The millions of mammography exams performed each year in Europe save thousands of women’s lives, but if the data from all breast cancer screening procedures was made available to clinicians and researchers across the continent they could save many more. That is the vision behind MammoGrid.

The MammoGrid project is studying the commercial possibilities for its distributed computing environment that employs existing Grid technologies for the creation of a European database of mam

Although adolescent sports-related deaths are rare, they are commonly caused by cardiovascular problems, such as commotio cardis–cardiac arrest caused by being hit in the chest with an object, such as a baseball or softball, usually traveling 30 to 50 miles per hour. The frequency of this problem is not known, but the survival rate is low among reported cases. However, the survival rate may be increased when cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is performed and an automated external defibrillato

A new treatment for pancreatic cancer developed by clinical researchers of Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center substantially reduces the size of tumors and lowers the risk of local recurrence of the disease. Fifty percent of patients in the study responded to therapy–one of the highest response rates ever seen with pancreatic cancer. Results of the study were published in the December 2005 issue of the Annals of Surgical Oncology.

Researchers, led by oncolog

Like their younger counterparts, some elderly patients who have early stage non-small cell lung cancer can benefit from a minimally invasive surgical procedure to remove part or all of a lung, according to a study conducted by thoracic surgeons at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and described in The American Surgeon, the journal of the Southeastern Surgical Congress and the Southern California Chapter of the American College of Surgeons.

When non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC) are d

New findings by a research team from the University of Edinburgh may help explain why diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS) which attack the myelin sheath – an insulator which protects the body’s nervous system – cause such severe symptoms in MS patients. Their discoveries may lead to new ways to help treat patients with MS, it is reported in the journal Neuron today (Thursday, 8 December).

The scientists have made an important breakthrough in understanding how animals with compl

In the December 6 issue of Nature Biotechnology, scientists from 14 different organizations around the world, including the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, propose a new quality standard for biochemical models. MIRIAM (for Minimum information requested in the annotation of biochemical models) will help researchers to reuse, modify and combine computer models of biochemical processes to gain a fuller understanding of life at the molecular and cellular level.

Biologists are making a

People who gain less protection from cancer by eating broccoli may be able to compensate for the difference in their genetic make-up by eating ‘super broccoli’, a variety with higher levels of the active plant chemical sulforaphane, or by eating larger portions.

Lead scientist on the new research, Professor Richard Mithen of the Institute of Food Research (IFR), said: “Eating a few portions of broccoli each week may help to reduce the risk of cancer. Some individuals, who lack a ge

Scientists at the John Innes Centre(JIC), Norwich, UK [1] today report a discovery that explains how plants control the size and development of their cells. Published on-line by the international journal PNAS [2] the report describes how a gene (called RHL1)[3] affects a plant cell’s ability to make multiple copies of its DNA, in turn affecting cell growth and overall plant development.

“Unlike the cells of animals, plant cells typically expand to up to 1,000 times their orig

Should we start being genetically tested for Parkinson’s disease (PD)? According to research just published in the December issue of the “journal Movement Disorders” this might be a possibility in the future if you belong to a family affected by G2019S, a genetic mutation responsible for some PD cases.

Parkinson disease results from the death or loss of function of the nervous cells (neurons) in a brain area called substancia nigra, which is involved in the regulation of moveme

Tourists in Spain often stop to ogle the country’s many saltwater lagoons, used to produce salt since Roman times. Scientists, too, admire these saltern crystallizers–and even more so, the microbes that manage to survive in such briny environs. Now, reporting in the November 28-December 2 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at The Institute for Genomic Research and collaborators reveal the genome of one bacterium at home in the salty Spanish

Tropical areas of south and central America such as the Amazon rainforest are home to some 7500 species of butterfly compared with only around 65 species in Britain. UCL scientists have ruled out the common theory that attributed this richness of wildlife to climate change, in a paper published on 7th December by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences).

Instead, scientists believe that biology played a far greater role in the evolution of species than

Dispelling years of anecdotes in travelogues, the popular press, and scholarly works, biologists from the University of Bristol argue that it is nearly impossible for elephants to become intoxicated from eating the fruit of the marula tree.

“Elephants display many behavioral characteristics viewed as positive traits in humans, often causing us to identify with them in anthropomorphic ways,” write Steve Morris, David Humphreys, and Dan Reynolds in a forthcoming paper in Physiological an

A group of investigators of the University of Bologna (Giovanni Fava, Chiara Ruini and Chiara Rafanelli) have published an article on a novel approach to treatment of depression and anxiety in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Administration of treatments in a sequential order is a common practice in clinical medicine, but has received insufficient attention in psychiatry. The aim of this article was to survey the literature concerned with a sequential use o

Valuable results for the complex jigsaw puzzle of cancer development

CDK6 is the plain name of a molecule that is often characteristically altered in medulloblastoma. This type of cancer is among the most common malignant brain tumors in children. Heidelberg molecular geneticians of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) have now found out that CDK6 can serve as an important indicator to help physicians determine the prognosis of patients. The

’We are beginning to understand how an animal without an adaptive immune system can still protect itself,’ Smith said, adding: ’The sea urchin may use genes that are different from antibodies and possibly even different mechanisms from humans.’

Inside that seemingly docile sea urchin there’s a surprisingly active innate immune system, probably utilizing previously unrecognized immune mechanisms, that may also actively function in vertebrates, including huma

Cholera remains a public health problem in countries without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. Researchers are trying to come up with theoretical models for cholera that allow them to understand how an outbreak happens, how it can best be contained, and how it might be prevented. Until now, the existing cholera models have not been able to describe and explain actual outbreaks very well. Taking new experimental data into account, David Hartley and colleagues (of the Universit