A Penn State College of Medicine pilot study suggests that a drug used to ease symptoms of alcohol and drug addiction may also bring relief to people with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory disorder of the intestine that affects an estimated 500,000 Americans.
In the study, patients with diagnosed Crohn’s disease were treated with a low dose of naltrexone, an FDA-approved drug used to ease symptoms of withdrawal from substance abuse, and monitored for improvement o
People aged 70 years and older with limited literacy skills are one and one half to two times as likely to have poor health and poor health care access as people with adequate or higher reading ability, according to a study led by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.
Elders with limited literacy, which the researchers define as a reading level lower than ninth grade, were one and a half times more likely than other study par
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently added 150 new methods–nicknamed “recipes”–to a database already containing 255 procedures for analyzing specific synthetic polymers using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry.
The recipes provide data critical to the industrial design, manufacture and application of synthetic polymers. They have been collected from the peer-review scientific literature and included in the
An improved technique for culturing cells, developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), may enable new, fundamental insights into the behavior of neuronal cells.
Culturing particular types of cells in isolation is a basic technique for measuring how they respond to various stimuli, testing new drugs, and similar cell biology tasks. Neuronal cells, which make up the central nervous system in mammals, are both particularly important and particularly har
Uterine fibroids affect the health and quality of life of more than six million women in the US every year
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine are working on ways to improve the results of a non-surgical method to treat fibroids. They are examining the overall effectiveness of different agents used to destroy uterine fibroids – a discovery that could lead to more answers about the durability of a procedure called Uterine Fibroid Embolization (UFE). I
Neither of the two emergency surgical interventions used to correct perforated necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a common and dangerous complication of prematurity, appears to significantly improve an infant’s survival and later health, according to a study by UAB researchers and colleagues in the May 25 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
In the first clinical trial to examine this issue, a team of scientists from UAB, Yale University and other sites studied 117 preterm infants
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), has discovered a crucial missing link in the search for the origin of HIV-1, the virus responsible for human AIDS. That missing link is the natural reservoir of the virus, which the team has found in wild-living chimpanzees in southern Cameroon.
The findings provide important clues to how the disease migrated from non-human to human primates, and will be released Thursday (May 25) in Sc
Despite lack of a key component of the immune system, a line of genetically engineered mice can control chronic herpes virus infections, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found.
Scientists can’t prove it yet, but they suspect the missing immune system component, a group of molecules known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) Class Ia, has a previously unrecognized backup that is similar enough to step in and fill the void left b
Dartmouth researchers, working with scientists at the University of Arizona and at the Department of Natural Resources in Sonora, Mexico, have published a study on the impact of arsenic exposure on DNA damage. They have determined that arsenic in drinking water is associated with a decrease in the body’s ability to repair its DNA.
“This work supports the idea that arsenic in drinking water can promote the carcinogenic effects of other chemicals,” says Angeline Andrew, the lead auth
When single-celled organisms such as sperm crack their whip-like appendages called flagella, the beating sets them in motion. But in certain colonies of green algae, flagella also boost nutrient uptake, according to surprising new research.
In the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Arizona and Brown University explain how flagella allow these algae to get the energy they need to multiply and create colon
The Academy of Finland Research Council of Health sees that the impact of funding can be improved for instance by extending the duration of research programmes and by streamlining programme contents. Impact assessment should be taken into account from the very beginning of programme planning and development of smaller fields of research should be continued for example by means of discipline assessments. This is the conclusion the Research Council comes to in the report “Strategic funding for enhanc
Light can blind or distort colours, or confuse one with chiaroscuros. But it can have greater usefulness if its properties, characteristics, how it is created, etcetera are better understood.
At the Department of Applied Physics at the University of the Basque Country School of Engineering they are using laser light in studies to look for new applications.
There is more than one kind of laser beam but, basically, the process of its creation is the same:
Initially,
Up to now, astronomers have discovered 188 extrasolar planets, among which 10 are known as “transiting planets&rdquo. These planets pass between their star and us at each orbit (Figure 1). Given the current technical limitations, the only transiting planets that can be detected are giant planets orbiting close to their parent star known as “hot Jupiters” or Pegasids. The ten transiting planets known thus far have masses between 110 and 430 Earth masses (for comparison, Jupiter, with 318 Earth ma
Eating fatty food does not appear to increase the risk of skin cancer. A study published today in the open access international journal BMC Cancer contradicts previous research that showed a link between high fat intake and certain types of skin cancer. The results of this latest study suggest that high fat intake might even play a protective role in the development of non-melanoma skin cancer.
Robert Granger and colleagues from the Menzies Research Institute in Hobart, Australia and col
A new technology to enable pharmaceutical companies to determine more effectively, and earlier on in clinical trials, whether an experimental drug is toxic to the heart has taken an important step toward the marketplace.
The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and iCardiac Technologies, Inc. have signed an exclusive agreement to commercialize software developed by biomedical engineer Jean-Philippe Couderc, Ph.D., that provides a more accurate and reliable method to an
Two wildly different pathogens – one that infects vegetables, the other infecting humans – essentially use the same protein code to get their disease-causing proteins into the cells of their respective hosts.
That’s what researchers from Ohio State and Northwestern universities report in a study published in the current issue of the journal PLoS Pathogens. The scientists were surprised to learn that the pathogen that causes malaria in humans and the microbe that caused the Ir
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