Body

BOSTON (September 12, 2016)--A new analysis of 100 million Medicare records from U.S. adults aged 65 and older reveals rising healthcare costs for infections associated with opportunistic premise plumbing pathogens--disease-causing bacteria, such as Legionella--which can live inside drinking water distribution systems, including household and hospital water pipes.

In a first-of-its-kind look at human kidney development, researchers at The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles have isolated human nephron progenitor (NP) cells. Their results, published online in the journal Stem Cell Translational Medicine, will help scientists understand how these progenitor cells become renal cells in the developing fetus, and possibly offer a future way to foster renal regeneration after chronic kidney failure or acute injury.

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Women who undergo gastric bypass surgery for weight loss risk giving birth to babies that are small or have lower average birth weights. The work is presented today at the 55th Annual European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology Meeting. The findings could lead to different advice and clinical care for pregnant women who have undergone gastric bypass surgery.

A minor hiccup in the sequence of a human gene can have devastating impacts on health. Such flaws cause cystic fibrosis (CF), a disease affecting the lungs and other vital organs, often leading to death by the age of 30.

In new research appearing in the current issue of Science Advances, Wade Van Horn and his colleagues from Vanderbilt and Northwestern Universities examine the underpinnings of this deadly affliction, including its apparent disproportionate effect on women, which is due in part to the influence of estrogen on the flow of important chemical ions.

In a six-day Ayurvedic-based well-being program that featured a vegetarian diet, meditation, yoga and massages experienced measurable decreases in a set of blood-based metabolites associated with inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk and cholesterol regulation.

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A protein known for helping cells withstand stress may also act as a switch that triggers free-swimming Schistosoma larvae to begin penetrating the skin and transforming into the parasitic flatworms that burden more than 240 million people worldwide with schistosomiasis.

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PHILADELPHIA - Individual cells within a tumor are not all the same. This may sound like a modern medical truism, but it wasn't very long ago that oncologists assumed that taking a single biopsy from a patient's tumor would be an accurate reflection of the physiological and genetic make-up of the entire mass.

Specifically training oncologists and their patients to have high-quality discussions improves communication, but troubling gaps still exist between the two groups, according to a new study in JAMA Oncology.

The 265 patients who agreed to participate in the research project had been diagnosed with advanced cancer (stages 3 or 4). Researchers coached them about what to ask their doctors and how to voice their concerns. Doctors were also given state-of-the-art communications workshop training.

Washington, DC - September 9, 2016 - Certain antibiotic resistance genes are easily transferred from one bacterial species to another, and can move between farm animals and the human gut. A team led by Chinese researchers has characterized this "mobile resistome," which they say is largely to blame for the spread of antibiotic resistance. They found that many antibiotic resistance genes that are shared between the human and animal gut microbiome are also present in multiple human pathogens.

This is the conclusion of a recent population-wide study from Denmark, which demonstrates a "significant and immediate" spike in the diagnoses of trauma and stressor related disorders (e.g. adjustment disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder) in Denmark in the weeks and months after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, even though the Nordic country was not directly impacted by the attacks.

PHILADELPHIA-- For patients with advanced lung cancer, a non-invasive liquid biopsy may be a more effective and suitable alternative to the gold standard tissue biopsy to detect clinically relevant mutations and help guide their course of treatment, suggests a new study published this week in the journal Clinical Cancer Research from researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania (ACC).

Researchers found no overall increase in cancer risk among World Trade Center (WTC)-exposed firefighters following the 9/11 attacks compared with other firefighters from several US cities. They noted a nearly 4-fold increase in the rate in thyroid cancer, but this increased risk was not significant after controlling for possible biases related to cancer screening. (WTC-exposed firefighters have access to health care and routine health monitoring exams even after retirement.)

Philadelphia, PA, September 9, 2016 - Many acute and chronic liver diseases, including alcoholic hepatitis, result from apoptotic (programmed) cell death mediated by the enzyme caspase. Caspase inhibitors have therapeutic potential to treat and prevent apoptosis-mediated liver injury, and some are currently in clinical trials. However, a new study published in The American Journal of Pathology raises serious safety concerns regarding the clinical use of caspase inhibitors by demonstrating the occurrence of delayed-onset necrotic, non-caspase-dependent liver cell injury.

The popular kids' card game "Exploding Kittens" teaches a concept critical to cancer science: When a player plays a "Nope" card, the subsequent player may lay another "Nope", thus creating a double-negative that becomes a positive, allowing the initial action to proceed. A paper, stemming from a longstanding collaboration between investigators at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and Yale, published in the journal Cancer Cell, demonstrates a similar strategy that bladder cancer uses to proliferate.

New research from The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai identifies a protein that may be an unexplored target to develop new cancer therapies. The protein, known as kinase suppressor of Ras, or KSR, is a pseudoenzyme that plays a critical role in the transmission of signals in the cell determining whether cells grow, divide, or die.