Every hour counts for stroke victims. The sooner they get to hospital, the better their outcome. The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and Urgences Santé announced today a new initiative to get stroke victims to the hospital and treated as fast as possible. This programme builds on an initiative started more than a year ago by the Centre Hospitalier l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) where the Stroke Centre was launched in August 2002. “By the time an individual arrive
UCSF scientists have identified a protein on T cells of the immune system that triggers type 1 diabetes in mice when it interacts with another protein in the pancreas. They have shown that blocking the interaction prevents development of diabetes without weakening normal immune defenses or causing measurable side effects. The success provides a promising strategy against human type 1 diabetes, since the T cell protein has a counterpart in the human immune system, the scientists say.
The rese
A new study has found a possible mechanism for tamoxifen resistance in breast cancer and provides evidence that another cancer drug–gefitinib (Iressa)–may be able to restore tamoxifen’s anticancer activity. The study appears in the June 16 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Although adjuvant tamoxifen can reduce the risk of death for women with invasive breast cancer by about 15% over 10 to 15 years, many women do not receive any benefit from the drug. Even among
Mounting evidence suggests that ecological and climatic conditions influence the emergence, spread, and recurrence of infectious diseases. Global climate change is likely to aggravate climate-sensitive diseases in unpredictable ways.
Increasingly, public health programs aimed at preventing and controlling disease outbreaks are considering aspects of the ecology of infectious diseases–how hosts, vectors, and parasites interact with each other and their environment. The hope is that by under
Your doctor may soon be able to check on your recovery after a hospital stay by texting your mobile phone. Researchers, writing in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making today, have developed and tested a wireless patient monitoring system that could help detect patient suffering at a distance.
Keeping up-to-date with a patient’s condition once they have left hospital can help doctors to “detect patient suffering earlier and to activate a well-timed intervention”.
Researc
Liver cirrhosis is approximately the 12th leading cause of death in the United States.
Roughly half of these deaths may be from alcohol use and/or abuse.
New findings indicate that how and when drinkers consume alcohol may be as important as the amount consumed.
Effects may also vary by gender. Liver disease was the 12th leading cause of death in the United States in the year 2001, accounting for roughly 27,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Co
In a report recently published in the Lancet, physicians at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) have described a new way to preserve the fertility of women who must undergo chemotherapy. This method, which can be done quickly, does not involve surgery or hormonal stimulation of the ovaries. “Our technique of removing immature eggs from the woman’s ovaries, then maturing them by a technique called in-vitro maturation (IVM), has been successfully used for eight female cancer patien
Research by Hungarian fertility experts published on Thursday 10 June in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction, has revealed that the onset of the menopause may not be dictated only by the fact that a woman’s lifetime supply of eggs are running low, but also by changes in the seasons.
Analysis of reliable questionnaires from over 100 patients at the menopause clinic at Baranya County Teaching Hospital in Pécs, revealed that the spring and autumn equinoxes played a
Scientists funded by the UK’s largest biomedical research charity, The Wellcome Trust, have developed a drink that enhances the effectiveness of medication given to treat psychiatric illnesses such as mania and schizophrenia.
A team of researchers from the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University have found that they can achieve this, and probably reduce problematic side effects from traditional treatments, by supplementing medication with a specially designed drink. The drink, called T
Unwanted, pulled or poisoned, the lowly weed is sometimes better than its highly touted “herbal” cousins for preventing and curing a host of diseases, according to University of Florida research.
“If I had one place to go to find medicinal plants, it wouldn’t be the forest,” said John Richard Stepp, a UF anthropologist who did the study. “There are probably hundreds of weeds growing right outside people’s doors they could use.”
Stepp combed through scientific journals an
Findings may help point researchers toward future medical treatments
Mayo Clinic researchers report in the latest issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings that there may be an association between lower urinary tract symptoms and sexual dysfunction among older men. As the population ages, this finding will help further research that could help millions of men.
Lower urinary tract symptoms become common as men age and their prostates enlarge, restricting urine flow or altering their b
Symptoms experienced by women that are more severe or frequent than expected and of recent occurrence warrant further diagnostic investigation because they are more likely to be associated with both benign (non-cancerous) and malignant (cancerous) ovarian masses, according to a study in the June 9 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
“Ovarian cancer has often been called the ‘silent killer’ because symptoms are not thought to develop until advanced stages when cha
Epilepsy drugs can increase the rate of bone loss in older women, according to a study published in the June 8 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Women over age 65 who were taking drugs for epilepsy were losing bone mass at nearly twice the rate of women who were not taking epilepsy drugs.
“If this rate of bone loss is not addressed, the risk of hip fracture for these women will jump by 29 percent over five years,” said study author Kris
Phase I trial shows experimental drug is safe and lowers level of key blood protein
Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers have reported that the antiangiogenesis drug they developed—called Veglin—not only is safe for patients with a wide variety of cancers, but also lowers levels of a key protein that tumors need to grow and stabilizes or even reverses some cancers for a period.
Alexandra M. Levine, M.D., Distinguished Professor of Medicine and chief of hematology at t
Researchers from the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania today presented the first comprehensive study results which show that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is significantly better than traditional mammography for detecting the presence and extent of disease in patients with a diagnosis of breast cancer. The research has significant implications for women considering surgical options – other than a full mastectomy – to remove their breast cancer, such as a lumpectomy. Indeed,
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are launching a clinical trial to determine whether a drug commonly used for diabetes might be effective in treating multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects 350,000 Americans.
In an animal model of the disease, the researchers found that the drug reduced the inflammation of nervous tissue that occurs with multiple sclerosis and prevented the aberrant immune response that ends up destroying the body’s own brain and spina
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