Intakes of dietary or supplemental antioxidants were not associated with a decreased risk of prostate cancer among men in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial, according to a study in the February 15 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute . The study did find that vitamin E and beta-carotene supplementation may be associated with reduced prostate cancer risk in certain population subgroups.

Research suggests that micronutrien

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have found that intravenous morphine used alone or with a topical anaesthetic (tetracaine) effectively reduced levels of pain in newborn infants undergoing insertion of central venous catheters (central lines). This research is reported in the February 15, 2006 issue of the journal JAMA.

About 10 to 15 per cent of newborns require prolonged hospitalization for conditions such as preterm birth, congenital defects and sepsis (a bloo

Having a surgeon with four arms is one of the advantages of the latest robotic technology now being studied at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

The $1.4 million robot named da Vinci can hold a camera in one hand while manipulating tiny laparoscopic surgical tools in its other hands. And it never tires like its human counterparts.

With a human surgeon at the controls, da Vinci filters out tremor, enhances precision, offers three-dimensional imaging and eliminates the

Regional disparities profoundly impact health of children, UF researchers say

Children living in the South are up to three times more likely to battle poor health and its consequences – including obesity, teen pregnancy and death – than those in all other regions of the United States, even if they receive the same medical care, a new University of Florida study reveals.

“Hurricane Katrina gave the world a glimpse of the disparities in the South,” says Jeffrey Goldhagen,

The cosmetic treatment Botox may have a new use as an adjuvant to cancer therapy, providing an open door for chemotherapy and radiation treatments, according to a study published in the Feb. 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

The study in mice, led by Bernard Gallez, Ph.D., professor of pharmacy at the Université de Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, found that by injecting Botulinum neurotoxin type A into two types of mouse tumors, the tumors’ cellular vasculature opened, allowing f

Researchers at the University of Warwick, and the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, have devised a new sensor which dramatically improves the amount of early warning doctors and midwives get of a dangerous situation in the birth process when the unborn child’s brain is starved of oxygen – Fetal Hypoxia.

The threat of fetal hypoxia carries dangers not only for the child but also for the woman giving birth as doctors often proceed quickly to a caesarean section i

Despite success of molecular genetics that developed efficient methods for educing mitochondrial DNA from fossil bones, anthropologists prefer primary sources as before and keep investigating skulls. Each skull possess multitude of distinctive and well-perceptible signs: these are supplementary and fontanel bones, sutural bones (epactal ossicle), accessory and inconstant orifices, appendices and protuberances.

As peculiarities of the skull structure are genetically determined,

Basal-like breast cancers (BLC) are highly aggressive tumors with a relatively poor prognosis that account for approximately 15% of sporadic human breast cancer. Sporadic BLC share certain characteristics with most of the breast cancers from patients carrying a germline mutation in the BRCA1 breast cancer suppressor gene. Among their similarities, sporadic BLC and BRCA1 cancers do not express the estrogen receptor and do not overproduce HER2 protein. Thus, therapeutics targeting estrogen receptor

Treatment of human cancer is often impeded when cancer cells develop resistance to drugs that are designed to induce a type of programmed cell death called apoptosis. A new study published in the February issue of Cancer Cell identifies compounds and mechanisms that can overcome a specific type of resistance to chemotherapeutic-induced apoptosis. The findings may have application for treatment of cancers that are linked to the human papilloma virus (HPV) oncoprotein E6, such as cervical cance

Few conditions are more detrimental to human brains than the one popularly referred to as mad cow disease. But now there’s reason to suspect that the protein which, when malformed, causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cows and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people, might also be necessary for healthy brain function. Researchers from Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that the normal form of this det

Every year, East Coast fever destroys the small farmer’s dream of escaping poverty in Africa. Killing more than a million cattle and costing some $200 million annually, this tick-borne disease rages across a dozen countries in eastern and central Africa. Now, an international team of scientists has taken the first major step toward a vaccine to prevent East Coast fever. Their work, published in the February 13-17 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, s

Scientists at Georgia Tech have created technology capable of detecting trace amounts of biological or chemical agents in a matter of seconds, much faster than traditional methods, which can take hours or up to a day. The system uses reusable hydrogel microlenses so small that millions of them can fit on a one-inch-square plate. It could greatly enhance the ability of authorities responding to a biological or chemical weapons attack as well as increase the speed of medical testing. The researc

Discovery suggests potential treatment for regenerating nerve tissue after stroke

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School have discovered a new population of cells in human umbilical cord blood that have properties of primitive stem cells.

Umbilical cord blood is generally known to contain hematopoietic stem cells that can only produce cells found in blood. The new findings, however, identify a small population of cord blood cells with the characterist

Humans and chimps share most of their genes, yet they differ dramatically in many ways—their walk, the sizes of their brains and their capacities for speech and language, for example.

Scientists would like to know how and when such differences arose, and new research from the University of Michigan shows how one process—gene loss—may have figured in.

The work, by a group led by associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Jianzhi Zhang, is reported i

Very thin but hardy, unblemished skin and slow developing gills appear to be keys to survival for newly hatched Antarctic notothenioids, a group of fish whose adults thrive in icy waters because of antifreeze proteins (AFPs) in their blood.

Such adaptations are important, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign say, because the larval fish of at least two species of notothenioids that inhabit the Ross Sea at McMurdo Sound and Terra Nova Bay surprisingly lack

The risk for a new cancer in the unaffected breast substantially increases in women diagnosed with unilateral, hereditary (non-BRCA1/2) breast cancer, according to a new study by researchers working at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. The study is the first in its kind and is published in the March 15, 2006 issue of CANCER.

Women with hereditary (non-BRCA1/2) breast cancer are estimated to be at up to six times greater risk of developing a second primary malignancy in the o