and negative charges.

Until now, however, circuits built with organic materials have allowed only one type of charge to move through them.

Now, new research from the University of Washington makes charges flow both ways.

“The organic semiconductors developed over the past 20 years have one important drawback. It’s very difficult to get electrons to move through,” said lead author Samson Jenekhe, a UW professor of chemical engineering.

“By now having polymer semiconductors that can transmit both positive and negative charges, it broadens the available approaches. This would certainly change the way we do things,” he added.

A major drawback with existing organic semiconductors is most transmit only positive charges.

In the last decade, a few organic materials have been developed that can transport only electrons.

But, making a working organic circuit has meant carefully layering two complicated patterns on top of one another, one that transports electrons and another one that transports holes.

“Because current organic semiconductors have this limitation, the way they’re currently used has to compensate for that, which has led to all kinds of complex processes and complications,” Jenekhe said.

Over the past few years, Jenekhe’s lab has created polymers with a donor and an acceptor part, and carefully adjusted the strength of each one.

In collaboration with Watson’s lab, they have now developed an organic molecule that works to transport both positive and negative charges.

“What we have shown in this paper is that you don’t have to use two separate organic semiconductors. You can use one material to create electronic circuits,” Jenekhe said.

The material would allow organic transistors and other information-processing devices to be built more simply, in a way that is more similar to how inorganic circuits are now made.

The group used the new material to build a transistor designed in the same way as a silicon model and the results show that both electrons and holes move through the device quickly.

The results represent the best performance ever seen in a single-component organic polymer semiconductor, according to Jenekhe.

Electrons moved five to eight times faster through the UW device than in any other such polymer transistor.

A circuit, which consists of two or more integrated devices, generated a voltage gain two to five times greater than previously seen in a polymer circuit.

“We expect people to use this approach. We’ve opened the way for people to know how to do it,” Jenekhe said. (ANI)

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Mothers of autistic kids suffer from higher levels of parenting stress

July 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 9 (ANI): A new study has revealed that the mothers of autistic children have higher levels of parenting-related stress and psychological distress than the mothers of kids with developmental delay.

“Both groups of women are dealing with children who need high levels of care-giving. But there is something about autism that is making a difference and adding stress and psychological distress to these mothers,” said Annette Estes, lead author of a new study and associate director of the UW Autism Centre.

The research from the University of Washington’s Autism Centre found no link between a child’s decreased daily living skills and increased parental stress and psychological distress.

“If a child has more needs in getting dressed and in other daily living skills, that means the parents are working harder and seemingly would be under stress,” Estes said.

“But it is not the hard work that is stressing the mothers. Our findings really pointed to the behaviour problems that can occur with autism.

“Children with autism had significantly higher levels of problem behaviours than children with developmental delay,” she added.

These behaviour problems included such things as irritability, agitation, crying, inappropriate speech, and not being able to follow rules.

“Help in what we call family adaptive functioning is what we need to figure out in these cases. How to help families is important because high levels of stress and psychological distress can interfere with early identification of autism and interventions which are delivered by parents,” she said.

“There’s another good reason to do this: Parents who feel supported can better support their children,” she added.(ANI)

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NASA spacecraft reveals dramatic thinning of Arctic sea ice

July 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 8 (ANI): Data from a NASA Earth-orbiting spacecraft has revealed a dramatic thinning of Arctic sea ice between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thin seasonal ice replacing thick older ice as the dominant type for the first time on record.

The new results provide further evidence for the rapid, ongoing transformation of the Arctic’s ice cover.

In the research, scientists from NASA and the University of Washington in Seattle conducted the most comprehensive survey to date using observations from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, known as ICESat, to make the first basin-wide estimate of the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover.

The Arctic ice cap grows each winter as the sun sets for several months and intense cold ensues.

In the summer, wind and ocean currents cause some of the ice naturally to flow out of the Arctic, while much of it melts in place.

But not all of the Arctic ice melts each summer, as the thicker, older ice is more likely to survive.

Seasonal sea ice usually reaches about 6 feet in thickness, while multi-year ice averages 9 feet.

Using ICESat measurements, scientists found that overall Arctic sea ice thinned about 7 inches a year, for a total of 2.2 feet over four winters.

The total area covered by the thicker, older “multi-year” ice that has survived one or more summers shrank by 42 percent.

Previously, scientists relied only on measurements of area to determine how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice, but ICESat makes it possible to monitor ice thickness and volume changes over the entire Arctic Ocean for the first time.

The results give scientists a better understanding of the regional distribution of ice and provide better insight into what is happening in the Arctic.

“Ice volume allows us to calculate annual ice production and gives us an inventory of the freshwater and total ice mass stored in Arctic sea ice,” said Kwok.

“Even in years when the overall extent of sea ice remains stable or grows slightly, the thickness and volume of the ice cover is continuing to decline, making the ice more vulnerable to continued shrinkage.

Our data will help scientists better understand how fast the volume of Arctic ice is decreasing and how soon we might see a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer,” he added.

The research team attributes the changes in the overall thickness and volume of Arctic Ocean sea ice to the recent warming and anomalies in patterns of sea ice circulation. (ANI)

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Cradle of fear found in the brain

July 7, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 7 (ANI): University of Washington researchers claim that they have for the first time located the neurons responsible for fear conditioning in the mammalian brain.

The researchers have revealed that an imaging technique enabled them to trace the process of neural activation in the brains of rats.

They say that their study has pinpointed the basolateral nucleus in the region of the brain called the amygdala as the place where fear conditioning is encoded.

Scientists previously believed that both the amygdala and another brain region, the dorsal hippocampus, were where cues get associated when fear memories are formed.

The new study, however, has shown that the role of the hippocampus is to process and transmit information about conditioned stimuli to the amygdala.

“By understanding the process of fear conditioning we might learn how to treat anxiety by making the conditioning weaker or to go away. It is also a tool for learning about these brain cells and the underlying mechanism of fear conditioning,” says Ilene Bernstein, a UW professor of Psychology.

A research article on the study has been published in PLoS One, a journal of the Public Library of Science. (ANI)

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Scorpion venom-nanoparticle combo slows brain cancer’s spread

April 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 17 (ANI): Scorpion venom has shown some promise to slow the spread of brain cancer, say researchers.

Scientists at the University of Washington have revealed that combining nanoparticles with chlorotoxin, a small peptide isolated from scorpion venom, they could halt the spread of cancerous cells by 98 per cent, compared to 45 per cent for the scorpion venom alone.

“People talk about the treatment being more effective with nanoparticles but they don’t know how much, maybe 5 percent or 10 percent. This was quite a surprise to us,” said Miqin Zhang, professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

She revealed that the study involved mouse brain-cancer cells that were grown in the lab.

Her team observed that the cells containing nanoparticle-chlorotoxin combo were unable to elongate, whereas those containing only nanoparticles or only chlorotoxin could stretch out.

Based on their observations, the researchers came to the conclusion that the nanoparticle-chlorotoxin combo disabled the machinery on the cell’s surface that allows cells to change shape, yet another step required for a tumour cell to slip through the body.

“We hypothesized the mechanism and we have all the data to prove our hypothesis,” Zhang said.

She revealed that her team’s future experiments would involve testing on mice.

A report describing the study has been published in the journal Small. (ANI)

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Summers in Arctic may be ice-free in as few as 30 years

April 3, 2009 By admin 1 Comment

Washington, April 3 (ANI): A new analysis of computer models has forecasted that summers in the Arctic may be ice-free in as few as 30 years.

“The Arctic is changing faster than anticipated,” said James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and co-author of the study.

“It’s a combination of natural variability, along with warmer air and sea conditions caused by increased greenhouse gases,” he added.

Overland and his co-author, Muyin Wang, a University of Washington research scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean in Seattle, analyzed projections from six computer models, including three with sophisticated sea ice physics capabilities.

That data was then combined with observations of summer sea ice loss in 2007 and 2008.

The area covered by summer sea ice is expected to decline from its current 4.6 million square kilometers (about 2.8 million square miles) to about 1 million square kilometers (about 620,000 square miles) – a loss approximately four-fifths the size of the continental U.S.

Much of the sea ice would remain in the area north of Canada and Greenland and decrease between Alaska and Russia in the Pacific Arctic.

“The Arctic is often called the ‘Earth’s refrigerator’ because the sea ice helps cool the planet by reflecting the sun’s radiation back into space,” said Wang.

“With less ice, the sun’s warmth is instead absorbed by the open water, contributing to warmer temperatures in the water and the air,” he added. (ANI)

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Physically abused women spend 40pc more on health care than non-abused

March 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 24 (ANI): Women who are victims of physical abuse from intimate partners have increased health care costs, even after the abuse has ended, a new study has found.

“Along with all the physical and emotional pain it causes, domestic violence also comes with a substantial financial price,” said Amy Bonomi, co-author of the study and associate professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.

She claimed that the study is the largest to date to examine health care costs and utilization based on the timing and type of domestic violence that women suffer.

Co-authored with researchers from the Group Health Cooperative and the University of Washington in Seattle, the study examined data from 3,333 randomly selected women who belonged to Group Health, a health care system in the Pacific Northwest.

In the survey, the researchers asked the women about whether they experienced any physical or emotional abuse from intimate partners and if so, when it occurred.

Then, they studied patterns of health care use and costs by the women over an 11-year period, from 1992 through 2002.

“We were able to track health care costs for quite a long time, giving us a good picture of how much domestic violence is actually costing our health care system,” said Bonomi.

It was found that women experiencing ongoing physical abuse had the highest health care costs-42 percent higher than non-abused women.

“It’s likely that these women need more health care because they are seeking care for immediate injuries and associated health problems,” said Bonomi.

And women, who had been physically abused within the last five years, but not currently, had 24 percent higher yearly health costs.

Abuse that occurred more than five years ago resulted in 19 percent higher costs.

Bonomi said that one striking finding was that all abused women, whether they experienced physical or psychological abuse, used significantly more mental health services than non-abused women.

Physically abused women used significantly more primary care, pharmacy, specialty care, laboratory and radiology services.

The study was published online this week in the journal Health Services Research. (ANI)

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Anti-social behaviour in girls triggers depression in adolescence

February 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 18 (ANI): Researchers at the University of Washington have found that anti-social behaviour among girls and anxiety among both sexes triggers depression in early adolescence.

“Anti-social behaviour has typically been viewed as a big problem among boys, so it tends to be ignored among girls,” said James Mazza, a UW professor of educational psychology and lead author of the new study.

“Boys with early anti-social behaviour typically go on to show more anti-social behaviour while girls may turn inward with symptoms, morphing into other mental health problems such as depression eating disorders, anxiety and suicidal behaviour during adolescence.

“When all the risk factors were analyzed, anti-social behaviour and anxiety were the most predictive of later depression. It just may be that they are more prevalent in the early elementary school years than depression,” he added.

He noted that depression and anxiety share a number of symptoms.

Mazza said that early adolescence is when the first episode of depression typically occurs and that’s when it has been noted that gender difference occur, with more girls than boys experiencing depressive symptoms.

Children can be assessed at 6 and 7 years of age, but depression is not often recognized or diagnosed until the middle school years.

Children in this study were drawn from a larger project looking at the risks for health and behaviour problems. More than 800 children participated in the depression study. Eighty-one percent were white and 54 percent were boys.

The research was published in the online edition of The Journal of Early Adolescence. (ANI)

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US Study Concludes, Doctors Show Preference towards Whites

October 30, 2008 By Rajesh Leave a Comment

A recent study presented to the American Public Health Association by Janice Sabin of the University of Washington in Seattle stated that the doctors subconsciously favored whites over blacks. To quote Sabin “This supports speculation that subtle race bias may affect health care, but does not imply that it will”. Although the study did show a common racial bias among the general population, quoting Sabin “but we have to remember people are not racist if they hold an implicit bias.”

The study involved some 400,000 people who took an online test between 2004 and 2006 about their attitudes on race. Out of which some 2,500 were doctors; 86 percent of people lived in the United States. From among the doctors 76 percent were US residents. Out of the entire group, 69 percent said they were white, while 66 percent of the doctors were white. Doctors showed a subtle preference for whites over blacks. The black doctors however did not show any preference.

Janice Sabin said, “The implicit bias effect among all test takers is very strong….. People who report they have a medical education are not different from other people, and this kind of unconscious bias is a common phenomenon”.

The study suggested diversity training to be included in the curriculum of medical education in the United States. The test, which was called the ‘Implicit Association Test’ was developed by Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor who stated “We don’t call what these tests show prejudice. We talk about it as hidden bias or unconscious bias, something that most people are unaware they even possess.”

The test which was created about a decade back has so far tested 6 million people that have measured unconscious attitudes about Race, gender, sexual orientation, age and various ethnic groups. Another study has shown that blacks are more likely to die from diabetes, strokes, heart attacks and cancer even though there is no difference in income, education and insurance coverage as compared to the whites.

Filed Under: Health News, International News Tagged With: age, American Public Health Association, gender, Implicit Association Test, medical education, Race, sexual orientation, United States, University of Washington