Body

WHAT: New research from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Louisiana State University shows the potential role of Extra® sugar-free gum in helping to control appetite, decrease calorie intake and reduce snack cravings.i Primary outcomes include:

Speaking on April 19 at the Experimental Biology 2009 meeting in New Orleans, Dr. Kristine Krajnak, a team leader in the Engineering and Control Technologies Branch of the Health Effects Laboratory Division of NIOSH in Morgantown, West Virginia, describes results from the first study to directly link the different physical responses of tissue that occur with exposure to different vibration frequencies with biological mechanisms underlying the development of vascular dysfunction. Her presentation is part of the scientific program of The American Physiological Society.

DURHAM, N.C. – The addition of a chemotherapeutic drug for leukemia to a standard regimen of two other chemotherapy drugs appears to enhance the response of certain ovarian cancers to treatment, according to a pre-clinical study led by researchers in the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Finally some promising news about pancreatic cancer, one of the most fatal cancers, due to the difficulties of early detection and the lack of effective therapies: Johns Hopkins University pathologist Akhilesh Pandey has identified an epidermal growth factor receptor aberrantly active in approximately a third of the 250 human pancreatic cancers studied.

One cell…one initial set of genetic changes - that's all it takes to begin a series of events that lead to metastatic cancer. Now, Johns Hopkins experts have tracked how the cancer process began in 33 men with prostate cancer who died of the disease. Culling information from autopsies, their study points to a set of genetic defects in a single cell that are different for each person's cancer.

DURHAM, N.C. -- New evidence gleaned from CT scans of fossils locked inside rocks may flip the order in which two kinds of four-limbed animals with backbones were known to have moved from fish to landlubber.

Both extinct species, known as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, lived an estimated 360-370 million years ago in what is now Greenland. Acanthostega was thought to have been the most primitive tetrapod, that is, the first vertebrate animal to possess limbs with digits rather than fish fins.

An unmapped reservoir of briny liquid chemically similar to sea water, but hidden under an inland Antarctic glacier, appears to support microbial life in a cold, dark, oxygen-poor environment – a most unexpected setting to be teeming with life.

Researchers have determined the structure of a key genetic mechanism at work in bacteria, including some that are deadly to humans, in an important step toward the design of a new class of antibiotics, according to an accelerated publication that appeared online today as a "paper of the week" in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

New research from the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary has found a connection between the laxity of a woman's knee joint and her monthly hormone cycle.

The research project — a collaboration between kinesiology, engineering and health sciences researchers — has found that not all woman experience knee laxity at the same time of their menst rual cycle. The researchers speculate that this is likely why previous research in the area has largely discounted a connection between the hormone cycle and knee injury.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found an exponentially better way to protect streams and lakes from the muddy runoff associated with stormwater around road and other construction projects.

The alternative is lower or comparable in cost to commonly used best management practices (BMPs) around construction sites, yet much more effective at keeping streams and lakes free of runoff sediment that pollutes water and harms aquatic life.

AUGUSTA, Ga. – New studies indicate the three drugs used to treat male impotence also appear to work in females, albeit a little differently, and should give the scientific community pause to take a second look at their potential in the 40 percent of women who report sexual dysfunction, researchers say.

Mammalian alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is a single-chain glycoprotein and altered serum AFP levels have been observed concurrent with aberrant growth manifestations in some congenital defects and cancer. The gut development during late gestation and early neonatal period is accompanied by changes in the synthesis of AFP, and abundance declines significantly during gut development. In this case, AFP is considered as an important growth factor with a specific function in gastrointestinal development.

Inadequate cleansing of the colon has an adverse effect on procedure time, safety, completion rate and diagnostic accuracy. Until now, it has been unclear whether the combination of the stimulant laxative, senna, and the osmotic laxative, magnesium citrate, results in better cleansing outcome and is acceptable and tolerable for the patients.

It is well known that non-cardiac chest pain is closely related to gastroesophageal reflux diseases (GERD). Chest pain of esophageal origin can be difficult to distinguish from that caused by cardiac ischemia because the distal esophagus and the heart share a common afferent vagal supply, and GERD can cause episodes of non-cardiac chest pain that resemble ischemic cardiac pain.

Kupffer cells, resident tissue macrophages that line the liver sinusoids, play a key role in modulating inflammation in a number of experimental models of liver injury. Since Kupffer cells represent only a small portion of the entire liver cell population, greatly outnumbered by the parenchymal cells, Kupffer cell isolation faces major technical obstacles. Laser capture microdissection (LCM) offers a method of isolating a single cell type from specific regions of tissue sections.