Body

There are no approved treatments or preventatives against Ebola virus disease, but investigators have now designed peptides that mimic the virus' N-trimer, a highly conserved region of a protein that's used to gain entry inside cells.

The team showed that the peptides can be used as targets to help researchers develop drugs that might block Ebola virus from entering into cells.

In a study of middle-aged men who were overweight, researchers found that if a man's parents were older at the time of his birth, he was more likely to have lower blood pressure, more favorable cholesterol levels, and improved glucose metabolism. It's unknown whether the beneficial effect was due to having an older mother, an older father, or both.

Preeclampsia, a late-pregnancy disorder that is characterized by high blood pressure and organ damage, may be caused by problems related to meeting the oxygen demands of the growing fetus, experts say in a new Anaesthesia paper.

Philadelphia, November 13, 2014 - Associations between opioid-related overdoses and increased prescription of opioids for chronic noncancer pain are well known. But some suggest that overdose occurs predominately in individuals who obtain opioids from nonmedical sources. In a new study published in the November issue of the journal PAIN®, researchers in Denmark found an increased risk of death associated with chronic pain without opioid treatment, as well as an even higher risk among those prescribed opioids for long-term use and a somewhat lower risk associated with short-term use.

Scientists at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and their collaborators have developed a scoring scheme that predicts the ability of cancer cells to spread to other parts of the body, a process known as metastasis. This system, which is the first of its kind, opens up the possibility to explore new treatments that suppress metastasis in cancer patients. The findings were published in EMBO Molecular Medicine in September.

Swedish materials researchers at Linköping and Uppsala University and Chalmers University of Technology, in collaboration with researchers at the Swiss Synchrotron Light Source (SLS) in Switzerland investigated the superconductor YBa2Cu3O7-x (abbreviated YBCO) using advanced X-ray spectroscopy.

Their findings are published in the Nature journal Science Reports.

Membranes are thin walls that surround cells and protect their interior from the environment. These walls are composed of phospholipids, which, due to their amphiphilic nature, form bilayers with dis-tinct chemical properties: While the outward-facing headgroups are charged, the core of the bilayer is hydrophobic, which prevents charged molecules from passing through. The controlled flow of ions across the membrane, which is essential for the transmission of nerve impulses, is facilitated by ion channels, membrane proteins that provide gated pathways for ions.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is the most common neuromuscular disease of children (affecting 1 boy in 3500-5000 births). It is caused by a genetic defect in the DMD gene residing on the X chromosome, which results in the absence of the dystrophin protein essential to the proper functioning of muscles.

TORONTO, Nov. 13, 2014--Canadians with cystic fibrosis are living almost 20 years longer than they did two decades ago, according to a research paper published today.

The median survival age was 49.7 years in 2012, up from 31.9 years in 1990, Dr. Anne Stephenson, a respirologist and research at St. Michael's Hospital wrote in the European Respiratory Journal. Since the paper was written, Dr. Stephenson has updated the median survival age to include Cystic Fibrosis Canada data from 2013 and reported the median age of survival has in fact reached 50.9 years.

Scientists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles describe a new distinctive fly species of the highly diverse genus Megaselia. The study published in the Biodiversity Data Journal proposes an innovative method for streamlining Megaselia species descriptions to save hours of literature reviews and comparisons.

High blood pressure - already a massive hidden killer in Nigeria - is set to sharply rise as the country adopts western lifestyles, a study suggests.

Researchers who conducted the first up-to-date nationwide estimate of the condition in Nigeria warn that this will strain the country's already-stretched health system.

Increased public awareness, lifestyle changes, screening and early detection are vital to tackle the increasing threat of the disease, they say.

Hospitalized premature infants are exposed to unsafe levels of a chemical found in numerous medical products used to treat them, raising questions about whether critically ill newborns may be adversely affected by equipment designed to help save their lives.

In a new study, Use of Social Network Sites at Work: Does it Impair Performance?, Postdoctoral Fellow Cecilie Schou Andreassen and colleagues at the University of Bergen's (UiB) Department of Psychosocial Science looked at the consequences of the use of social media during working hours.

Every day, more than one billion people worldwide use social media. This habit has also invaded the workplace, as some research reports that four out of five employees use social media for private purpose during working hours.

Scientists used mathematical models to show that analysing genetic data, alongside a range of other risk factors, could substantially improve the ability to flag up women at highest risk of developing breast cancer.

Their study showed that prevention strategies could be improved by testing not only as currently for major cancer predisposition genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 - which identify a small percentage of women at very high risk - but also by factoring in data on multiple gene variants that individually have only a small effect on risk, but are more common in the population.

Researchers at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute of Bellvitge, the Catalan Institute of Oncology and the University Hospital of Bellvitge have participated in an international study published in the journal Cancer Cell that describes how exosomes secreted by tumor cells contain protein and microRNA molecules capable of transform neighboring cells into tumoral cells promoting tumor growth.

What are exosomes?