Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder “remain a significant public health concern” three years after the 1999 NATO campaign in Serbia, according to an article published this week in BMC Medicine. Refugees and people living in remote areas are particularly vulnerable to suffering from mental health problems. Almost half the people questioned had symptoms of depression and more than one in eight had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). American researchers teamed

It is more convenient to glue parts together than to suture them. Even surgeons agree to that. They only need a good adhesive. Siberian researchers have created the third generation bio-adhesive and successfully tested it on animals.

Surgery is steadily improving methods for joining of slit parts. To solve the problem, biological adhesives were recently used. More often physicians use chemical compounds based on alpha cyanoacrylates, which do not provoke allergy or stimulate tumorogenesis. T

Two years after transforming human fat cells into what appeared to be nerve cells, a group led by Duke University Medical Center researchers has gone one step further by demonstrating that these new cells also appear to act like nerve cells.

The team said that the results of its latest experiments provide the most compelling scientific evidence to date that researchers will in the future be able to take cells from a practically limitless source — fat — and retrain them to differentiate al

USC researchers provide unique view of inherited disorders, cancer with discussion of new field of epigenetics in journal Nature

Researchers from the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center are heralding an entirely new approach to the treatment of aging, inherited diseases and cancer in a review paper published in today’s issue of the journal Nature. Dispelling the belief that the only way to treat such conditions is by fixing or replacing damaged genes, they are instead focusing

EUREKA project E! 2427 PERMON is developing a radiological imaging system that will give medics a clearer view inside the human body by accurately monitoring organ blood flow during operations. This essential information will lead to an increase in techniques such as laser surgery over more invasive methods. Operations will be less costly and less traumatic to the patient, involving smaller incisions, less pain, and shorter hospital stays.

The project brought together a range of Polish and A

Researchers have combined novel molecular targeting technologies to deliver gene-silencing therapy specifically to tumor cells shielded by a normally impermeable obstacle, the blood brain barrier.

In the June 1 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research, William Pardridge, M.D., UCLA, reported that a delivery packet equipped with two specific antibodies first recognizes the transferrin receptor, a key protein portal in the blood brain barrier, and then gains entry into brain cancer cells

Alzheimer’s disease could be caused by the deactivation of what are known as “presenilin genes”. Using mice as a model for the study of Alzheimer’s in humans, a scientific team headed by the researcher Carlos Saura, from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has discovered that when these genes mutate and stop working they cause neuro-degeneration and memory loss, giving rise to what in humans would be Alzheimer’s. The discovery, published in Neuron, is totally unexpected, since up till now it was

Scientists at the Karolinska Institute have found that changes in the “powerhouse” of cells, the mitochondria, play a key role in aging. The findings are being published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

Mitochondria, which provide energy to cells, have their own set of DNA. Mutations of mitochondrial DNA increase with age, but until now no one knew whether this is a result of aging or a cause of aging. New research findings now indicate that the latter is the case.

Mice w

Finding overturns long held ideas about how cells build proteins

Writing in the May 28 issue of Cell, Johns Hopkins researchers report that four critical components of cells’ protein-building machine don’t do what scientists had long assumed.
The machine, called the ribosome, is a ball of RNA (DNA’s cousin) surrounded by proteins. In the RNA center, genetic instructions are read, the right protein building block is added onto a growing chain, and at the appropriate

Yale scientists have discovered a new way of illuminating MCH neurons, which may play an important role in regulating appetite and body weight, by using a virus that has been genetically engineered so that it cannot replicate.

MCH neurons are located in the hypothalamus, a homeostatic regulatory center of the brain. Because these nerve cells look like any other brain cell, it has been difficult to study their cellular behavior previously.

The researchers took the “safe” virus, know

UCLA chemists have devised an elegant solution to an intricate problem at the nanoscale that stumped scientists for many years: They have made a mechanically interlocked compound whose molecules have the topology of the beloved interlocked Borromean rings. In the May 28 issue of the journal Science, the team reports nanoscience that could be described as art.

The UCLA group is the first to achieve this goal in total chemical synthesis, which research groups worldwide have been pursuing.

Researchers from Havard University have discovered the presence of a previously unidentified microbial community inside the porous stone of the Maya ruins in Mexico that may be capable of causing rapid deterioration of these sites. They present their findings at the 104th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

“The presence of a previously undescribed endolithic microbial community that is different than the surface community has important implications for the conservation

Experiments by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have revealed it might be possible for randomness in gene expression to lead to differences in cells — or people, for that matter — that are genetically identical.

The researchers, HHMI investigator Erin K. O’Shea and colleague Jonathan M. Raser, both at the University of California, San Francisco, published their findings May 27, 2004, in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

According to O

Discovery may lead to insights into cancer, birth defects, fertility and neurological disorders

A cellular structure discovered 125 years ago and dismissed by many biologists as “cellular garbage” has been found to play a key role in the process of cytokinesis, or cell division, one of the most ancient and important of all biological phenomena.
The discovery of the function of the dozens of proteins harbored within this structure – which are necessary for normal cell division – by

Researchers from Newcastle University in the UK have ended a 15-year search for the gene that causes the rare Cornelia de Lange Syndrome. (CdLS).

CdLS affects just one in 40,000 live births but can be devastating, with affected youngsters having growth problems, missing or deformed limbs, gastro-intestinal disorders, seizures, cardiac problems, neurological, learning and behavioural difficulties and oro-dental issues.
Doctors in the USA and Europe knew that there was likely to be a rogue

Investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have conducted studies in mice to gain a new picture of how the immune system’s “killer” T cells are prompted to destroy infected cells. Their insights provide a blueprint for rational design of vaccines that induce desired T-cell responses.

The findings are published in this week’s Science. “If we are correct, what we’ve found will put rational vac