San Diego, July 29, 2008 – Although Second Hand Smoke (SHS) is widely accepted as a risk factor for coronary heart disease, there have been few studies investigating the association of SHS and stroke risk. In a new study, published in the September 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers report on evidence of increased risk of stroke for spouses of smokers.
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DALLAS – July 29, 2008 – UT Southwestern Medical Center gastroenterologists are using a new method to freeze damaged cells in the esophagus, preventing them from turning cancerous.
The Food and Drug Administration-approved cryoablation therapy helps Barrett's esophagus patients with dysplasia, a condition in which normal cells are transformed into potentially cancerous ones.
Drug-resistant HIV at levels too low to be detected by standard tests is not unusual and may contribute to treatment failure, according to research published in PLoS Medicine.
For male fruit flies, sperm is not enough in the battle to reproduce – at each mating a cocktail of proteins is transferred to the female, many of which directly influence female behaviours in ways that benefit the male. In a new paper, published in this week's PLoS Biology, the online open access journal, a team of biologists from Willie Swanson's lab have investigated these proteins using a new method that is able to identify male proteins in mated females.
Long gone are the days when hundreds of thousands of bison grazed the Great Plains, millions of passenger pigeons darkened the skies while migrating to and from their breeding grounds, and some 12.5 trillion Rocky Mountain locusts crowded an area exceeding the size of California. The subject of great migrations—lost and still to be saved—is explored in two new articles published online today in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known in America as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that has no effective treatment. While it is well known that specific genetic mutations can cause the condition, how the changed genes produce the symptoms has previously been a mystery. A new paper in this week's PLoS Biology, the online open access journal, is able to predict ALS patient longevity to an unprecedented degree based on two properties of the protein SOD1.
Seminal fluid contains protein factors that, when transferred from a male to a female at mating, affect reproductive success. This is true of many different animals, from crickets to primates. In fruit flies, for instance, seminal fluid proteins influence the competitive ability of a male's sperm, and alter the female's post-mating behavior by dampening her interest in other males and cueing her to lay eggs. There is also some speculation, not yet proven, that having the wrong seminal fluid proteins might be one of several barriers to cross-breeding between closely related species.
By the age of 18 years, two in every five South African schoolboys report being forced to have sex, mostly by female perpetrators. A new study, reported in BioMed Central's open access journal International Journal for Equity in Health, reveals the shocking truth about endemic sexual abuse of male children that has been suspected but until now only poorly documented.
If you're fishing for ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, you might start with the seafood-rich diet typically served up in Japan. According to new research, a lifetime of eating tuna, sardines, salmon and other fish appears to protect Japanese men against clogged arteries, despite other cardiovascular risk factors.
SEATTLE – Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have discovered that microRNAs – molecular workhorses that regulate gene expression – are released by cancer cells and circulate in the blood, which gives them the potential to become a new class of biomarkers to detect cancer at its earliest stages. Muneesh Tewari, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues describe their findings in the July 28 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Boston, Mass. (July 28, 2008) — Micromanagers may generate resentment in an office setting, but they get results in your body. New data indicate that a dividing cell takes micromanagement to the extreme, tagging more than 14,000 different sites on its proteins with phosphate, a molecule that typically serves as a signal for a variety of biological processes.
MADISON — Though bacteria are everywhere — from the air we breathe and the food we eat to our guts and skin — the vast majority are innocuous or even beneficial, and only a handful pose any threat to us. What distinguishes a welcome microbial guest from an unwanted intruder?
Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests the answer lies not with the bacteria, but with the host.
PITTSBURGH, July 28 – Consuming large quantities of fish loaded with omega-3 fatty acids may explain low levels of heart disease in Japan, according to a study led by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health slated for the Aug. 5 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and available online at 5 p.m. ET, today. The study also found that third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans had similar or even higher levels of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries – a major risk factor for heart disease, compared to white Americans.
KNOXVILLE -- What began with an off-the-cuff curiosity eventually led Joe Williams to hang from the limbs of a tree 80 feet above the soil of northeastern Australia.
The things Williams, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researcher found there may help explain the amazing diversity in the world's flowering plants, a question that has puzzled scientists from the time of Charles Darwin to today.
A national analysis of physician office and emergency department records shows that the types of skin infections caused by community-acquired MRSA doubled in the eight-year study period, with the highest rates seen among children and in urban emergency rooms.
The study, conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, examined annual data from the National Center for Health Statistics of patient visits for skin and soft-tissue infections from 1997 to 2005. The results appear in the July 28, 2008 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.