Body

ST. PAUL, Minn. – A new study shows that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as the pain relievers ibuprofen and naproxen do not prevent Alzheimer's disease, but they may instead delay its onset. The study suggests a need for re-interpretation of earlier findings that suggested NSAIDs can prevent the disease. The research is published in the April 22, 2009, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

INDIANAPOLIS – Solving the age-old chicken and the egg dilemma, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis researchers report that genetic predisposition to impulsivity is a trait predictive of alcoholism. The study appears on the July print issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, available online on April 22.

University of British Columbia researchers have discovered a "molecular key" that could help increase the success of blood stem cell transplants, a procedure currently used to treat diseases such as leukemia, Hodgkin's lymphoma and aplastic anemia.

PASADENA, Calif.--Some 25 years after the AIDS epidemic spawned a worldwide search for an effective vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), progress in the field seems to have effectively become stalled. The reason? According to new findings from a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), it's at least partly due to the fact that our body's natural HIV antibodies simply don't have a long enough reach to effectively neutralize the viruses they are meant to target.

Doctors have no specific drugs to treat dengue fever, a viral illness spread by mosquitoes that sickens 50 million to 100 million people worldwide each year. Instead, the only treatments they can recommend for this painful and sometimes fatal illness (20,000 deaths globally each year) are fluids, rest and non-aspirin pain and fever reducers.

DURHAM, N.C. – By painstakingly silencing genes one at a time, scientists at Duke University Medical Center have identified dozens of proteins the dengue fever virus depends upon to grow and spread among mosquitoes and humans.

The research, appearing in the April 23 issue of the journal Nature, opens the door to new ways to potentially prevent or treat the disease, which infects millions of people around the globe every year.

Several bacterial pathogens use toxins to manipulate human host cells, ultimately disturbing cellular signal transduction. Until now, however, scientists have been able to track down only a few of the proteins that interact with bacterial toxins in infected human cells.

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, April 22, 2009—Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have discovered a potential chink in the armor of fibers that make the cell walls of certain inedible plant materials so tough. The insight ultimately could lead to a cost-effective and energy-efficient strategy for turning biomass into alternative fuels.

New Orleans, LA – Liwei Chen, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health, is the lead author of a research paper showing that weight gain and obesity are more linked to an increase in liquid calories, particularly sugar-sweetened beverages, than calories from solid food. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document the relative effects of calories from liquids compared with those of calories from solid food on weight loss in adults over an extended period.

Having both lungs replaced instead of just one is the single most important feature determining who lives longest after having a lung transplant, more than doubling an organ recipient's chances of extending their life by over a decade, a study by a team of transplant surgeons at Johns Hopkins shows.

Jerusalem, April 22, 2009 – If it were not for the Holocaust, the number of Jews in the world would likely today be at least 26 million, and perhaps even as much as 32 million, says Prof. Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

DellaPergola, a world renowned figure in Jewish demography, is Shlomo Argov Professor of Israel-Diaspora Relations and director of the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University.

(Boston) -- Streamlining the construction of synthetic gene networks has led a team of Boston University researchers to develop a technique that couples libraries of diversified components with computer modeling to guide predictable gene network construction without the back and forth tweaking.

By applying engineering principles to biological systems where a set of components can evolve into networks that display desired behaviors – known as synthetic biology -- , has led to new opportunities for biofabrication, drug manufacturing -- even potential biofuels.

Animals that seem identical may belong to completely different species. This is the conclusion of researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who have used DNA analyses to discover that one of our most common segmented worms is actually two types of worm. The result is one of many suggesting that the variety of species on the earth could be considerably larger than we thought."We could be talking about a large number of species that have existed undiscovered because they resemble other known species," says Professor Christer Erséus.

Denver, Colo. – Many studies determine hormone levels in the blood as a marker of breast cancer risk. But it hasn't been known whether these blood tests reflect what is happening in the breast tissue, where certain hormones fuel cancer. Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center's (GUMC) Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center found that measuring the levels of four hormones in blood known to be linked to breast cancer doesn't necessarily reflect the levels of these hormones in the breast tissue itself.

Recent studies have shown that the mitochondrial peptide Humanin (HN) protects against neuronal cell death such as happens in Alzheimer's disease. Now, in a study presented April 22 at Experimental Biology 2009 in New Orleans, Dr. Nir Barzilai reports that a small infusion of HN is the most potent regulator of insulin metabolism that his research team has ever seen, significantly improving overall insulin sensitivity and sharply decreasing the glucose levels of diabetic rats.