In a nationwide study of hospitalized patients, researchers at Duke University Medical Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that individuals at risk for developing deep vein thrombosis (DVT) — a disorder characterized by the formation of blood clots in the deep veins of the legs — often fail to receive preventive medications. DVT can cause death when leg clots break free and lodge in the lungs, a condition known as pulmonary embolism.

The study found that, of more than 5,000

Adult stem cells have long been thought to be restricted in their potential to differentiate and regenerate tissues in which they reside. A study by Sem Phan and colleagues from the University of Michigan, in the January 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, suggests that the collagen overproduction and deposition in the lung causing idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis may develop from cells derived from bone marrow stems cells, rather than parenchymal lung fibroblasts.

The authors in

Today there is a great need for portable equipment that can quickly detect chemical and biological weapons such as nerve gases, viruses, bacteria, and toxins. In a new dissertation the Swedish researcher Inga Gustafsson shows that artificial membranes can be used for this purpose in future biosensors.

Biosensors have already proven to be useful in the detection of impurities in food and water, for example. They have also been used in industrial processes, clinical analyses, and the develop

Evidence from fossilised embryos of worm-like creatures that lived 500 million years ago shows that embryos developed then in much the same way as their living relatives do today. The implications of this remarkable discovery, reported in this week’s issue of Nature, is that embryological processes that occur today must have been established very early on in the evolution of animals.

Because embryos are composed of tissues that decay away to nothing in an instant they are very rarely preserv

People who take the recreational drug ecstasy risk impairing their memory, according to an international study which surveyed users in places including the UK, other European countries, the USA and Australia.

The study, which also surveyed non-drug users, found that those who regularly took ecstasy suffered from mainly long-term memory difficulties, and that they were 23 per cent more likely to report problems with remembering things than non-users.

The British research team, led

A significant percentage of children recently diagnosed with autism receive complementary or alternative medicine treatments, some of which are potentially harmful, according to a research team from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The researchers reviewed charts for 284 patients evaluated at the Hospital’s Regional Autism Center for autistic spectrum disorder. They found that 90 children, or 32 percent of the total, were using complementary and alternative medicine, with

Why is this year’s flu packing such a wallop? And why is it taking such a harsh toll on young children?

One reason is that the flu virus has changed, or mutated, slightly in the nine months since flu makers designed this year’s vaccine, and those changes may be rendering the vaccine less effective, according to flu expert John Treanor, M.D., director of the Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit at the University of Rochester. Treanor provides an update on this year’s flu – and explai

Researchers and clinicians know that drinking alcohol can have both beneficial and harmful effects.
Yet little is known about the effects of long-term, chronic alcohol consumption on survival.
A new study has found that rats bred to prefer alcohol are healthier and live longer than rats bred to avoid alcohol, whether they drink alcohol or not
Study authors ponder the implications of this unexpected yet significant finding. Statistics clearly show that alcoh

An all over tan is fashionable and large numbers of people, especially young women, achieve this by using sunbeds. Professor Antony Young, of King’s College London, has reviewed the evidence that links sunbed use to malignant melanoma; a skin cancer that is fatal if not detected and treated early. Malignant melanoma is a cancer of the skin’s cells that are responsible for tanning (melanocytes). Unlike most cancers, that tend to occur in late middle age, malignant melanoma can appear in younger people

A novel non-invasive system for cancer treatment is being developed with technology from the European space industry. The first target for this new treatment, which could be ready as early as 2006, is breast cancer.

Dutch entrepreneur Hugo Brunsveld van Hulten has come up with a solution to help physicians in their fight against breast cancer that combines two techniques: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to locate and diagnose cancerous tissue and high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) to

Researchers from LSU, NASA and Mexico find Mars-like conditions in a South American desert

A team of scientists from LSU, NASA, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and other research organizations has discovered an area of Earth that is shockingly similar to the surface of Mars.

This joint research effort has discovered clues from one of Earth’s driest deserts about the limits of life on this planet, and why past missions to Mars may have failed to detect life.

Sediment samples dating back thousands of years and taken from under the deep water of West Olaf Lake in Minnesota have revealed an unexpected climate indicator that can be factored into future projections.

In the Jan. 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report that native C4 plants did not fare well during prolonged periods of severe drought that occurred in the middle Holocene (4,000 to 8,000 years a

Scientists for the first time have restored a crucial substance known as myelin in a widespread area of an animal’s brain, opening the door toward new ways to improve treatment of an assortment of “demyelinating” diseases as well as the side effects of such common conditions as high blood pressure and heart disease. The research by a team led by Steven Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Rochester Medical Center, is in the January issue of Nature Medicine.

Using human brain cell

A University of Alberta researcher has developed the first model to predict risk of West Nile virus in North America–a tool that could help prevent the infectious disease from becoming an outbreak.

Dr. Marjorie Wonham and her research team from the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Alberta, created a simple mathematical model using the dead bird counts collected in New York in 2000. Her research is published in the current issue of the Royal Society of London’s jour

Month-long project leads to four-month investigation and revolutionary discovery

A U of T student had no idea his class project would end up unravelling the history of SARS. But when he was assigned an open-ended study, John Stavrinides jumped at the chance to tackle public enemy number one.

“I chose the SARS genome because it was obviously very important from a medical perspective,” said Stavrinides, a PhD candidate in comparative genomics.

Under the supervision of

Flowering plants are the largest group of plants and contain just about all of our food crops. Khidir Hilu’s research using rapidly evolving genes to determine the molecular evolution of flowering plants is providing new insights into plant relationships, according to the cover story article in the recently released December 2003 issue of the American Journal of Botany (Angiosperm phylogeny based on matK sequence information1).

Flowering plants include cereals such as wheat, barle