Body

One of the current handicaps of cancer treatments is the difficulty of aiming these treatments at destroying malignant cells without killing healthy cells in the process. But a new study by McMaster University researchers has provided insight into how scientists might develop therapies and drugs that more carefully target cancer, while sparing normal healthy cells

If you're an asthma sufferer, make sure the medical history at your doctor's office includes your employment and recreation plans. A new screening tool developed by Tel Aviv University researchers may save you a trip to the emergency room later on.

It has long been suspected that physical exertion itself, as part of work or play, can trigger an asthma attack, but little medical evidence has been found for this conclusion ― until now. A study by Dr. Shlomo Moshe from Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine gives doctors a new way of advising those who may be at risk.

MADISON, WI, January 5, 2009 -- A new calibration tool was recently developed to help students and soil scientists calibrate their thumb and forefinger for the correct amount of pressure.

C.A. Seybold and colleagues, USDA-NRCS, Lincoln, NE, write about this new tool in the 2009 issue of Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education.

People with substance abuse disorders cost Medicaid hundreds of millions of dollars annually in medical care, suggesting that early interventions for substance abuse could not only improve outcomes but also save substantial amounts of money, according to a comprehensive study that examined records of nearly 150,000 people in six states.

The mystery of why ancient South American peoples who created the mysterious Nazca Lines also collected human heads as trophies has long puzzled scholars who theorize the heads may have been used in fertility rites, taken from enemies in battle or associated with ancestor veneration.

A recent study using specimens from Chicago's Field Museum throws new light on the matter by establishing that trophy heads came from people who lived in the same place and were part of the same culture as those who collected them. These people lived 2,000 to 1,500 years ago.

When there is a threat of disease during pregnancy, mothers produce less aggressive sons with more efficient immune systems, researchers at The University of Nottingham have discovered.

The study provides the first evidence for a transgenerational effect on immune response based on environmental cues — with maternal perception of disease risk in the immediate environment potentially determining offspring disease resistance and social dominance. The results are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Royal Society's flagship biological research journal.

With cold and flu season in full swing, the fact that viruses and bacteria rapidly evolve is apparent with every sneeze, sniffle, and cough. A new report in the January 2009 issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), explains for the first time how humans keep up with microbes by rearranging the genes that make antibodies to foreign invaders. This research fills a significant gap in our understanding of how the immune system helps us survive.

CLEVELAND—Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Yale University have made a significant advancement in understanding the cause behind why some pregnant women suffer from inflammations in the inner womb without any signs of an infection.

Using gene-cloning techniques, researchers discovered that approximately 60 percent of the bacteria present in women with intra-amniotic inflammations were missed by traditional culture testing — considered the gold standard for finding bacterial infections.

A new epidemiological study has found that among women who have never used menopausal hormone therapy, obese women are at an increased risk of developing ovarian cancer compared with women of normal weight. Published in the February 15, 2009 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the research indicates that obesity may contribute to the development of ovarian cancer through a hormonal mechanism.

Berkeley -- Two new studies led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that taking maternity leave before and after the birth of a baby is a good investment in terms of health benefits for both mothers and newborns.

One study found that women who started their leave in the last month of pregnancy were less likely to have cesarean deliveries, while another found that new mothers were more likely to establish breastfeeding the longer they delayed their return to work.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT engineers have developed a new, highly efficient way to pair up cells so they can be fused together into a hybrid cell.

The new technique should make it much easier for scientists to study what happens when two cells are combined. For example, fusing an adult cell and an embryonic stem cell allows researchers to study the genetic reprogramming that occurs in such hybrids.

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 4 – An international team led by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers has identified genetic markers associated with risk for ulcerative colitis. The findings, which appear today as an advance online publication of the journal Nature Genetics, bring researchers closer to understanding the biological pathways involved in the disease and may lead to the development of new treatments that specifically target them.

Researchers from Duke University Medical Center have identified a variation in a particular gene that increases susceptibility to early coronary artery disease. For years, scientists have known that the devastating, early-onset form of the disease was inherited, but they knew little about the gene(s) responsible until now. The results are published January 2 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

HOUSTON – A single tumor-suppressing gene is a key to understanding, and perhaps killing, dormant ovarian cancer cells that persist after initial treatment only to reawaken years later, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the December Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The team found that expression of a gene called ARHI acts as a switch for autophagy, or self-cannibalization, in ovarian cancer cells. Often a mechanism for cancer cell death, in this case "self-eating" acts as a survival mechanism for dormant cancer cells.

A team of scientists has discovered a new syndrome associated with severe congenital neutropenia (SCN), a rare disorder in which children lack sufficient infection-fighting white cells, and identified the genetic cause of the syndrome: mutations in the gene Glucose-6-phosphatase, catalytic subunit 3 (G6PC3). The findings, which are published in the Jan.