Body

he first and only over-the-counter product for weight loss approved by the Food and Drug Administration will be available Friday, June 15.

Orlistat, known by the brand name Alli, works by decreasing the amount of fat absorbed by the body. It is the OTC version of Xenical, a prescription weight loss pill. The good news: Orlistat has been tested and the prescription version has been used since 1999.

Sleep disorders are common, costly and treatable, but often remain undiagnosed and untreated. Unrecognized sleep disorders adversely affect personal health and may lead to chronic sleep loss, which, in turn, increases the risk of accidents and injuries.

A large study has found that black Medicare patients are less likely than white patients to receive blood vessel opening procedures such as angioplasty following a heart attack, whether they are admitted to hospitals that provide or do not provide these procedures, but also experience higher mortality rates at 1 year, according to a study in the June 13 issue of JAMA.

A University of Warwick physicist has uncovered how female cells are able to choose randomly between their two X chromosomes and why that choice is always lucky.

Human males have both a X and a Y chromosome but females have two X chromosomes. This means that in an early stage in the development of a woman’s fertilised egg the cells need to silence one of those two X chromosomes. This process is crucial to survival and problems with the process are related to serious genetic diseases.

A chemist at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) is looking for unusual structures in snake venom and plans to prove their medical effectiveness.

What in the 1950s led to the development of Captopril, a drug for the treatment of hypertension, is being continued in an interesting new chapter with the analysis of venom from South American pit vipers and tropical rattlesnakes.

The era in which standard serology tests divided populations into two basic blood groups, ABO and Rh, may soon be a thing of the past. Nearly a century after blood group analysis began, new technologies for genotyping of blood offer a far more accurate picture of blood groups, experts reported at the 12th Congress of the European Hematology Association.

Want to play the ultimate version of The X-Men's "Wolverine" this Halloween? You'll need self-healing skin after those claws come out. Researchers at the University of Illinois are here to help. They have invented the next generation of self-healing materials, which mimics human skin by healing itself time after time. The new materials rely upon embedded, three-dimensional microvascular networks that emulate biological circulatory systems.Now they just need to invent that Adamantium exo-skeleton. Copyright Marvel Comics Group

When the activity of individual genes it is longer required, there are two main mechanisms responsible for the “switching off”, mainly DNA methylation and the Polycomb protein complex.

Sometimes, these mechanisms lose their efficiency and some of the genes that should be “switched off” remain active. This, in turn, could lead to uncontrolled cellular proliferation, and tumorigenesis. These mechanisms, present both in lower organisms as well as in mammals, have always been thought to be separated and independent.

Slicing certain pills in half could slice a hefty amount off of America’s prescription drug costs. While only some types of pills can be split safely, the practice could be used by millions of Americans – including many of those who take popular cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The same genetic defect that causes a rare respiratory disease may also lead to some types of congenital heart disease, according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

Over the past few years we have been hearing about the anti-oxidising effect of the Mediterranean diet, however until now there have been no reliable scientific studies carried out to prove this. A team of IMIM-Hospital del Mar researchers consisting of Drs. Montserrat Fitó, Rafael de la Torre, Jaume Marrugat under the supervision of Dr. María Isabel Covas, have taken on the task.

A childhood sleep-related breathing disorder (SRBD) is known to have negative consequences on cognitive development, behavior, quality of life and utilization of health care resources. However, a research abstract that will be presented Monday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS), finds that breastfeeding may provide long-term protection against the incidence or severity of a childhood SRBD.

A gene implicated in the development of cancer cells can be switched on using drugs, report researchers from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. The finding could lead to a new class of targeted cancer therapies with potential to benefit many different cancer types.

More time at the beach? It's hard to tell, but research in the British Journal of Dermatology says there is a correlation between skin cancer and income.

Skin cancer rates are up, based on their studies of trends in Northern Ireland. Analzying official cancer statistics for nearly 23,000 patients over a 12-year period, they reported a 20 percent increase in patients and a 62 percent increase in skin cancer samples processed by pathology laboratories.

A human cell contains an enormous 1.8 metres of DNA partitioned into 46 chromosomes. These have to be copied and distributed equally into two daughter cells at every division.

Condensation, the shortening of chromosomes, allows the cell to handle such huge amounts of genetic material during cell division and helps preventing fatal defects in chromosome separation. Now researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) for the first time tracked chromosome condensation in mammalian cells over the entire course of cell division.