Body

April 8, 2009 – (BRONX, NY) – Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have developed a simple, accurate, and highly sensitive test to detect and quantify ricin, an extremely potent toxin with potential use as a bioterrorism agent. The report appears as a featured article in the April 12th issue of Analytical Chemistry.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Higher doses of radiation combined with chemotherapy improve survival in patients with stage III lung cancer, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Wild female chimpanzees copulate more frequently with males who share meat with them over long periods of time, according to a study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE April 8, 2009.

If you hate prune juice and chalky fiber supplements, just sit down and relax. Help is on the way. In a research report published online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), a team of researchers has discovered a new way to make it a lot easier to go to the bathroom, especially when all other methods fail. Specifically, they have found a group of nerve ending receptors which, when stimulated, causes the bowels to pass waste, and the specific receptor needed to activate bowel clearance.

If cancer cells lack a certain protein, it could be much easier for them to penetrate healthy body tissue, the first step towards forming metastases. Scientists at the Pharmacology Institute of the University of Heidelberg have discovered the previously unknown cell signal factor SCAI (suppressor of cancer cell invasion), which inhibits the movement and spread of tumor cells in laboratory tests.

The 9th Annual Spring Meeting of the European Society of Cardiology Council on Cardiovascular Nursing and Allied Professions (CCNAP), organised in cooperation with the Irish Nurses Cardiovascular Association (INCA), is being held at the Royal Dublin Society, Dublin, Ireland, on 24-25 April.

[PRESS RELEASE, 8 April 2009] Many diseases derive from problems with cellular respiration, the process through which cells extract energy from nutrients. Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have now discovered a new function for a protein in the mitochondrion – popularly called the cell's power station – that plays a key part in cell respiration.

A cancer scientist from Johns Hopkins has convinced an international group of colleagues to delay their race to find new cancer biomarkers and instead begin a 7,000-hour slog through a compendium of 50,000 scientific articles already published to assemble, decode and analyze the molecules that might herald the furtive presence of pancreatic cancer.

Reporting in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE April 8, Vincenzo Penteriani and Maria Delgado of the Estacion Biologica de Doñana, Spain, describe the evolution of white throat badges in association with dawn and dusk vocal signals in certain species of nocturnal bird, which maximise the potential for these species to communicate during hours when light is low.

Wild female chimpanzees copulate more frequently with males who share meat with them over long periods of time, according to a study in PLoS ONE.

Scientists at Schepens Eye Research Institute have found that the growth factor known as TGF-β is essential to the health of blood vessels in the retina and that blocking it can cause retinal dysfunction. These findings, published in the April 2 issue of PLoS ONE, may have an important impact on the prevention and treatment of diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration.

Regular exercise is safe for heart failure patients and may slightly lower their risk of death or hospitalization, according to results from the largest and most comprehensive clinical trial to examine the effects of exercise in chronic heart failure patients. Supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, the study also found that heart failure patients who add regular, moderate physical activity to standard medical therapy report a higher quality of life compared to similar patients who receive medical therapy only.

DURHAM, N.C. – Working out on a stationary bicycle or walking on a treadmill just 25 to 30 minutes most days of the week is enough to modestly lower risk of hospitalization or death for patients with heart failure, say researchers from Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI).

Patients with early bladder cancer who receive more intensive treatment within the first two years of diagnosis do not appear to have better survival than patients who receive less intensive treatment, according to a retrospective analysis published in the April 7 online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Multiple, anatomically distinct lung cancer tumors may frequently arise from a single cancer cell, according to a retrospective analysis of patient tumor samples published in the April 7 online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Some lung cancer patients have multiple anatomically distinct tumors at the time of diagnosis. Although such multiple tumors usually share a common appearance, it has been unclear whether they arise from a single tumor or are independent primary cancers.