Imagine what it was like to take a photograph of an object such as a tree, before the wide availablilty of zoom lenses. You would be able to make out the shape and the branches from a distance but you wouldn’t be able to see the smaller branches or leaves. Until recently, Doctors have been in a similar situation regarding NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) imaging of organs and other features deep within the body. Thanks to a new NMR microscope developed by Oxford Researchers, Doctors will in futu
A novel rat behavioral model of tinnitus that will allow researchers to study this debilitating condition in a manner never before possible and to test potential treatments has been developed by researchers with the University at Buffalo’s Center for Hearing & Deafness.
Center researchers, who have been studying tinnitus for more than a decade, will use this animal model to monitor the activity of individual neurons in the animals’ brains where the phantom sounds of tinnitus are t
So-called “exercise hypertension,” an abnormally high spike in blood pressure experienced by generally healthy people during a workout, is a known risk factor for permanent and serious high blood pressure at rest. But who gets it, and why, has been largely unknown.
Now, Johns Hopkins scientists say they have reason to believe that the problem is rooted in the failure of cells that line the blood vessels to allow the arteries to expand to accommodate increased blood flow during exertion.
A novel gene therapy that responds specifically to oxygen-starved heart muscle may protect against further injury following a heart attack, a study by University of South Florida cardiovascular researchers found.
Their findings are reported in the April 2004 issue of the journal Hypertension.
M. Ian Phillips, PhD, DSc, and his team at the USF College of Medicine and All Children’s Hospital Research Institute designed a kind of oxygen-sensitive biosensor that turns on protecti
A comparison of various guidelines and strategies for treatment of sore throat provides information that may help optimize use of diagnostic tests and reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics, according to a study in the April 7 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
According to background information in the article, recent guidelines for management of a sore throat (pharyngitis) vary in their recommendations concerning antibiotic treatment and the need for laboratory
A new invention that could dramatically change the lives of millions of people administering medication at home, has received investment worth £120,000 from NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) – the organisation that nurtures UK creativity and innovation.
A plaster that can be worn on the skin, containing a tiny pump, could soon be improving the quality of life for those on fertility treatments, or diabetics needing regular insulin.
The pioneering te
Researchers at Jefferson Medical College and Duke University have used gene therapy to help damaged heart cells regain strength and beat normally again in the laboratory. The work takes the scientists one step closer to eventual clinical trials in humans.
Walter Koch, Ph.D., director of the Center for Translational Medicine of the Department of Medicine at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and his colleagues at Duke used a virus to carry a gene into t
Newly diagnosed breast cancer patients who test positive for a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation are twice as likely to opt for bilateral or double mastectomy, taking the most aggressive surgical stance to treat their current cancer and reduce their risk for future breast cancer.
The study, led by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC) and published online today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, is the largest to date that evalua
Researchers in the University of Warwick’s Department of Biological Sciences have found that a hormone associated with obesity is actually also very active in the male genitals where it plays a key role in male fertility and may even influence the erection response in male sexual arousal.
The research, published today (Tuesday 6th April 2004) in the “Journal of Clinical and Endocrinology and Metabolism” focuses on a protein called orexin. Orexin is named after the Greek word for appetite as
It has long been the accepted view of cancer researchers that there is a difference between the mechanism behind the development of leukemias, on the one hand, and solid tumors like breast cancer, prostate cancer, gastrointestinal cancer, etc, on the other. A research team at the Section for Clinical Genetics at Lund University in Sweden is now claiming just the opposite: the same mechanism gives rise to all non-hereditary forms of cancer. These findings are being published in Nature Genetics.
Researchers from Finland have found that the antidepressant drug fluvoxamine (brand names Fevarin, Faverin, Luvox etc.) drastically increases the concentrations of tizanidine (Sirdalud, Zanaflex) in blood.
Concomitant use of fluvoxamine and tizanidine results in severe and prolonged decrease in blood pressure and greatly enhanced central nervous system effects. This previously unrecognised interaction can be dangerous, particularly in elderly patients, and the concomitant use of the two age
Being exposed to high levels of ’second-hand’ smoke can reduce the speed at which wounds heal, leading to a lack of healing or greater levels of scarring. A study published in the journal BMC Cell Biology this week may begin to explain why: when cells are exposed to smoke, their ability to migrate towards the site of damage is compromised. The study, carried out by researchers from University of California, Riverside, examined the effects of ’second-hand’ smoke on fibroblasts, cells that pl
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center report that 20 percent of children with asthma do not get enough exercise, even though physical activities such as running and swimming have been shown to decrease the severity of asthma symptoms.
The report, published in the April issue of Pediatrics, shows that this physical inactivity is partly due to parents’ misconceptions that exercise poses a risk to asthmatic children.
The findings are based on the results of a t
The deadly virus HIV can mutate to prevent display of its components to immune cells, thus concealing itself from the body’s surveillance system and resulting in faster progression to AIDS, report Philip Goulder and colleagues in The Journal of Experimental Medicine. This has important implications for design of the long-sought-after vaccine for HIV.
When someone is infected with HIV, certain regions of viral proteins are chopped up and displayed by infected cells to their immune syste
Scientists have discovered why dendritic cell vaccines do not attack cancer as forcefully as expected, and they have demonstrated how to overcome this constraint by bolstering the vaccines’ tumor-seeking machinery.
The findings, published in the April 4, 2004, issue of Nature Immunology, present a novel method of equipping dendritic cells so they can activate the immune system to fight against cancers, said the researchers from the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center and the departments o
Duke University Medical Center researchers have created for the first time moving images of blood traveling through vessels, non-invasively and without the use of contrast agents or radiation. They used a novel application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology.
Just as importantly, the researchers said, this technology can easily be applied to existing MRI machines, since the advances reported by the Duke team do not involve new hardware, but are rather the result of new conceptual
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