DT, or destination therapy, refers to the implantation of heart pumps as permanent treatment for advanced heart failure.

Until recently, these pumps – which help the heart pump blood to the body more efficiently – were most often used to bridge the gap until patients could get a transplant. “Although heart transplantation has been viewed as the gold standard for heart failure, there are simply not enough hearts to go around,” says Robert Bourge, M.D., director of UAB Cardiovascular

A massive grant of almost a million pounds has been awarded to the University of Bristol to carry out a major trial that will assess the effects of diet and exercise on people with type 2 diabetes. This trial will be the largest diet and exercise trial in the world for people with type 2 diabetes.

The recent large rise in the number of people suffering from type 2 diabetes is closely linked to the increase in obesity within the population, and this is thought to be due to a lack of exercise

Diabetes, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure are just some of the problems that overweight people may encounter. While researchers across the globe are working to solve these problems, the University of Missouri-Columbia has created the new MU Health Activity Center under the leadership of one MU professor. The center is the focal point of an effort to bring a cross-disciplinary approach to investigating the sedentary lifestyle, which is believed to be the cause of many of these problem

New research using nearly a dozen different genomic testing procedures has revealed unprecedented detail about the molecular characteristics and virulence of group A streptococcus (GAS), the “flesh-eating” bacteria, according to scientists at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML), part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health.

The study, conducted by an international team led by RML scientist James M. Musser, M.D., Ph.D., will

Despite recent gains in the awareness and treatment of osteoporosis, millions of Americans who have the disease remain undiagnosed and untreated and may learn of their condition only when they suffer a fracture, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers report.

Writing in the July 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, the research group estimates that fewer than half of the people with osteoporosis have been recognized as such. “If a person’s doctor hasn’t diagnosed

For nearly a decade, scientists have known that leptin plays an important fat-burning role in humans. But the map of leptin’s path through the body – the key to understanding how and why the hormone works – is still incomplete.

Now a small but critical section of that map is charted, based on new research conducted at Brown Medical School and Rhode Island Hospital and at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

The research team found that lepti

While studying the relationship between vitamin A and lung inflammation, a Kansas State University researcher made a surprising discovery — a link between vitamin A and emphysema in smokers. Richard Baybutt, associate professor of human nutrition, said his research could have a number of implications for smokers and the cigarette and health industries.

The discovery was accidental, Baybutt said, but the research project quickly shifted to investigate the link. “We essentially weren’t

Patients with or at risk for heart disease who take the anti-hypertensive drug clonidine before non-cardiac surgery can significantly reduce the risk of complications and death due to inadequate blood flow to the heart, according to a study by UCSF researchers at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

The findings add a second drug to the list of inexpensive preventive measures available to these patients before non-cardiac surgery. In 1998 the same UCSF/SFVAMC researcher

Competing theories about why brain cells die in Huntington’s disease may not be competitors after all, according to a report published July 23, 2004, in the early online edition of the Annals of Neurology.

Researchers report finding minor molecular abnormalities of the sort proposed by these different theories in cells throughout the brain and even in the skin. Yet only select groups of cells in a few movement centers of the brain are so vulnerable to these disruptions that they degener

A research study published this week has for the first time identified the specific precursor stem cell that gives rise not only to the important cells lining our blood vessels but also the blood itself.

Dr. Mick Bhatia and his colleagues at Robarts Research Institute in London, Ontario, had demonstrated last year that human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can make blood cells; and they and others have known for some time that there is a connection between the development of the blood an

For many years, engineers have worked to efficiently filter valuable bio-process products on an industrial economic scale. The challenge has been to push rates up without incurring high shear rates and resultant cell lysis, which would cause loss of yield. High shear can destroy delicate and valuable biological materials such as proteins, blood, algae and yeasts, and also brings with it a requirement for higher flow rates, which in turn raises pumping costs.

Inventors at the University of Ox

Obscure mathematical ideas developed back in the 1980s could solve current problems of mixing fluids at the microscale, and revolutionise the technology, reports an article in Science.

The need to mix fluids at the microscale affects a whole range of developing technologies – from inkjet printers to DNA analysis – and finding ways to do it is becoming big business. Millions of dollars have already been poured into ‘lab-on-a-chip’ projects, but making miniature labs is not just a question o

Fish and mammal teeth are not created equal. Sometime after the move from spineless to having a backbone, the family of genes that controls tissue mineralization evolved to produce mammalian tooth enamel, bones and dentine, but fish enameloid developed from different genes, according to Penn State researchers.

“We also suggest that mammalian enamel is distinct from fish enameloid,” the researchers reported in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sc

Researchers have found a family of molecules that play a key role in the formation of synapses, the junctions that link brain cells, called neurons, to each other. The molecules initiate the development of these connections, forming the circuitry of the mammalian nervous system.

Scientists from Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis describe the findings in the July 23 issue of the journal Cell.

“This is very basic work, far from any clinical applications at

Research led by Anna Marie Pyle, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University reveals how a protein from Hepatitis C (HCV) unwinds RNA, potentially allowing it to be copied.

The work published in the journal Nature focuses on an enzyme, helicase NS3, that unwinds the RNA virus for replication inside cells. NS3 is one member of an extensive family of helicases and is used as a model for studying unwinding activities of motor proteins.

Their finding

Johns Hopkins researchers report that once a growing nerve “tastes” a certain protein, it loses its “appetite” for other proteins and follows the tasty crumbs to reach its final destination. The finding in mice, reported in the July 23 issue of Cell, appears to help explain how nerves connect to their targets and stop growing once there, a process important for the normal development of mouse and man.

During prenatal development, a nerve connects to its proper targets in part by obeying pr