Health and Medicine

Entrenched sedentary behavior such as watching television and playing computer video games has been the bane for years of parents of overweight children and physicians trying to help those children lose pounds. University at Buffalo researchers now have shown in a randomized trial that by using a device that automatically restricted video-viewing time, parents reduced their children's video time by an average of 17.5 hours a week and lowered their body-mass index (BMI) significantly.

Timothy F. Murphy, Ph.D., University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has been appointed to serve as a study section member in the National Institutes of Health's Center for Scientific Review.

Up to 20 percent of patients taking aspirin to lower the risk of suffering a second cerebrovascular event do not have an antiplatelet response from aspirin, the effect thought to produce the protective effect, researchers at the University at Buffalo have shown.

American politics and federal tax law draw on outdated notions of the American family that continue to promote gender inequality and undermine the middle class, according to a University at Buffalo Law School professor.

The doctor who wouldn't come into the patient's hospital room. The neurologist who avoided eye contact. The ambulance attendant who angrily threw her bloodied gloves into the street after learning the injured patient was HIV-positive. These are reactions of some health-care personnel when faced with caring for persons infected with HIV more than 25 years after its discovery and documented in a study a University at Buffalo assistant professor of communication and health behavior.

Cardiac researchers at the University at Buffalo have received a four-year, $512,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to investigate how a common cholesterol-lowering drug increases cardiac-muscle cells and helps to stem the progress of heart failure.

Between 900,000 and 3 million women annually experience violence or abuse by their intimate partners, the U.S. Department of Justice estimates. And while the children in such relationships often receive extensive counseling as a matter of course, support for their mothers may not go beyond providing temporary safe housing. The Athena Project at the University at Buffalo was designed to help correct that scenario.

Increases in young women's drinking during the transition from high school through the first year of college can have dangerous physical, sexual and psychological implications, according to a report out of the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions.

Two novel proteins studied by a University at Buffalo professor of microbiology and immunology appear to have the potential to enhance the production of antibodies against a multitude of infectious agents.

Jurgen Bohnemeyer, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, has received a 42-month $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund a comparative study of the representation of space in 15 indigenous languages of Guatemala and Mexico, many of which are severely under-documented and endangered.