Body

An analysis based on computerized simulation models suggests that the lifetime risk of cancer associated with radiation exposure from a computed tomography (CT scan) coronary angiography varies widely, with the risk greater for women and younger patients, according to a study in the July 18 issue of JAMA.

Rochester Institute of Technology and the County of Monroe, New York have created a research partnership to assess the performance of the County’s fleet of E85 flex-fuel vehicles. E85 is comprised of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline and is considered a major alternative energy option for American automobiles.

Abdominal fat, the spare tire that many of us carry, has long been implicated as a primary suspect in causing the metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that includes the most dangerous heart attack risk factors: prediabetes, diabetes, high blood pressure, and changes in cholesterol.

But with the help of powerful new imaging technologies, a team of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers at Yale University School of Medicine has found that insulin resistance in skeletal muscle leads to alterations in energy storage that set the stage for the metabolic syndrome.

FINDINGS: Researchers isolated bisdemethoxycurcumin, the active ingredient of curcuminoids – a natural substance found in turmeric root – that may help boost the immune system in clearing amyloid beta, a peptide that forms the plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease. Using blood samples from Alzheimer’s disease patients, researchers found that bisdemethoxycurcumin boosted immune cells called macrophages to clear amyloid beta. In addition, researchers identified the immune genes associated with this activity.

While no one has an authoritative answer, anthropologists have long theorized that early humans began walking on two legs as a way to reduce locomotor energy costs.

In the first study to fully examine this theory among humans and adult chimpanzees, published online July 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have found that human walking is around 75 percent less costly, in terms of energy and caloric expenditure, than quadrupedal and bipedal walking in chimpanzees.

Aerodynamic scaling rules that explain how flight varies according to weight and wing loading have been used to compare general speeds of a wide range of flyers, from the smallest insects to the largest aircraft. In a paper published this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Thomas Alerstam, Mikael Rosen, and colleagues from the University of Lund in Sweden analyze the flight speeds of 138 bird species and overturn the general assumption that maximum flight speed of a species is solely determined by such rules.

The ability to pump liquids at the cellular scale opens up exciting possibilities, such as precisely targeting medicines and regulating flow into and out of cells. But designing this molecular machinery has proven difficult.

Now chemists at the University of Illinois at Chicago have created a theoretical blueprint for assembling a nanoscale propeller with molecule-sized blades.

The work is featured in Research Highlights in the July 12 issue of Nature and was described in the June 28 cover story of Physical Review Letters.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere say they have mapped out an escape route that cancers use to evade the body’s immune system, allowing the disease to spread unchecked.

In a report published in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature Medicine, the Hopkins team, along with researchers from Florida and Nebraska, describe how myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), which normally keep the immune system in check and prevent it from attacking otherwise healthy tissue, can suppress the anti-tumor response to cancer.

A diagnosis of type I diabetes means a life sentence of medical follow-up. While treatments have become simpler and less restrictive in recent years, they are still a burden, especially for young patients. The latest study published in the journal Nature by Dr. Constantin Polychronakos, Director of the Pediatric Endocrinology Department at the MUHC, in collaboration with Dr. Hakon Hakonarson, Director of the Centre for Applied Genomics of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), provides hope that this situation will evolve in the long term toward a cure for this disease.

Pediatricians who talk to obese patients and their families about losing weight feel their conversation makes little difference in encouraging a lifestyle change, a small Saint Louis University study finds.

“Pediatricians feel as if their efforts are futile,” says Sarah Barlow, M.D., the lead author of the study who also is an associate professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University School of Medicine and pediatric obesity specialist at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center.

Patients not complying with their dermatologic treatment is a universal problem that doctors need to address, according to Steven Feldman, M.D., Ph.D., from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in an editorial published in the current issue of Archives of Dermatology. He said non-compliance can explain why some conditions may seem resistant to treatment.

The cancer known as cutaneous T-cell lymphoma became substantially more common in the United States between 1973 and 2002, according to a report in the July issue of Archives of Dermatology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The rates of the disease vary by race, sex and geographic area.

Cutaneous T-cell lymphoma occurs when certain cells of the lymph system (called T lymphocytes) become cancerous and affect the skin. The term covers several types of lymphoma, according to background information in the article. The nationwide rates of the disease were last documented in 1992.

There are hundreds of thousands of proteins for which amino acid sequence data are available, but whose structure and function remain unknown.

Now a research team, led by University of Illinois biochemistry professor John A. Gerlt, has devised a method to use a computational approach to accurately predict a protein’s function from its amino acid sequence. Their “in silico” (computer-aided) predictions were validated in the laboratory by means of enzyme assays and X-ray crystallography.

When a cell is seriously stressed, say by a heart attack, stroke or cancer, a protein called Bak just may set it up for suicide, researchers have found.

In a deadly double whammy, Bak helps chop the finger-like filament shape of the cell’s powerhouse, or mitochondrion, into vulnerable little spheres. Another protein Bax then pokes countless holes in those spheres, spilling their pro-death contents into the cell.

By bypassing a well-known gene implicated in almost one-third of all cancers and instead focusing on the protein activated by the gene, Dr. Christopher Counter and colleagues at the Duke University Medical Center have identified IL6 as a new target in the battle against Ras-induced cancers.