Mixed Bag

Better use of lighting in hospital rooms may improve patients' health
The researchers found that hospitalized patients in the study were exposed primarily to low levels of light 24 hours per day, indicating a lack of the natural fluctuation between bright and low light required to help maintain normal sleep-wake patterns. Also, patients slept very poorly, and the less light patients were exposed to during the day, the more fatigued they felt. Finally, the more fatigued they felt, the more pain they experienced. Eurekalert!

Alarming increasing incidence of myopia
 New research on myopia—how it develops, risk and protective factors, and potentially effective measures for prevention and treatment are reported across twenty articles in the November issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. Eurekalert!

Knee Brace Eases OA Pain
Patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA) who wore a patellofemoral brace for 6 weeks experienced decreases in pain and bone marrow lesions, a researcher said here.

On a 100-point visual analog scale (VAS), patients who wore the brace for an average of 7.35 hours per day had a "substantial" decline in pain of -18.16 points (95% CI minus 23.88-minus 12.44), whereas controls had only a slight change of -1.29 points (95% CI minus 6.39-3.80), reported David T. Felson, MD, of the University of Manchester in England, and colleagues.

That represented a highly significant between-group difference of 16.87 points (P<0.001), he said at the annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology. MedPage Today

Kessler Foundation MS study correlates fMR with negative effect of warmer weather on cognitive status
Kessler Foundation scientists correlated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings with the negative impact of outdoor temperature on cognitive functioning in multiple sclerosis (MS). This study, “Warmer outdoor temperature is associated  with task-related increased BOLD activation in patients  with multiple sclerosis,” released by Brain Imaging & Behavior as epub ahead of print, corroborates the group’s previous study that established that people with MS performed worse on processing speed and memory tasks during warmer outdoor temperatures versus during cooler outdoor temperatures.

“Increased MS disease activity during warmer months is a recent discovery. Now, this work is the first report of brain activation associated with outdoor temperature in MS. This finding is novel and important for persons with MS who are shown to have worse cognition during warmer weather,” said Victoria M. Leavitt, Ph.D., research scientist at Kessler Foundation and principal investigator for the study, funded by a grant from the National MS Society. Kessler Foundation

Staph infections and eczema: What's the connection?
In a paper in Nature, the team reports that a toxin produced by the common bacteria Staphylococcus aureus – popularly known as "staph" – causes immune-system cells in the skin to react in a way that produces eczema-like rashes. MedicalXpress