Body

Fizzy drinks, cakes, biscuits, crisps and desserts have all been identified as risk factors for bowel cancer, according to new research.

The study is the first of its kind to find a positive link between the disease and a diet high in foods that contain a lot of sugar and fat.

Researchers looked at risk factors including diet, levels of physical activity and smoking in a large Scottish study.

Physicists from the University of York have carried out new research into how the heating effect of an experimental cancer treatment works.

Magnetic hyperthermia is viewed as an attractive approach for the treatment of certain cancers as it has no known side effects compared to more conventional therapies such as chemotherapy. It is particularly suitable for the treatment of prostate cancer and brain tumours. However, until now there has been no clear theoretical understanding of how it actually works.

Studies of patients with immunodeficiencies involving single gene mutations can reveal a great deal about our immune systems, especially when actual symptoms do not accord with clinical expectations.

Australian scientists acknowledge such a gap between expectation and reality in a new study, which examines people with 'Autosomal Dominant Hyper IgE Syndrome'.

A team of scientists, led by researchers at The Wistar Institute, has determined that it might be possible to stimulate the immune system against multiple strains of influenza virus by sequentially vaccinating individuals with distinct influenza strains isolated over the last century.

Their results also suggest that world health experts might need to re-evaluate standard tests used for surveillance of novel influenza strains. Their findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, available online now.

The number of tick-borne illnesses reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on the rise. Lyme disease leads the pack, with some 35,000 cases reported annually. In the Northeast, the black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) that spread Lyme disease also infect people with other maladies, among them anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and – as a new paper in the journal Parasites and Vectors reports – Powassan encephalitis.

Experiments by biochemists at the University of California, Davis show for the first time that a law of physics, the ergodic theorem, can be demonstrated by a collection of individual protein molecules -- specifically, a protein that unwinds DNA. The work will be published online by the journal Nature on July 14.

Vitamin D influences many other physiological processes, including muscle function, cardiovascular homeostasis, nerve function, and immune response. Furthermore, accumulated evidence suggests that vitamin D also mediates the immune system response to infection. Infections are very common in patients from neurosurgical intensive care unit. A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No.

As a consequence of the Affordable Care Act, between 500,000 and 900,000 Americans may choose to stop working. That possibility is predicted in a new analysis of an analogous situation in reverse: the abrupt end of Tennessee's Medicaid expansion in 2005. That year, Tennessee dropped 170,000 of its citizens from Medicaid. It was the largest Medicaid disenrollment in the history of the program.

But patchiness can also have a downside: Phytoplankton, the photosynthetic microbes of the sea, form the base of the ocean food web. Clusters of cells can become easy prey to zooplankton predators that home in on clusters of phytoplankton. And close proximity to like cells can increase competition among the microorganisms for sparse nutrients.

Is space really the final frontier, or are the greatest mysteries closer to home? In cosmology, dark matter is said to account for the majority of mass in the universe, however its presence is inferred by indirect effects rather than detected through telescopes.

JUPITER, FL, July 14, 2013 – An international group of scientists has shown that a drug candidate designed by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) significantly increases exercise endurance in animal models.

These findings could lead to new approaches to helping people with conditions that acutely limit exercise tolerance, such as obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and congestive heart failure, as well as the decline of muscle capacity associated with aging.

A set of proteins involved in the body's natural defenses produces a large number of mutations in human DNA, according to a study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The findings suggest that these naturally produced mutations are just as powerful as known cancer-causing agents in producing tumors.

A type of genetic abnormality linked to cancer is more common in people with type 2 diabetes than the rest of the population, a new study has found.

People with type 2 diabetes are already known to have a higher risk of cancers, especially blood cancers like lymphoma and leukaemia. The new study, led by scientists at Imperial College London and CNRS in France, suggests that mutations called clonal mosaic events (CMEs) may partly explain why this is.

UPTON, NY-Building on earlier work exploring the complex choreography by which intricate cellular proteins interact with and copy DNA prior to cell division, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have captured a key step-molecular images showing how the enzyme that unwinds the DNA double helix gets drawn to and wrapped around its target.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered that a human antiviral enzyme causes DNA mutations that lead to several forms of cancer.

The discovery, reported in the July 14 issue of Nature Genetics, follows the team's earlier finding that the enzyme, called APOBEC3B, is responsible for more than half of breast cancer cases. The previous study was published in Nature in February.