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Basel, 24 July 2008. The European Committee for Human Medicinal Products (CHMP) has confirmed that the presence of an impurity called ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) in Roche's Viracept (nelfinavir mesylate) did not increase patients' risk of developing cancer.

The discovery of the EMS impurity in some batches of nelfinavir led to a global recall of this HIV medication in June 2007. Since then, the product has been made available again in the EU.

Isoforms from Novel Structure Proteins (NSP), a new family of genes discovered by researchers in the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine in Temple University's College of Science and Technology, could be involved in apoptosis or programmed cell death.

Chicago, 24 July 2008 –The editors of Neurotherapeutics are pleased and proud to announce their July issue, devoted to "Novel Therapeutics for Alzheimer's Disease." Neurotherapeutics (http://www.neurotherapeutics.org/) is the journal of the American Society of Experimental NeuroTherapeutics (ASENT) www.asent.org.

Age-dependent macular degeneration (AMD) is the commonest cause of blindness in the western industrialised nations. Hereditary changes in the regulation of the immune system influence the risk of contracting AMD. Opthalmologists at the University Clinic in Bonn, working in co-operation with researchers from Göttingen, Regensburg and Great Britain, have now, for the first time, demonstrated that in cases of senile blindness the patient´s immune resistance is hyperactive throughout his entire body.

Dr Szu-Yao (Zoe) Wang, who recently completed her PhD with UQ's School of Nursing, found that in Taiwan, where the culture dictates that children should care for their parents, aged-care facilities are becoming more popular.

"Family caregivers in Taiwan may experience criticism from a society which has a traditional cultural reticence about placing parents into a nursing home, as such action is considered contrary to filial piety," Dr Wang said.

PORTLAND, Ore. July 23, 2008. A fire is currently burning through a study area where projections were made about fire behavior about 2 years ago. Managers used data and analysis from the Gotchen Late-Successional Reserve (LSR) study in the planning, analysis, and implementation of treatments near where the Cold Springs fire is now active.

For the first time, children as young as 5 have been shown to understand issues regarding integration and separation. The research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), confirms that the ethnic composition of primary schools has a direct impact on children's attitudes towards those in other ethnic groups and on their ability to get on with their peers.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – A study out of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center demonstrates emergency room doctors are correctly identifying patients who are having a heart attack, even when laboratory tests haven't yet confirmed it.

The study used data from a registry called i*trACS, and analyzed patients with heart attack symptoms who were admitted to emergency departments (EDs) in eight participating U.S. centers.

The findings were released today in the Emergency Medicine Journal.

The School of Physics, Shandong University, has shown that the coercivity mechanism of HDDR Nd-Fe-B permanent magnetic alloy is greatly related to its microstructure defect at the grain boundary. The investigation can provide a clear understanding of coercivity mechanism, and hence will be reported in Science in China Series G-Physics, Mechanism and Astronomy.

DALLAS – July 24, 2008 – One of the reasons people on low-carbohydrate diets may lose weight is that they reduce their intake of fructose, a type of sugar that can be made into body fat quickly, according to a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Dr. Elizabeth Parks, associate professor of clinical nutrition and lead author of a study appearing in a current issue of the Journal of Nutrition, said her team's findings suggest that the right type of carbohydrates a person eats may be just as important in weight control as the number of calories a person eats.

Newly developed software will help to allay patients' fears about who has access to their confidential data. Research published today in the open access journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making describes a computer program capable of deleting details from medical records which may identify patients, while leaving important medical information intact.

Men who eat an average of half a serving of soy food a day have lower concentrations of sperm than men who do not eat soy foods, according to research published online in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal, Human Reproduction, today (Thursday 24 July). The association was particularly marked in men who were overweight or obese, the study found.

There is no justification for denying obese patients knee replacement surgery: They benefit almost as much as anyone else from the procedure, concludes a small study published ahead of print in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

Around 55,000 knee replacements are performed every year in England to relieve the pain and disability of knee osteoarthritis.

For patients receiving kidney transplants, treatment with cholesterol-lowering "statin" drugs may lead to longer survival, reports a study in the November 2008 Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN).

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have found that sorafenib (Nexavar) helps patients with advanced liver cancer live about 44 percent longer compared with patients who did not receive the anti-cancer drug. The findings, published in the July 23rd, 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is a significant advance in the management of liver cancer, which is the third cause of cancer death globally, often resulting in death within a year of diagnosis.