Patients with or at risk for heart disease who take the anti-hypertensive drug clonidine before non-cardiac surgery can significantly reduce the risk of complications and death due to inadequate blood flow to the heart, according to a study by UCSF researchers at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
The findings add a second drug to the list of inexpensive preventive measures available to these patients before non-cardiac surgery. In 1998 the same UCSF/SFVAMC researcher
Studies have shown that overweight and obese mothers are significantly more likely to quit breast-feeding their infants sooner than do healthy-weight mothers. An important reason why is the weaker biological response that heavier women have to their babies’ suckling, according to a study conducted by researchers at Cornell University and Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y.
“We found that overweight and obese women have a lower prolactin response to suckling,” says Kathleen Rasmussen,
Finding cancer in a tiny drop of body fluid containing relatively few cells now may be possible with a new method of analyzing multiple genes in small samples of DNA, the cellular building blocks of our genetic code. The molecular test may be especially helpful in detecting cancer cells in breast fluid.
Preliminary tests of the new method, which can detect cancer in a sample with as few as 50 cells, were conducted on a small number of breast tissue samples and are reported in the July 1 issu
Take off the gloves, salad eaters, in your fight against fat – you actually need the stuff if you want the greens’ cancer-fighting carotenoids to kick in.
A recent study conducted by Wendy White, associate professor of food science and nutrition at Iowa State University, shows that eating salad vegetables with some added fat promotes the absorption of lycopene, alpha- and beta-carotenes, all of which aid in the fight against cancer and heart disease.
On the flip side, ea
New research from Purdue University shows that even when people who stutter are not speaking, their brains process language differently.
“Traditionally, stuttering is thought of as a problem with how someone speaks, and little attention has been given to the complex interactions between neurological systems that underlie speaking,” says Christine Weber-Fox, an assistant professor of speech sciences who is interested in the brain’s involvement in language processing.
“We hav
A light-sensitive probe is being developed to help doctors spot breast cancer in some of the 70,000 American women each year whose malignancies fail to show up in needle biopsies.
The technology also holds the potential of minimizing the trauma associated with the procedure, in which a hollow needle the width of a pencil is used to collect small tissue samples for testing.
Doctors now rely on X-rays or ultrasound images to guide the needle to the area in question. They may
Despite a backdrop of declining rates, a new study concludes cervical cancer continues to be a more serious threat to women with low incomes and educational levels.
The study, published July 26, 2004 in the online edition of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, finds incidence and death rates for cervical cancer increased with increasing poverty and decreasing education levels.
While previous studies have linked socioeconomic status (SES) to the progno
Physical symptoms that impact quality of life, such as nausea and shortness of breath, may predict shorter survival for patients with terminal cancer.
A new study published July 26, 2004 in the online edition of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, finds a patient’s symptoms and results of quality of life assessments may provide important clues to an individual patient’s prognosis. Psychosocial factors, such as anxiety or spiritual distress, did
The Pamplona-based psychologist, Margarita Aguinaga Aguinaga, has recently defended her PhD at the Public University of Navarre on her research work into eating behaviour disorders – such as anorexia and bulimia – and drug consumption.
This descriptive and analytical study was in fact based on the requests for assistance for eating behaviour disorders registered in a centre in Pamplona between 2000 and 2002. 90 women patients were studied of which 46.7% were diagnosed anorexic, 43.4% with
The drug cetuximab, a promising new targeted therapy better known as Erbitux, offers another option for patients who have colorectal cancer that resists standard chemotherapy treatment, according to an editorial written by two Mayo Clinic cancer researchers that will be published in the July 22 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
The editorial is co-authored by Mayo Clinic’s Charles Erlichman, M.D., chair of the Department of Oncology and a specialist in the research and t
Women are at least twice as likely as men to develop some musculoskeletal disorders of the upper body. That’s the finding of scientists at Ohio State University who re-analyzed data from 56 previous studies on the subject.
This new work, though it did not yield specific incidence rates for different disorders, gives researchers a critical baseline for comparing gender differences in the prevalence of disorders of the neck, shoulders, arms, and hands.
Until now, some researchers su
A multi-center study led by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center cardiologist David M. Herrington, M.D., M.H.S., suggests that measuring the stiffness of arteries to screen for early atherosclerosis may be another way to identify people at risk for heart disease or stroke.
Herrington’s study was published in on-line this week in Circulation, a medical journal of the American Heart Association. “The study suggests another way to identify people who are at risk for coronary heart dise
Since West Nile virus is expected to be prominent again this summer – especially on the West Coast – University of Toronto researchers are urging physicians to be on the lookout for its most common manifestations.
A U of T study, published in the May issue of the quarterly Canadian Journal of Neuroscience, found that among hospitalized patients in Toronto with West Nile virus (WNV), encephalitis was the most common neurological manifestation. More surprisingly, encephalitis was an apparent
Thirty-one-year-old Karen Romero, blinded by a malignant brain tumor, had endured two years of chemotherapy before her cancer was finally eradicated at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas with a new means of delivering radiation therapy.
She believes – as do her doctors – that the treatment she received, which pinpoints high-beam radiation therapy on cancer cells with unprecedented accuracy, saved her life. After only two treatments, her ocular germinoma tumor appears to be gone.
The thought of having any chemotherapy treatment must be hard enough to bear, but researchers from the University of Surrey are carrying out clinical trials into ‘chemotherapy at home’. NHS cancer patients are currently asked to attend busy clinics in city hospitals but research by the Postgraduate Medical School together with the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford may see a change to that for intensive treatments. Cancer patients taking part in the trials are responding well and are much ha
Autism suffers present a widespread range of antibodies against brain tissue and one protein in particular seems to be the major target of these antibodies claim a group of scientists in the July issue of the Journal of Neuroimmunology. The researchers also show that these antibodies are not genetically determined, as parents of affected individuals do not exhibit them, and so are probably not involved in disease appearance.
Immune abnormalities, including antibodies against the central ner
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