Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are investigating whether hormone therapy and two alternative herbal products can lessen memory and other cognitive problems experienced by menopausal women.

“Decline in mental skills and difficulty remembering things, finding words, paying attention — these are all common complaints of midlife women,” said Pauline Maki, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology in the UIC Center for Cognitive Medicine.

According

High blood pressure in otherwise healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 83 is associated with a measurable decline in cognitive function, according to a report published today by University of Maine researchers in the pre-publication online edition of the journal Hypertension. The article will appear in the October issue of the printed journal.

While they characterize the decline as “relatively minor and manageable in terms of everyday functioning,” the authors underscore the imp

Minor depression, an underdiagnosed and undertreated subset of major depressive disorder that affects upwards of 15 million Americans*, can be effectively treated with a drug called a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), according to a multi-center study led by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and published in the October 2004 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

“This is especially important since patients with minor depression are n

A recent study, published in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, describes a 19-year old female diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) who suffered from somatic and psychiatric symptoms for two years. After a four-month course of chiropractic care, the young woman reported an 80% reduction in her anxiety symptoms, including a 90% decrease in her headaches. The patient was able to resume a normal lifestyle without resorting to prescription or over-the-counter drugs.

A prescription cream recently approved to treat select superficial basal cell carcinomas (sBCCs) may provide an alternative to skin surgery in certain cases. The FDA approved 3M’s Aldara (imiquimod) in July.

Dermatologist Craig Elmets, M.D., one of the investigators in its clinical trials, says imiquimod will be “useful for treating patients in whom surgical procedures are difficult, including elderly patients, patients with sBCCs at cosmetically sensitive areas where scarring is a concern,

Mayo Clinic neurologists have discovered a drug application smart enough to alleviate orthostatic hypotension — problems with sinking blood pressure when standing up from a sitting position — without the unwanted effect of also causing patients’ blood pressure to soar when lying down.

“This is a significant step forward for these patients,” says Phillip Low, M.D., Mayo Clinic neurologist and lead study investigator. “This would be a good drug to provide the first line of trea

Boosting the blood count – in effect, curing anemia – in conjunction with radiation therapy won’t help patients with head and neck cancer fare any better than with radiation alone, says a national study led by Jefferson Medical College researchers. Physicians have known for decades that patients who have anemia and are undergoing radiation therapy, especially for head and neck cancer, do much worse in terms of controlling their cancer and survival.

One theory proposes that anemia

What happens to painkillers, antibiotics and other medicines after their work is done, and they end up in the wastewater stream? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is using laboratory experiments to help answer this question by studying what happens to pharmaceuticals when they react with chlorine–a disinfectant commonly used in wastewater treatment.

Scientists around the world often find drugs in water samples taken from streams and other waterways, but li

The first genetic instruction manual of a diatom, from a family of microscopic ocean algae that are among the Earth’s most prolific carbon dioxide assimilators, has yielded important insights on how the creature uses nitrogen, fats, and silica to thrive.

The diatom DNA sequencing project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and conducted at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, provides insight into how the diatom species Thalassiosira pseudonana prospers in the marine en

“The results of the research we have carried out on the genome of viruses, specifically on nucleopolyhedroviruses (NPVs; Baculoviridae) will help to understand how genetic systems evolve. This discovery is of great importance when we take into account that NPVs have shown to have great insecticide potential for the control of agricultural and forestry plagues, above all for the cultivation of maize in countries such as Mexico and Honduras”. This is one of the conclusions of the PhD thesis “Funct

Researchers have learned how to commandeer the complex machinery that cells use to recognize and respond to such important molecules as steroid hormones, thyroid hormones and vitamin D.

The development could provide a foundation for a new family of biologically-based mechanisms able to detect common drugs, chemical weapons and other small molecules. By allowing manipulation of this cellular protein machinery – known as nuclear receptors – the technique could also lead to new method

Giving flu vaccine to toddlers in the spring and fall guards against infection and is easier on parents than the fall schedule of two doses administered a month apart, found researchers from Duke University Medical Center and the University of Washington.

The study compared the immune response in toddlers aged six to 23 months who received a flu shot in the spring and one in the fall, to the response of those who received fall shots separated by one month. The Centers for Disease C

In rats, stress hormones lower threshold for aggression and aggression raises stress hormones; data may lead help to break the cycle of violence

Scientists may be learning why it’s so hard to stop the cycle of violence. The answer may lie in the nervous system. There appears to be a fast, mutual, positive feedback loop between stress hormones and a brain-based aggression-control center in rats, whose neurophysiology is similar to ours. It may explain why, under stress, humans ar

A drug refined from cottonseed oil and previously tried and abandoned as a male contraceptive could boost the effectiveness of treatment for prostate cancer and possibly other common cancers as well, according to new research from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Results of the study will be reported Oct. 1 at the Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Geneva, Switzerland. The symposium is sponsored by the European Organization for Research a

Scientists have discovered a DNA sequence that causes the destabilization, and hence decay, of the protooncogene bcl-2 (B-cell lymphoma/leukemia-2). Because the overexpression of bcl-2 is associated with cancer, this discovery may lead to new therapeutic strategies for treating the disease.

The research appears as the “Paper of the Week” in the October 8 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.

Bcl-2 i

Plants and animals living together in communities don’t rub shoulders too closely because evolution has caused them to compromise on key life measures, say ecologists at Imperial College London and Royal Holloway, University of London, writing in the journal Science today (1 October).

The researchers suggest a new basis for explaining how communities of species assemble: they have to give up being good at everything and ’trade off’ their life histories. ’Life histo