In Brief

In Brief:

Childbirth

Delivery `coach' not much help

For a generation of expectant fathers who donned sweat shirts and stopwatches to "coach" their pregnant partners through delivery, researchers have some dispiriting news: You didn't help much.

Scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that women who were told to push 10 seconds for every contraction gave birth 13 minutes faster than those who weren't told when to push. But there was little net impact on labor, which lasted an average of 14 hours.

"There were no other findings to show that coaching or not coaching was advantageous or harmful," said Dr. Steven Bloom, the university's interim head of obstetrics and gynecology and lead author.

"Oftentimes, it's best for the patient to do what's more comfortable for her."

The researchers studied 320 first-time mothers at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.

About half were given specific instructions by certified nurse-midwives during the second stage of labor, when they were fully dilated. The rest were told to "do what comes naturally."

Researchers said coached mothers also showed an increased risk of pelvic floor problems and subsequent bladder problems.

The report appeared in this month's American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

SUN STAFF

DNA

Could skull be Mozart's?

Have scientists found Mozart's skull? Researchers say they'll reveal the results of DNA tests in a documentary airing Sunday on Austrian television to help celebrate the composer's 250th birthday.

The tests were done last year by experts at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, and the results will be made public in Mozart: The Search for Evidence, to be screened by state broadcaster ORF.

Past tests were inconclusive, but this time "we succeeded in getting a clear result," lead researcher Dr. Walther Parson, a forensic pathologist, told ORF.

For more than a century, the skull has been in the possession of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on Jan. 27, 1756.

Parson said genetic material from skull scrapings were compared with DNA samples that were gathered in 2004 from the thigh bones of Mozart's maternal grandmother and a niece. Those bones were recovered from a family grave that was opened in 2004 at Salzburg's Sebastian Cemetery.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Immunology

Rotavirus vaccines hailed as effective

Two new vaccines appear safe and very effective against rotavirus, a major diarrheal killer of young children in poor countries, large-scale studies show. The results prompted two government doctors to call for making routine immunization "a global priority."

Rotavirus, which causes diarrhea and dehydration, leads to more than 2 million hospitalizations and half a million deaths a year, mostly in developing countries. In the United States, the virus sickens about 2.7 million children younger than 5, sends up to 70,000 to the hospital and causes 20 to 70 deaths each year.

The new vaccines, developed by the drugmakers that ran the studies, Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC's GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, did not increase cases of a rare disorder that forced withdrawal of another anti-rotavirus drug in 1999.

The studies, each including about 60,000 children, were reported in yesterday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The two studies, each of 60,000 children, found each vaccine prevented at least 98 percent of severe cases of gastroenteritis, or intestinal inflammation.

Drs. Roger I. Glass and Umesh D. Parashar of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in an editorial that the new vaccines are impressive enough to recommend routine immunizations worldwide. Still, they wrote, babies should be monitored to ensure there's no risk.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Icthyology

Tuna-mercury report to be probed

The Food and Drug Administration will investigate whether tens of millions of cans of tuna sold each year contain potentially hazardous levels of mercury.

Responding to a Chicago Tribune series on mercury in fish, the FDA said it will review the possibility that there are elevated mercury levels in some cans of "light tuna," one of America's best-selling seafoods and a product the agency has repeatedly recommended as a low-mercury choice.

The Tribune reported that the U.S. tuna industry is using a potentially high-mercury tuna species, yellowfin, to make about 15 percent of the 1.2 billion cans of light tuna sold annually. Most of these cans are not labeled yellowfin, making it impossible for consumers to know which cans might be high in mercury.

Tuna industry officials insist that light tuna does not contain dangerous levels of mercury.

David Acheson, the FDA's chief medical officer, said the agency had been unaware that some canned light tuna was made with a species that is often high in mercury. "We will definitely look at it through our office of seafood and determine whether there is something that requires further pursuit," Acheson said.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Oncology