Body

There is no evidence that organically produced foods are nutritionally superior to conventionally produced foodstuffs, according to a study published today in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Consumers appear willing to pay higher prices for organic foods based on their perceived health and nutrition benefits, and the global organic food market was estimated in 2007 to be worth £29 billion (£2 billion in the UK alone). Some previous reviews have concluded that organically produced food has a superior nutrient composition to conventional food.

Scientists from Scotland and Singapore have unraveled a mystery that has perplexed scientists since red wine was first discovered to have health benefits: how does resveratrol control inflammation? New research published in the August 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), not only explains resveratrol's one-two punch on inflammation, but also show how it—or a derivative—can be used to treat potentially deadly inflammatory disease, such as appendicitis, peritonitis, and systemic sepsis.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a blood-borne disease that causes inflammation of the liver and to which there is currently no vaccine available. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 3% of the world's population, approximately 170 million people, are infected with HCV and it is a leading cause of liver cirrhosis, end stage liver disease, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and liver transplantation.

A new analysis of the remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) that roamed Earth 68 million years ago has confirmed traces of protein from blood and bone, tendons, or cartilage. The findings, scheduled for publication in the Sept. 4 issue of ACS' monthly Journal of Proteome Research, is the latest addition to an ongoing controversy over which biochemical remnants can be detected in the dino.

In cancer research, as in most other biomedical sciences, they are playing a key role: living cells, kept in sterile plastic containers with red culture media populating incubators in laboratories around the world. But do researchers always know what is really living in their culture dishes? Under the microscope, different cell lines are almost impossible to distinguish from each other. When these important research objects stop growing without apparent reason – is it because of the manipulations by the scientists or because of an invisible viral or bacterial infection?

July 30, 2009—A study published online ahead of press in the Gerontology Society of America's Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences reports that the condition of frailty in older adults is associated with a critical mass of abnormal physiological systems, over and above the status of each individual system, and that the relationship is nonlinear. This research is the first evidence that frailty is related to the number of abnormal physiological systems, rather than a specific system abnormality, a chronic disease, or chronological age.

Everyone knows that vitamins "from A to zinc" are important for good health. Now, a new research study in the August 2009 print issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (http://www.jleukbio.org) suggests that zinc may be pointing the way to new therapeutic targets for fighting infections. Specifically, scientists from Florida found that zinc not only supports healthy immune function, but increases activation of the cells (T cells) responsible for destroying viruses and bacteria.

Two researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom have shown for the first time that the law of brevity in human language, according to which the most frequently-used words tend to be the shortest, also extends to other animal species. The scientists have shown that dolphins are more likely to make simpler movements at the water surface.

A UK hospital that combined its bereavement and donation services saw a forty-fold increase in tissue donations, such as corneas, in just five years, according to research in the August issue of Anaesthesia.

"We decided to address the problem of low organ and tissue donation rates by amalgamating the two services and introducing a trigger to automatically refer all potential organ donors to the regional transplant donor co-ordinators" explains Bereavement and Donor Co-ordinator Fiona Murphy from the Royal Bolton Hospital, UK.

NEWPORT, Ore. – Scientists are comparing annual growth rings of the Pacific Northwest's largest bivalve and its most iconic tree for clues to how living organisms may have responded to changes in climate.

Analyzed by themselves, the rings from a single tree or mollusk may sometimes reflect conditions that are either favorable or unfavorable for growth. When scientists look at numerous individuals of the same species, however, the consistency of the ring patterns allows them to build a model and compare that to known climatic measurements.

This study consisted of 10 patients (three male and seven female) with hepatic angiomyolipoma, with a mean age of 55.1 years (age range, 19-78 years). Of these patients, dynamic contrast CT showed hepatic angiomyolipoma as a hypervascular mass with intratumoral fatty density, absence of a capsule, and prominent central vessels in six sporadic cases, and multiple, small hepatic angiomyolipomas, with or without a fat component in four cases with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) and multiple hepatic angiomyolipomas were found in one patient with TSC.

UCSF researchers have identified a new potential drug target for the herpes virus that causes Kaposi's sarcoma, re-opening the possibility of using the class of drugs called protease inhibitors against the full herpes family of viruses, which for 20 years has been deemed too difficult to attain.

Older adults who have less strength, poor physical function and low muscle density are at higher risk of being hospitalized compared to adults with more strength and better function. That's the finding of a new study in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

The study also found that muscle density, a measure of how much fat compared to lean tissue there is in the muscle, is a more accurate gauge of a person's risk of hospitalization than muscle mass or size. The relative risk for hospitizations was 50% higher for those with poor walking or less dense muscle mass

Osteoarthritis (OA), the most common joint disorder throughout the world and a leading cause of disability, is characterized by pain, impaired joint mobility, reduction of muscular strength and loss of joint function. Unlike most other common diseases, little is known about its origins, and factors predicting a severe disease course have not been identified. A new study, the first to establish a laboratory marker for the risk of severe OA, found that vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM-1), was a strong predictor of hip and knee joint replacement due to severe OA.

DALLAS – July 30, 2009 – The typical dose of a medication considered pivotal in treating tuberculosis effectively is much too low to account for modern-day physiques, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers said.

The finding, reported online and in the August edition of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, is particularly important for those living in societies plagued by obesity, said Dr. Tawanda Gumbo, associate professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and the study's lead author.