In the ongoing quest to identify the genetic factors involved in disease, scientists have increasingly turned to genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, which enable the scanning of up to a million genetic markers in thousands of individuals.
These studies generally compare the frequency of genetic variants between two groups — those with a particular disease and healthy individuals. Differences in the frequency of a given variant suggest the variant may be involved in the disease.
Stress during pregnancy may raise the risk of asthma in offspring, according to researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. The researchers investigated differences in immune function markers in cord blood between infants born to mothers in high stress environments and those born to mothers with lower stress and found marked differences in patterns that may be associated with asthma risk later in life.
Researchers in Australia have demonstrated that blocking a certain protein can reduce or prevent cigarette smoke-induced lung inflammation in mice. Inflammation underlies the disease process of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and many other smoking-related ailments.
The findings have been published online ahead of print publication in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
A purified form of an omega 3 cuts the number and size of precancerous bowel growths (polyps) in people whose genetic make-up predisposes them to bowel cancer, finds research published ahead of print in the journal Gut.
Furthermore, this particular omega 3 (eicosapentaenoic acid or EPA) seems to be as effective as the prescription medicine used to treat familial bowel polyps, but without the associated cardiovascular side effects.
The profession must take advantage of changes in medical education to ensure that all health professionals, but especially gut specialists, are given adequate training in nutrition, urge Dr Penny Nield and colleagues, in the launch issue of Frontline Gastroenterology,* the new quarterly companion journal to Gut.
Hypnotherapy seems to be very effective for easing the distressing symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and in a goodly proportion of cases, clears up symptoms altogether, reveal experts during a wide ranging discussion of the condition in a Frontline Gastroenterology podcast.
The role of selenium in diabetes has been controversial, with some studies suggesting that it raises diabetes risk and others finding that it is protective. Now, research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Nutrition and Metabolism, has shown that, for men, high plasma selenium concentrations are associated with a lower occurrence of dysglycemia.
PHILADELPHIA (March 17, 2010)—All clinical trials have guidelines that clearly state who can and cannot participate, but according to the National Institutes of Health these guidelines are typically based on age, gender, previous treatment history, the type and stage of a disease, and other medically relevant factors. However, researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center have gathered evidence indicating that some trials explicitly exclude individuals based on their sexual orientation.
Increasingly common insurance plans that encourage patients to receive care from physicians who keep medical costs lower are based on unreliable estimates of doctor performance and may not achieve the intended savings, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
The first major assessment of physician cost profiling found that about one-fourth of the 13,788 physicians studied would be misclassified under the system of cost ranking commonly used by insurance plans, according to findings published in the March 18 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report that in a small study of women with advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer, gemcitabine and cisplatin, when used in combination, produced a response rate in fifty percent of patients.
Jubilee Brown, M.D., associate professor in M. D. Anderson's Department of Gynecologic Oncology, presented the findings at today's plenary session of the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists' 41st Annual Meeting on Women's Cancer.
SALT LAKE CITY—Treating virulent influenza, sepsis, and other potentially deadly infections long has focused on looking for ways to kill viruses and bacteria. But new research from the University of Utah and Utah State University shows that modulating the body's own overeager inflammatory response to infection may help save more lives.
A team of McGill Chemistry Department researchers led by Dr. Hanadi Sleiman has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of nanotubes – tiny "magic bullets" that could one day deliver drugs to specific diseased cells. Sleiman explains that the research involves taking DNA out of its biological context. So rather than being used as the genetic code for life, it becomes a kind of building block for tiny nanometre-scale objects.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Fungi have significant potential for "horizontal" gene transfer, a new study has shown, similar to the mechanisms that allow bacteria to evolve so quickly, become resistant to antibiotics and cause other serious problems.
This discovery, to be published Thursday in the journal Nature, suggests that fungi have the capacity to rapidly change the make-up of their genomes and become infectious to plants and possibly animals, including humans.
Waltham, MA—Whenever you choke on acrid cigarette smoke, feel like you're burning up from a mouthful of wasabi-laced sushi, or cry while cutting raw onions and garlic, your response is being triggered by a primordial chemical sensor conserved across some 500 million years of animal evolution, report Brandeis University scientists in a study in Nature this week.
HOUSTON - Increased understanding of the Skp2 gene and its relation to cellular senescence may lead to the development of novel agents that can suppress tumor development in common types of cancer, researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center report in the journal Nature.