Study of kidney condition challenges conventional view of steroid effects
Children who take steroid drugs for a kidney condition called nephrotic syndrome do not suffer bone loss, a common side effect of steroid treatments in adults. A new study sheds light on the steroid’s mixed effects: the drug frequently causes obesity, which seems to protect children against bone loss.
Childhood nephrotic syndrome, which affects 3 out of 100,000 children, is the most common chronic ki
University of Warwick Medical School researchers are concerned that the health service could fail to learn important lessons from a crucial series of ambulance and emergency trials that increase the skills of paramedics and help reduce unnecessary emergency hospital admissions.
Dr Matthew Cooke, Head of the Emergency Care & Rehabilitation research group at the University of Warwick’s Medical School, will outline his concern at the “Emergency Care Conference”, at the University of W
For many patients with advanced breast cancer, the cancer drug Herceptin (trastuzumab) has offered new hope when traditional cancer drugs failed to work, shrinking tumors and sending some patients into remission.
Now Dihua Yu, M.D., Ph.D., and her colleagues at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have uncovered a powerful new cancer-fighting property of Herceptin, an antibody-based drug that targets a protein on breast cancer cells called HER-2 (also called ErbB2). Th
Using an ancient Chinese folk remedy as a model, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have designed several new compounds that, in early testing, promise to be both safer and more effective in fighting malaria and some forms of cancer than the current “gold standard” drug treatments.
Scientists will announce their successful results in late August at the American Chemical Society’s annual summer meeting, held this year in Philadelphia. Some of the results also
Breast cancer tends to progress to nearby lymph nodes, but surgeons can find it difficult to determine what tissue to remove with the breast tumor and what to leave intact. National Cancer Institute researchers hope to change that.
“Our advance is that we have a non-invasive method that may minimize surgical trauma,” says the team’s leader, Martin Brechbiel, Ph.D. “At the least, surgeons can acquire a set of images and have a feel, a road map if you will, for what they need to do be
Tangled strands of proteins called amyloid are found in the brain tissues of patients with a variety of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. One such protein is tau, now known to participate in tangle formation in Alzheimer’s patients. Another is alpha-synuclein, whose mutations cause Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. In a paper published in the current issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Psy
Temple University researcher seeking physiological evidence of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has found a link between creatine and metabolic energy. The findings, which hold promise for future CFS treatments, were published in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.
“We found that creatine affects mitochondria – the parts of the cells that produce energy for all biological functioning – in normal human subjects. Now that we have established this baseline evidence, we ar
Loss supports cilia’s role in the condition
Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that many people with Bardet-Biedl syndrome (BBS), a rare, complex condition marked by an array of seemingly unconnected symptoms, including obesity, learning difficulties, eye problems and asthma, also have another, previously unreported problem: many of them can’t detect odors. Because people with the syndrome likely lose their sense of smell before or shortly after birth, it wouldn
A University of Alberta study has verified that there is physical evidence for those who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), giving new weight to the often stigmatized and misdiagnosed disorder.
Research just published in the “International Journal of Psychophysiology” determined that, using independent criteria, CFS can be distinguished from depression–two disorders that share many of the same symptoms.
CFS is an often debilitating disorder, characterized by a c
Your knees take the brunt of the increased demands on your lower body in terms of the amount of muscle mass used and joint flexion when you compare walking to running. By a lot. Why? Because you’re human.
Though humans share a lot of qualities with other mammals, we are unique in terms of posture, locomotion and gait. (In fact, we’re among the only two-legged mammals who walk and run.) For instance, horses consume about the same amount of energy to cover a mile when running or walkin
The combination of ultraviolet (UV) light and certain coatings can lower — by 15 to 50 percent — the ability of some types of bacteria to stick to a glass surface and cause contamination or biofouling, Penn State environmental engineers have found.
Dr. Baikun Li, assistant professor of environmental engineering, Penn State Harrisburg, says “Ultraviolet light has been used for many years as an environmentally friendly route to water disinfection. However, these new results indica
A study from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) Affiliate Center at the University of Helsinki in Finland has shed light on the development of lymphatic vasculature and valves, and may help to develop better treatments for lymphedema.
The disease, which results from damaged or absent lymphatic vessels, may be inherited or may be a side-effect of the surgical removal of tumors. Lymphatic vessels normally remove fluid and proteins escaping from blood capillaries into sur
A recent study of 81 cases, published in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research is the first to show that correction of upper neck injuries may reverse the progression of both Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD).
The research was performed by Erin Elster, D.C., an Upper Cervical Chiropractor in Boulder, Colorado, who compiled data from 44 MS patients and 37 PD patients treated over the past five years. After treating upper neck injuries in 81 patients, 91% of
InterBioScreen (IBS), global provider of unique chemical compound libraries, and Quantum Pharmaceuticals, high-tech drug discovery company, announced a new project to create a revolutionary product for the drug discovery market.
The joint project, QuantumLead, combines the industry leading in silico lead optimization technology of Quantum Pharmaceuticals with the unique synthetic and natural compound libraries and network of scientists of IBS to create Q-Lead-Libraries.
Nitroxyl-releasing drugs seem to strengthen cardiac contractions, relaxation in conscious dogs
Half a million Americans are diagnosed each year with heart failure, a progressively debilitating condition characterized by the heart’s declining ability to pump blood efficiently. The condition causes about 50,000 deaths annually and accounts for 1 million hospitalizations – more than for all forms of cancer combined.
Since the 1980s, nitroglycerin and other medications that releas
People in a negative mood provide more accurate eyewitness accounts than people in a positive mood state, according to new research.
The surprise finding, which is to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is the first to assess the effect of mood on memory and human thinking.
People in a positive mood such as happiness were shown under experimental conditions to have relatively unreliable memories, and show poorer judgement and critical thinking ski
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