Body

Bacteria are particularly ingenious when it comes to survival strategies. They often create a biofilm to protect themselves from a hostile environment, for example during treatment with antibiotics. A biofilm is a bacterial community that is surrounded by a protective slime capsule consisting of sugar chains and "curli". Scientists at VIB and Vrije Universiteit Brussel have for the first time created a detailed three-dimensional image of the pores through which the curli building blocks cross the bacterial cell wall, a crucial step in the formation of the protective slime capsule.

Instead, it may just lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, suggest the researchers, led by a team based at Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands.

Their paper publishes as the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference opens next week (Monday 15 Sept), where experts from around the world will discuss how to tackle the threat to health and the waste of money caused by unnecessary care. The conference is hosted by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford in partnership with The BMJ's Too Much Medicine campaign.

Dr Stephen Martin and colleagues argue that this strategy is failing patients and wasting healthcare resources. They call for a re-examination of the threshold and urge clinicians to be cautious about treating low risk patients with blood pressure lowering drugs.

Scientists can now explain a third of the inherited risk of prostate cancer, after a major international study identified 23 new genetic variants associated with increased risk of the disease.

The study brings the total number of common genetic variants linked to prostate cancer to 100, and testing for them can identify 1% of men with a risk of the disease almost six times as high as the population average.

Cells regulate protein functions in a wide variety of ways, including by modifying the protein structure. In an instant, a protein can take on another form and perform no or even the "wrong" function: in humans, proteins that fold wrongly can cause serious diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or cystic fibrosis. Some of these proteins also have a tendency to "infect" other molecules of the same type and congregate into insoluble so-called amyloid fibrils or plaques. These amyloids can damage cells and tissues and make people ill.

Method breaks the shackles

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have discovered how two genes – Period and Cryptochrome – keep the circadian clocks in all human cells in time and in proper rhythm with the 24-hour day, as well as the seasons. The finding, published today in the journal Genes and Development, has implications for the development of drugs for various diseases such as cancers and diabetes, as well as conditions such as metabolic syndrome, insomnia, seasonal affective disorder, obesity, and even jetlag.

Health policies which favour using ranibizumab for treating eye disease in older people over safety concerns for a cheaper alternative should take account of a new Cochrane Review published today. The researchers looked at the results of studies which compared the safety of two drugs used for treating age-related macular degeneration, ranibizumab and bevacizumab.

PISCATAWAY, NJ – Adolescents and young adults who smoke marijuana frequently may attempt to manage negative moods by using the drug, according to a study in September's Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

"Young people who use marijuana frequently experience an increase in negative affect in the 24 hours leading up to a use event, which lends strong support to an affect-regulation model in this population," says the study's lead author Lydia A. Shrier, M.D., M.P.H., of the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at Boston Children's Hospital.

The story of cancer care seems so simple: find the mutated gene that causes cancer and turn it off or fix it. But rarely does a single gene cause cancer. More often, many genes are altered together to drive the disease. So the challenge becomes sorting out which altered genes are the most to blame in which cancers. A collaborative study between researchers at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) published today in the journal Clinical Cancer Research takes an important step toward answering this question in bladder cancer.

WASHINGTON — Which is more likely to convince a smoker to quit? The words, "Warning: cigarettes cause cancer" beneath the image of an open mouth with a cancerous lesion and rotten teeth, or the same image with the words, "Warning: Quitting smoking reduces the risk of cancer"?

The answer depends on how confident you are in your ability to quit, according to a study led by researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

Leaky intestines may cripple bacteria-fighting immune cells in patients with a rare hereditary disease, according to a study by researchers in Lausanne, Switzerland. The study, published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine on September 15, may explain why these patients suffer from recurrent bacterial infections.

A single protein may tip the balance between ridding the body of a dangerous virus and enduring life-long chronic infection, according to a report appearing in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

New research shows that schizophrenia isn't a single disease but a group of eight genetically distinct disorders, each with its own set of symptoms. The finding could be a first step toward improved diagnosis and treatment for the debilitating psychiatric illness.

The research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is reported online Sept. 15 in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Bethesda, MD (Sept. 15, 2014) — The treatment of Crohn's disease is evolving. To help gastroenterologists better identify and manage their Crohn's disease patients, the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) has created a clinical decision tool to guide GIs in their decision-making process.

An international team of scientists has cracked the genetic code of the liver fluke parasite, Opisthorchis viverrini, using a unique DNA analysis technique developed at A*STAR's Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS).

GIS's DNA analysis technique has allowed the researchers to further study the biology of Opisthorchis viverrini to understand the cause and the eventual development of treatments for bile duct cancer, a condition caused by the parasite.