Body

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Statins, drugs widely prescribed to lower cholesterol, do not interfere with a commonly used medication to treat lymphomas, according to a Mayo Clinic study presented today at the50th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology (http://www.hematology.org/meetings/2008/) in San Francisco. In fact, statins may slow the progression of certain types of lymphoma.

An international team of biologists has discovered a new species of microsporidia, a single-celled parasite of animals, in a roundworm used in genetic laboratories around the world.

The discovery, detailed in the current issue of the journal PLoS Biology, is a breakthrough for public health researchers who until now had been looking for a suitable laboratory model in which to study microsporidia—a class of emerging pathogens that can cause significant illness in humans.

Scientists have uncovered vital clues about how to treat serious bowel disorders by studying the behaviour of cells in the colon.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh believe a chemical messenger that is essential for developing a baby's gut in the womb could hold the key to new treatments for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a condition which affects 1 in 250 people in the UK.

The team studied a chain of chemical reactions inside colon cells, called the Hedgehog signalling pathway, which controls the way it behaves and communicates with other cells.

SAN FRANCISCO - A new risk model for myelodysplastic syndrome provides survival projections that apply to patients at any stage of the disease, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report today at the 50th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

"The previous prognostic model for MDS applies only to the newly diagnosed patient, so once therapy begins or the disease progresses, it cannot help guide our decisions," said study lead author Hagop Kantarjian, M.D., chair of M. D. Anderson's Department of Leukemia.

New data from a long-term, prospective study show that among people who were surgically treated for colorectal cancer, pre-diagnosis blood levels of two insulin-related proteins predicted the risk of subsequent death. Researchers found that patients with high pre-diagnosis levels of insulin-like growth factor binding protein-1 (IGFBP-1) had a more than 50 percent reduced risk of overall death and colorectal cancer death; conversely, high levels of C-peptide, a marker of insulin production, were associated with nearly twice the overall risk of death.

BOSTON--A pair of proteins may help explain why people with surgically removed colorectal cancer and who are overweight, physically inactive, and follow a Western-pattern diet may have an increased risk of dying of the disease or other causes, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists report in a new study.

Washington, DC -- A lack of clear-cut, scientific evidence illustrating the benefits of mammography screening in women over 80 has created a trail of controversy leading to a disturbing conclusion about cancer care in America. "We are ill-prepared from a scientific knowledge perspective to provide cancer health care rationally, ethically, equitably and humanely to the 'booming' older population," say two leading cancer researchers.

Rather than testing for individual marker genes or proteins, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) and the Moores UCSD Cancer Center have evidence that groups, or networks, of interactive genes may be more reliable in determining the likelihood that a form of leukemia is fast-moving or slow-growing.

Just as the emotions it represents are dynamic, the heart's development requires dynamic shifts in proteins that prompt alternative spicing, a mechanism that allows a given gene to program the cell to make several proteins, said a group of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report that appears online today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Neonatal diabetes is a rare form of diabetes that is usually detected within the first six months of life. Approximately 50% of cases of neonatal diabetes are caused by mutations in either the KIR6.2 gene or the SUR1 gene. Frances Ashcroft and colleagues, at Oxford University, United Kingdom, have now developed a mouse model of neonatal diabetes that they believe provides new insight into the human disease.

DALLAS – Dec. 8, 2008 – Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have shown in mice how and under what circumstances the gut activates its defensive mechanisms to prevent illness.

Scientists have known for decades that microbial cells in the human gut outnumber the body's own cells by about 10 to 1. Some microbes are beneficial, helping us break down food we can't otherwise digest; others can cause disease and illnesses such as food poisoning if they escape the gut and invade body tissues.

SAN FRANCISCO - Two drugs approved as fallback therapy for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) appear to outperform historical benchmarks of the frontline medication when used as a first treatment in separate clinical trials, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center reported at the 50th Annual Meeting of the American Hematological Society.

Men and women have about the same in-hospital death rate for heart attack — but women are twice as likely to die if hospitalized for a more severe type of heart attack, according to a report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Individuals younger than 50 who have been previously vaccinated do not appear to have a substantially different immune response to a half-dose of influenza vaccine than to a full dose, according to a report in the December 8/22 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. This suggests that half-dose vaccination in healthy young individuals may be effective in times of vaccine shortage.

A traditional Mediterranean diet with an additional daily serving of mixed nuts appears to be useful for managing some metabolic abnormalities in older adults at high risk for heart disease, according to a report in the December 8/22 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.