Body

Pioneering biophotonics technology developed at Northwestern University is the first screening method to detect the early presence of ovarian cancer in humans by examining cells easily brushed from the neighboring cervix or uterus, not the ovaries themselves.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a method for assessing the effect of tamoxifen, a common drug to prevent the relapse of breast cancer. The key lies in monitoring changes in the proportion of dense tissue, which appears white on a mammogram, during treatment. Women who show a pronounced reduction in breast density during tamoxifen treatment have a fifty per cent reduction in breast cancer mortality. This tool provides doctors with the possibility to assess whether a patient is responding to tamoxifen at an early phase of treatment.

Long-term use of highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART) does not appear to be associated with impaired heart function in children and adolescents in a study that sought to determine the cardiac effects of prolonged exposure to HAART on children infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), according to a report published Online First by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication.

Prior to contemporary antiretroviral therapies (ARTs), children infected with HIV were more likely to have heart failure.

Alternative therapies such as aerobic exercise, resistance or strength training, and isometric hand grip exercises may help reduce your blood pressure, according to the American Heart Association.

In a new scientific statement published in its journal Hypertension, the association said alternative approaches could help people with blood pressure levels higher than 120/80 mm Hg and those who can't tolerate or don't respond well to standard medications.

New results from a retrospective study conducted in Europe suggest that anti-HER2 treatments, like the widely used breast cancer agent trastuzumab (Herceptin), have anti-cancer effects in a small subset of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring specific HER2 protein mutations. Although genetic changes cause tumor cells to make too much of the HER2 protein in up to 20% of lung cancers, mutations in the HER2 gene occur in only 1-2% of lung cancers.

AURORA, Colo. (April 22, 2013) – As natural gas development expands nationwide, policymakers, communities and public health experts are increasingly turning to health impact assessments (HIA) as a means of predicting the effects of drilling on local communities, according to a new study from the Colorado School of Public Health.

The report, published this week in the American Journal of Public Health, highlights lessons learned when scientists from the school were hired to assess the possible health impacts of fracking in a small western Colorado town.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Understanding exactly how stem cells form into specific organs and tissues is the holy grail of regenerative medicine. Now a UC Santa Barbara researcher has added to that body of knowledge by determining how stem cells produce different types of "daughter" cells in Drosophila (fruit flies). The findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

April 22, 2013 — (BRONX, NY) — Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have developed a therapy for pancreatic cancer that uses Listeria bacteria to selectively infect tumor cells and deliver radioisotopes into them. The experimental treatment dramatically decreased the number of metastases (cancers that have spread to other parts of the body) in a mouse model of highly aggressive pancreatic cancer without harming healthy tissue.

As many as one in 50 people around the world is infected with some type of hepacivirus or pegivirus, including up to 200 million with hepatitis C virus (HCV), a leading cause of liver failure and liver cancer. There has been speculation that these agents arose in wildlife and jumped species to infect humans; however, little was known about their distribution in other species.

AUSTIN, Texas — Scavengers might not play as key a role in spreading anthrax through wildlife populations as previously assumed, according to findings from a small study conducted in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia.

Wildlife managers currently spend large amounts of money and time to control anthrax outbreaks by preventing scavengers from feeding on infected carcasses.

DENVER – The identification of potentially targetable kinase mutations has been an exciting advancement in lung cancer treatment. Although the mutations driving many lung carcinomas remain unknown, approximately 50 percent of lung adenocarcinoma cases harbor KRAS mutation, EGFR mutation, or ALK translocation, and an additional 5 percent or so have been shown to have mutations involving BRAF, PIK3CA, HER2, MET, MEK1, NRAS, and AKT. In the vast majority, these driver mutations are mutually exclusive.

DENVER – Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths and is tied as the third leading cause of death overall in industrialized countries. Within the United States, several groups identified by race, sex, and socioeconomic status have been linked to increased cancer mortality, suggesting a disparity because of these characteristics. The relationships are complicated by the fact that many of these characteristics may also be associated with areas of decreased access to care and local resources and not inherently based on implicit biases.

As climate studies saturate scientific journals and mainstream media, with opposing viewpoints quickly squaring off in reaction and debate, new findings can easily be lost in the noise.

But in the case of Northern Arizona University Regents' professor Darrell Kaufman and a study appearing in Nature Geoscience, obscurity is an unlikely fate.

Researchers from Dartmouth's Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences (iQBS) and the Center for Genomic Medicine have helped to discover three unique genetic variations that influence body size and obesity in men and women of African ancestry. This study, a meta-analysis that examined 3.2 million genetic variants in over 30,000 people with African heritage for links to body-mass index or BMI—by professors Jason Moore, Christopher Amos and Scott Williams—was the largest ever done on this population to date.

Scientists from The University of Manchester have identified 14 new genes which could have important consequences for future treatments of childhood arthritis. Scientists Dr Anne Hinks, Dr Joanna Cobb and Professor Wendy Thomson, from the University's Arthritis Research UK Epidemiology Unit, whose work is published in Nature Genetics yesterday (21 April), looked at DNA extracted from blood and saliva samples of 2,000 children with childhood arthritis and compared these to healthy people.