Some 200,000 people live with partial or nearly total permanent paralysis in the United States, with spinal cord injuries adding 11,000 new cases each year. Most research aimed at recovering motor function has focused on repairing damaged nerve fibers, which has succeeded in restoring limited movement in animal experiments. But regenerating nerves and restoring complex motor behavior in humans are far more difficult, prompting researchers to explore alternatives to spinal cord rehabilitation.
Insights gained from extensive studies in mice may someday lead to treatments for comparable neurodegenerative diseases in humans
Scientists at Jefferson Medical College and the University of Michigan have uncovered a gene defect responsible for a muscle-wasting, neurodegenerative disease in mice known as mnd2. Their results may provide insights into the molecular origins of other such diseases in humans, including Parkinson’s disease.
In an online report on October 8 in the
Results of a study from Malawi in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlight how antiretroviral therapy targeted at babies soon after childbirth (because their mothers’ HIV diagnosis was made around the time of delivery) is still effective in preventing vertical HIV-1 transmission from mothers to their children.
Zidovudine and nevirapine have been shown to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV in breastfeeding women in Africa; treatment is usually initiated late in pregnancy and continue
Giel Hendriks discovered that the linking of sugars to the protein aq
Dutch research has revealed that bone cement containing antibiotics can effectively control infections around prostheses but only during the first few days after the implantation. For the past 30 years bone cement, which affixes hip and knee prostheses to the bone, has contained antibiotics and from the start, the usefulness of this has been contested.
In a laboratory set-up, Hans Hendriks discovered that in the immediate vicinity of the antibiotic-containing bone cement, the antibiotic con
A Canadian-led international clinical trial has found that post-menopausal survivors of early-stage breast cancer who took the drug letrozole after completing an initial five years of tamoxifen therapy had a significantly reduced risk of cancer recurrence compared to women taking a placebo. The results of the study appear in today’s advance on-line edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
The clinical trial has been halted early because of the positive results and researchers ar
Treatment for the most common inherited cause of blindness, retinitis pigmentosa, is one step closer, according to investigators at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC). They are the first to link two new gene mutations in two French-Canadian families to loss of vision in humans. Their findings are published in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology. This project was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), le Fonds de la
The researcher who discovered the active form of Vitamin D, Dr. Michael F. Holick, a Professor of Medicine, Dermatology, Physiology and Biophysics at the Boston University School of Medicine, told the National Institutes of Health’s symposium on “Vitamin D and Health in the 21st Century” that the nation faces “severe Vitamin D deficiency” which, if not properly addressed, will have profound far reaching health consequences such as hundreds of thousands of new cases of breast cancer, colon cancer
Imagining movement of arms and legs that have been weakened from stroke may facilitate functional recovery of affected limbs, a Northwestern University study has found.
The effects of stroke vary, based on the type of stroke and its severity and location in the brain. The majority of strokes affect one of the brain’s hemispheres, resulting in muscle weakness or paralysis on the opposite side of the body — a condition known as hemiparesis.
Jennifer A. Stevens and co-researche
Researchers have demonstrated that Methotrexate, a promising drug to treat hearing loss in patients with autoimmune inner ear disease (AIED), proved no more effective than placebo in a recently concluded four-year study.
In findings published in the October 8, 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a team headed by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Professor and Chief of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, Jeffrey Harris, M.D., also noted that the s
Vanderbilt is one of nine US sites
Vanderbilt University Medical Center is participating in worldwide tests of a potential vaccine that can stimulate important immune responses against the virus that causes AIDS.
This is the first candidate vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to be studied simultaneously in so many locations, from Brazil to Thailand, according to Merck & Co. Inc., which developed the vaccine.
Vanderbilt currently is testing six p
Discovery could lead to development of protein-targeting drugs, OHSU researchers say
When HIV enters the human body, a fierce battle ensues between a ruthless viral protein and our long-misunderstood innate protection system. Ultimately, the protein seizes and destroys that system, and HIV replicates.
But Oregon Health & Science University researchers who discovered the mechanism by which this destruction occurs say our innate protection system could have a leg up in the mêl
Could help improve treatment of anxiety
Behavior therapists may have a better way to help anxious patients, thanks to insights from a UCLA study of different ways to get mice past their fears. Rodents have long been used to study learning by association. Neuroscientists compared different ways of exposing mice to a stimulus that they had learned to fear, and found that “massing” the feared stimulus -– delivering it in concentrated bursts, not pacing it with longer pauses in between –
Duke University Medical Center researchers have linked elevated levels of a specific heart protein in elderly hearts to a decrease in the pumping ability of the heart.
Since levels of this protein, known as G-alpha-i, are also elevated in patients with congestive heart failure, the researchers believe that not only do they better understand why the heart’s pumping ability decreases with age, but that there may be a pharmacological approach to prevent this age-related decline.
Electrical signals from nerves in the brain cause weak magnetic fields which can be measured by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG). A project supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has investigated the extent to which direct measurement of neural electrical activity can be coupled with MEG to diagnose and treat epilepsy. The findings are important in view of today’s spiralling health care costs, as the apparatus used to detect magnetic fields in the brain is 30 times as expensive as that us
An expert at the University of Sheffield has published a paper that dispels the popular belief that Louis Pasteur was the first person to demonstrate the connection between infective agents and disease in the 1860s.
Dr. Milton Wainwright’s research, published in Advances in Applied Microbiology, has uncovered various references that suggest that Greek and Italian physicians had made the link between bacteria and disease before the birth of Christ. He also found that Louis Pasteur wasn’t eve
Feedback
