Body

Medicare reimburses physicians three to five times more for common procedural care than for cognitive care (the main professional activities of primary care physicians), and these financial pressures may be a contributing factor to the U.S. health care system's emphasis on procedural care, according to a study by Christine A. Sinsky, M.D., of the Medical Associates Clinic P.C., Dubuque, I.A., and David C. Dugdale, M.D., of the University of Washington, Seattle.

Both basic scientists and clinicians have an interest in how the cells of our body move. Cells must be mobile in order for organisms to grow, to heal, to transmit information internally, to mount immune responses and to conduct a host of other activities necessary for survival. But if cell mobility is unregulated, tumors can grow and spread throughout the body.

Researchers have probed deep into the cell’s genome, beyond the basic genetic code, to begin learning the “grammar” that helps determine whether or not a gene gets switched on to make the protein it encodes.

Climate change is already affecting the spread of infectious diseases--and human health and biodiversity worldwide--according to disease ecologists reporting research results in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Modeling disease outcomes from host and parasite responses to climate variables, they say, could help public health officials and environmental managers address the challenges posed by the changing landscape of infectious disease.

A team including Dartmouth researchers has uncovered a protein that plays a vital role in how plant roots use water and nutrients, a key step in improving the production and quality of crops and biofuels.

The findings appear this week in the journal PNAS. The team included researchers from Dartmouth, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Lausanne.

URBANA, Ill. – A successful program that increased the number of fruits and vegetables eaten and decreased sugar-sweetened beverage consumption by 50 percent among Latino children had two secret weapons, according to a University of Illinois researcher.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a unique new twist to the story of graphene, sheets of pure carbon just one atom thick, and in the process appear to have solved a mystery that has held back device development.

Studying lampreys allows biologists to envision the evolutionary past, because they represent an early offshoot of the evolutionary tree, before sharks and fish.

Despite their inconspicuous appearance, lampreys have a sophisticated immune system with three types of white blood cell that resemble our B and T cells, researchers have discovered.

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Outbreaks such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS) have afflicted people around the world, yet many people think these trends are on the decline.

Quite the opposite is true.

A new study led by a University of Colorado Cancer Center member recently published in the journal Quality of Life Research reveals that in young, female cancer survivors, quality of life is significantly impaired long after treatment. The study compared 59 cancer survivors to 66 healthy controls and found that, as expected, cancer survivors showed higher stress and anxiety than the general population. Of note, survivors reported particular stress around the issues of sexual problems, physical pain and fatigue.

For the majority of cancer patients, it's not the primary tumor that is deadly, but the spread or "metastasis" of cancer cells from the primary tumor to secondary locations throughout the body that is the problem. That's why a major focus of contemporary cancer research is how to stop or fight metastasis.

SAN ANTONIO -- Adding to the picture of what prompts breast cancers to form, researchers from the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio today announced that "distant estrogen response elements" (DEREs) can act independently of oncogenes to spur tumor development.

Radiography is widely used in diagnosing ankle injuries, with 85%–95% in pediatric injuries, although only 12% of these show fractures.

"Radiography is unnecessary for most children's ankle injuries, and these high rates of radiography needlessly expose children to radiation and are a questionable use of resources," writes Dr. Kathy Boutis, a pediatric emergency department physician at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Toronto, with coauthors.

Australian researchers have identified a molecule called interleukin-11 as a potential new target for anti-cancer therapies.

Until now, the importance of interleukin-11 in cancer development has been underestimated, but researchers have recently identified this molecule as a 'dark horse' for the development of cancer. Their discovery suggests blocking interleukin-11 signalling could ultimately provide an exciting new approach to the treatment of bowel and stomach cancer, which are two of the most common cancers worldwide.

Boston, Mass., August 12, 2013 – In a new paper in Cancer Cell, a team led by Judy Lieberman, PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital's Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine reports "triple-negative" breast cancers may be vulnerable to drugs that attack the proteasome. This cellular structure acts as the cell's waste disposal, breaking down damaged or unneeded proteins.