Body

DALLAS – Dec. 7, 2010 – A more sensitive version of a blood test typically used to confirm that someone is having a heart attack could indicate whether a seemingly healthy, middle-aged person has unrecognized heart disease and an increased risk of dying, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.

In an effort to pinpoint potential triggers leading to inflammatory responses that eventually contribute to depression, researchers are taking a close look at the immune system of people living in today's cleaner modern society.

Rates of depression in younger people have steadily grown to outnumber rates of depression in the older populations and researchers think it may be because of a loss of healthy bacteria.

ORLANDO — A pioneering clinical trial is testing the effectiveness in leukemia of a small molecule that shuts down MDM2, a protein that can disable the well-known tumor suppressor p53.

Author of an exhaustive reference work on the birds of South Asia, Rasmussen has personally recorded on all the continents for this project. Her work in the Philippines alone netted 597 recordings of 120 species, many of which are threatened. Some of those sound types are not publicly available anywhere other than AVoCet.

CINCINNATI—Helicopter emergency medical services can be a life saver for patients needing immediate care. But, according to a University of Cincinnati study, the process of activating them often delays treatment beyond recommended times.

Athens, Ga. – Researchers at the University of Georgia have discovered a central switch that controls whether cells move or remain stationary. The misregulation of this switch may play a role in the increased movement of tumor cells and in the aggressiveness of tumors themselves.

SEATTLE & CHICAGO – Scientists at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (Seattle BioMed) and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine have reached a major milestone in the effort to wipe out some of the most lethal diseases on the planet. As leaders of two large structural genomics centers, they've experimentally determined 500 three-dimensional protein structures from a number of bacterial and protozoan pathogens, which could potentially lead to new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics to combat deadly infectious diseases.

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Researchers have found compelling evidence for an extensive biological community living in porous rock deep beneath the seafloor. The microbes in this hidden world appear to be an important source of dissolved organic matter in deep ocean water, a finding that could dramatically change ideas about the ocean carbon cycle.

Among patients with a family or past history of colorectal cancer (CRC), testing between colonoscopies helps detect CRC and advanced tumors that are either missed or develop rapidly, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.

BOSTON (December 7, 2010) —Newly-created bioactive peptides promote wound healing through the growth of new blood vessels and epithelial tissue, such as skin. These wound-healing peptides, synthesized by researchers at the Tufts Center for Innovations in Wound Healing Research, increased angiogenesis in vitro by 200 percent. The discovery, reported online in advance of print this week in Wound Repair and Regeneration, provides a better understanding of the mechanisms regulating wound healing and may lead to new therapies for acute and chronic wound healing.

AUSTIN, Texas—The role a key molecule plays in a plant's ability to remember winter, and therefore bloom in the spring, has been identified by University of Texas at Austin scientists.

Many flowering plants bloom in bursts of color in spring after long periods of cold in the winter. The timing of blooming is critical to ensure pollination, and is important for crop production and for droves of people peeping at wildflowers.

Cardiologists from the Mayo Clinic performed sheathless transradial percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to remedy complex lesions, achieving a 90% success rate with no radial complications. Standard guiding catheters were used during the procedure. Details of this novel approach—overcoming the last hurdle to greater adoption of transradial PCI in the U.S.—are published in the December issue of Catheterization and Cardiovascular Intervention, the official journal of The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions.

On Tuesday 7 December 2010, maternal health professionals from Africa and Asia will be attending a workshop in Liverpool to discuss the effects of 'Making It Happen', a programme with a life-saving training package for health care providers at its heart. Participants will share successes and lessons learned from this maternal and newborn health intervention, to better determine how the programme can be scaled-up.