Body

An international research team has shown how changes in a flu virus that has plagued Chinese poultry farms for decades helped create the novel avian H7N9 influenza A virus that has sickened more than 375 people since 2013.

Three years after a small number of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) were treated with high-dose immunosuppressive therapy (HDIT) and then transplanted with their own hematopoietic stem cells, most of the patients sustained remission of active relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) and had improvements in neurological function, according to a study in JAMA Neurology, doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2014.3780.

he body has evolved ways to get rid of faulty stem cells and a new study shows that one of these ways is a "program" that makes stem cells damaged by radiation differentiate into other cells that can no longer survive forever. Radiation makes a stem cell lose its "stemness." That makes sense: you don't want damaged stem cells sticking around to crank out damaged cells.

While people who eat a lot of red meat are known to be at higher risk for certain cancers, other carnivores are not, prompting researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine to investigate the possible tumor-forming role of a sugar called Neu5Gc, which is naturally found in most mammals but not in humans.

Already known to cut proteins, the enzyme SPPL3 turns out to have additional talents: it works without cutting proteins to activate T cells, the immune system's foot soldiers. Because its structure is similar to that of presenilin enzymes, which have been implicated in Alzheimer's disease, the researchers believe their findings could shed more light on presenilin functions, in addition to providing new insight into how the immune system is controlled.

In 1982, the gene TRK was shown to cause a small percentage of colon cancers but by 2013 and 2014, sequencing of tumor samples found fusions of the TRK family of genes in at least 11 tumor types, including lung, breast, melanoma and more.

A recent article in the journal Cancer Discovery describes clinical trials at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and elsewhere that match drugs to this long-overlooked oncogene, offering targeted treatment options for cancers that harbor these gene abnormalities. See ClinicalTrials.gov #NCT02122913.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) and metabolic syndrome are major public health problems in the USA and worldwide. A new paper finds that Yoga, a popular mind-body practice, has value in improving cardio-metabolic health.

Recovery of blinking function is a critical but easily overlooked outcome after facial transplantation and in a new study surgeon Eduardo DeJesus Rodriguez, MD, DDS, and colleagues highlight the need for careful surgical planning and technique to achieve optimal voluntary and reflex blinking--essential to protect long-term visual outcomes--in facial transplant recipients.

Binge drinking in young, healthy adults significantly disrupts the immune system, according to a new epidemiology paper.

Estradiol, a type of estrogen, enhances the levels and activity in mice of an enzyme that drives life-threatening allergic reactions, according to researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The results may help explain why women frequently experience more severe allergic reactions compared to men.

A three-year clinical trial suggests that a novel pre-operative drug therapy reduces antibodies in kidney patients with greater success than with traditional methods, with the potential to increase the patients' candidacy for kidney transplantation and decrease the likelihood of organ rejection.

The study, titled "Prospective Iterative Trail of Proteasome Inhibitor-Based Desensitization," appears in the January 2015 edition of the American Journal of Transplantation.

A new study of 618 Swedes with coronary heart disease and a control group of 3,000 healthy subjects assigned them to various categories based on the amount of alcohol they consumed (ethanol intake). Meanwhile, they were tested in order to identify a particular genotype (CETP TaqIB) that previous studies had found to play a role in the health benefits of alcohol consumption.

The results, which have been published in Alcohol, confirm the findings of the earlier studies. Moderate consumption of alcohol helps protect people with the genotype against coronary heart disease.

Recently, many turned back the hands of time as part of the twice-annual ritual of daylight savings time. That means remembering to change the alarm clock next to the bed, which will mean an extra hour of sleep before getting up in the morning.

But for some diabetics who use insulin pumps, Saleh Aldasouqi, associate professor of medicine at Michigan State University, suggests that remembering to change the time on this device should be the priority.

Cancer is an unwanted experiment in progress. As the disease advances, tumor cells accumulate mutations, eventually arriving at ones that give them the insidious power to grow uncontrollably and spread. Distinguishing drivers of cancer from benign mutations open opportunities for developing targeted cancer therapies.

Consuming caffeinated or sugary drinks can affect the body's metabolism, causing changes in heart and respiratory rate and weight gain. The results of a new study exploring whether individuals respond differently to caffeinated drinks that do or do not contain sugar and to sugar alone are published in Journal of Caffeine Research: The International Multidisciplinary Journal of Caffeine Science.