Body

(SAN ANTONIO, Texas) -- Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM), a procedure that removes the unaffected breast in patients with cancer in one breast, provides only a modest increase in life expectancy, according to a new study by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, the study shows that the surgery may actually reduce the quality-adjusted life expectancy – a measure of life expectancy that takes into account quality of life – among women whose breast cancer is not hereditary.

SAN ANTONIO — Everolimus in combination with exemestane has shown promise for the treatment of breast cancer.

"For postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor (HR)-positive metastatic breast cancer, the addition of everolimus to exemestane markedly improves the duration of disease control," said Gabriel N. Hortobagyi, M.D., FACP, professor of medicine, chair of the department of breast medical oncology and director of the Multidisciplinary Breast Cancer Research Program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

BOZEMAN, Mont., Dec. 7, 2011 – LigoCyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced today that its experimental vaccine provided significant protection against norovirus infection and related gastrointestinal illness collectively known as acute gastroenteritis (AGE). Norovirus infection, sometimes referred to as "the stomach flu" is one of the most common causes of severe nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps and diarrhea afflicting 21 million Americans annually and is an important contributor to gastrointestinal disease worldwide.

FINDINGS: A long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) prevents programmed cell death during one of the final stages of red blood cell differentiation, according to Whitehead Institute researchers. This is the first time a lncRNA has been found to play a role in red blood cell development and the first time a lncRNA has been shown to affect programmed cell death.

You're more likely to respond to a yawn with another yawn when it comes from family member or a friend than from a stranger, says a study published Dec. 7 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Ovarian cancer is a major health concern for women and the identification of sensitive biomarkers for early detection and/or monitoring of disease recurrence is of high clinical relevance.

New work published in the Dec. 7 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE reports promising advances toward the development of blood-based DNA markers for ovarian cancer.

Being good at estimating time can be a useful skill on its own, but it may also indicate higher mathematical intelligence as well, according to a new study published in the Dec. 7 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE.

A test of 202 students, evenly divided between males and females, revealed that those subjects who were better at estimating the durations of a series of short tones were also more likely to correctly answer various mathematical questions relative to their more poorly estimating counterparts.

GPS tracking has shown its utility for wildlife studies, and now, development of light-weight GPS tags will allow researchers access to information about a broader range of small- to medium-sized animals than was previously available, according to a study to be published in the Dec. 7 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE.

Athletes go to great lengths to protect their muscles and recover from exercise-induced muscle damage, but there has been little work to determine what methods are most effective.

Now, a study published in the Dec. 7 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE reports that runners benefit more from whole-body cryotherapy, in which the study participants was exposed to temperatures as cold as -166°F (-110°C), than from exposure to far-infrared radiation or no treatment.

BOSTON, Mass. -- Fifty years after the pioneering discovery that a protein's three-dimensional structure is determined solely by the sequence of its amino acids, an international team of researchers has taken a major step toward fulfilling the tantalizing promise: predicting the structure of a protein from its DNA alone.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. - For the first time, scientists have altered natural bioelectrical communication among cells to directly specify the type of new organ to be created at a particular location within a vertebrate organism. Using genetic manipulation of membrane voltage in Xenopus (frog) embryos, biologists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences were able to cause tadpoles to grow eyes outside of the head area.

SAN ANTONIO — A recently presented study revealed that the bisphosphonate clodronate had a low incidence of adverse events and toxicity among patients with breast cancer and may modestly reduce the incidence of distant metastases in postmenopausal women.

SAN ANTONIO — Results from a German study demonstrated no improvement in disease-free survival among patients with breast cancer who were treated with dose-dense chemotherapy and the bisphosphonate ibandronate.

Volker Möbus, Ph.D., head of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Klinikum Frankfurt Höchst GmbH in Frankfurt, presented the results from the German Adjuvant Intergroup Node Positive (GAIN) Study, at the 2011 CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 6-10, 2011.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – A majority of Americans rate their current financial situation as poor or fair, and nearly half of Americans say they have encountered financial problems in the past year, according to the Pew Research Center. A University of Missouri researcher studied how parents' financial problems and resulting mental distress affect their relationships with their children.

Kirtland's warblers are an endangered species of lightweight little birds with bright yellow-bellies that summer in North America and winter in the Bahamas. But be it their winter or their summer home, a new study using data from NASA-built Landsat satellites shows that these warblers like to live in young forests and often forests that have been on fire.