Body

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (March 10, 2009)—Interventional radiologists are fitting together the puzzle pieces of how to use stem cells to create new or more blood vessels to treat peripheral arterial disease (PAD) in those individuals with extensively narrowed or clogged arteries. That puzzle may be closer to being solved in light of recent successful techniques that use simple imaging to view and locate transplanted stem cells and to confirm that they remain alive in the body once injected, notes a study presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 34th Annual Scientific Meeting.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (March 10, 2009)—The use of common and readily available screening tests—like the ankle brachial index (ABI)—along with traditional risk scoring systems—such as the Framingham Risk Score—has the potential to prevent devastating heart attacks in thousands of individuals who are not originally thought to be at high risk (according to Framingham alone), say researchers at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 34th Annual Scientific Meeting.

An unlikely brew of seaweed and glow-in-the-dark biochemical agents may hold the key to the safe use of transplanted stem cells to treat patients with severe peripheral arterial disease (PAD), according to a team of veterinarians, basic scientists and interventional radiologists at Johns Hopkins.

In a preliminary "proof of concept" study in rabbits, Johns Hopkins scientists safely and successfully delivered therapeutic stem cells via intramuscular injections and then monitored the stem cells' viability once they reached their targets.

Arnhem, 10 March 2009 -- The standard Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test for prostate cancer cannot tell the difference between aggressive and slow-growing forms. At the Annual EAU Congress, which will be held from 17 to 21 March 2009 in Stockholm (SE), Dr. Arun Sreekumar - University of Michigan (US) - will report about a possible breakthrough biomarker that can supposedly discriminate between aggressive and non-aggressive prostate cancers: sarcosine.

A new study shows for the first time that a microRNA-based diagnostic test can objectively identify squamous lung cancer with 96% sensitivity, according to Harvey Pass, M.D. of the NYU Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center, one of the authors of the study published on-line ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

CHICAGO (March 10, 2009) – New research published in the March issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons suggests that lung transplantation should be used with caution in patients older than 60 years and that the procedure is associated with high rates of mortality after one year in patients 70 and older.

A large group of California physicians given financial incentives to improve the quality of medical care have begun to embrace an array of changes important to advancing quality, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.

Interest in personal health records as an electronic tool to manage health information is increasing dramatically. A group led by a UCSF researcher has identified cost, privacy concerns, design shortcomings and difficulties sharing information across different organizations as critical barriers hindering broad implementation of electronic personal health records.

The barriers are discussed in a paper appearing in the March-April 2009 issue of the journal "Health Affairs."

An international team of health researchers, writing in this week's PLoS Medicine, says that the number one research priority for reducing childhood deaths from diarrhoea is to find ways to improve the acceptability and effectiveness of oral rehydration solution (ORS).

But unfortunately, says the team, donor agencies have shown little interest in funding this type of research.

Researchers have found living together the known carrier species for the Chagas disease-causing parasite Triatoma dimidiata (also known as "kissing bugs") and a cryptic species that looks the same — but is genetically distinct from — the known carrier species. The two species haven't interbred for as many as 5 million years, according to a report published March 10 in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Animals have an astonishing ability to develop reliably, in spite of variable conditions during embryogenesis. New research, published in parallel this week in PLoS Biology and PLoS Computational Biology, addresses how living things can develop into precise, adult forms when there is so much variation present during their development stages. A team led by John Reinitz at Stony Brook University, and funded by the National Institutes of Health, shows how fruit fly embryos can "forget" initial incorrect versions of their body plan and develop into recognizable adult flies.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 10, 2009 – IOS Press is pleased to announce the publication of a landmark study in which both traditional and highly-innovative scientometric approaches are employed to measure scientific productivity and impact of the top 100 Alzheimer's disease (AD) investigators. The article appears in the March 2009 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

Incipient sex chromosomes have been found in New Zealand's eponymous export, the kiwifruit. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Genomics have mapped the kiwifruit genome and pin-pointed the sex-determining locus.

Most aphids host mutualistic bacteria, Buchnera aphidicola, which live inside specialized cells called bacteriocytes. Buchnera are vital to the aphids well being as they provide essential amino acids that are scarce in its diet. Now research published in the open access journal BMC Biology suggests that the aphids' ability to host Buchnera depends on genes they acquired from yet another species of bacteria via lateral gene transfer (LGT).

Despite India's economic and educational reform efforts in the last decade, the prevalence of child marriage remains high, fueling the risks of multiple unwanted pregnancies, pregnancy terminations and female sterilizations, according to a new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher.