Body

DURHAM, N.C. -- Childhood obesity comes with an estimated price tag of $19,000 per child when comparing lifetime medical costs to those of a normal weight child, according to an analysis led by researchers at the Duke Global Health Institute and Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore. When multiplied by the number of obese 10-year-olds in the United States, lifetime medical costs for this age alone reach roughly $14 billion.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center found that integrating an educational intervention regarding upper respiratory infections (URI) into Early Head Start programs led to a significant decrease in pediatric emergency visits and adverse care practices among predominantly Latino families, who have been shown to be at high risk for limited health literacy. Findings are published in the journal Pediatrics.

Researchers at the University of Montreal and the INRS-Institut-Armand-Frappier have shown that men circumcised after the age of 35 were 45% less at risk of later developing prostate cancer than uncircumcised men. This is one of the findings that resulted from a study undertaken by Andrea Spence and her research directors Marie-Élise Parent and Marie-Claude Rousseau. The researchers interviewed 2114 men living on the Island of Montreal. Half of them had been diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2005 and 2009, while the others participated in the study as the control group.

Vienna, Austria: Men with prostate cancer that is small and confined to the prostate gland but that is at risk of growing and spreading, do better if they are treated with radiotherapy combined with androgen deprivation therapy, which lowers their levels of the male hormone, testosterone, according to new research.

The findings, which will be presented at the 33rd conference of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO33) in Vienna today (Monday), are expected to change clinical practice.

Vienna, Austria: Women who have radiotherapy for breast cancer have a small but significantly increased risk of subsequently developing a primary lung tumour, and now research has shown that this risk increases with the amount of radiation absorbed by the tissue.

SAN DIEGO, CA (April 6, 2014)—Researchers from Fox Chase Cancer Center have shown that NEDD9, a scaffolding protein responsible for regulating signaling pathways in the cell, promotes the growth and spread of epithelial ovarian cancer.

Your body's cells have two major interconnected energy sources: the lipid metabolism and the glucose metabolism. Most cancers feed themselves by metabolizing glucose, and thus can be seen in Positron Emission Topography (PET) scans that detect radiolabeled glucose. However, prostate cancers tend to use the lipid metabolism route and so cannot be imaged in this way effectively.

SAN DIEGO, CA (April 6, 2014)—Tumor cells are picky about where they live. In the wrong environment, they fail to reach their potential. But put those same cells on the right bit of real estate, and they grow like mad. Researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center found renal cancer cells planted in a supportive environment proliferate with the help of an enzyme usually only seen in the brain.

Some three billion base pairs make up the human genome—the floor plan of life. In 2003, the Human Genome Project announced the successful decryption of this code, a tour de force that continues to supply a stream of insights relevant to human health and disease.

BOSTON, MA (April 6, 2014) -- Researchers studying a rare, always fatal brain tumor in children have found several molecular alterations that drive the cancer, according to a new study from scientists at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and McGill University. The findings identify potential new targets for drug treatments.

The transfer, via a viral vector, of a normal copy of the gene deficient in patients, allowed to fully and very rapidly cure the heart disease in mice. These findings are published in Nature Medicine on 6 April, 2014.

The visibility of smoking in city streets has for the first time anywhere been mapped, in new research from the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand.

The research found that up to 116 smokers outside bars/cafés could be seen from any one location in the outdoor public areas of downtown Wellington (e.g. on a footpath). Of 2600 people observed in the outdoor areas of bars and cafés, 16% were smoking, with a higher proportion than this in evenings.

STANFORD, Calif. — A blood sample could one day be enough to diagnose many types of solid cancers, or to monitor the amount of cancer in a patient's body and responses to treatment. Previous versions of the approach, which relies on monitoring levels of tumor DNA circulating in the blood, have required cumbersome and time-consuming steps to customize it to each patient or have not been sufficiently sensitive.

Vienna, Austria: Patients with cancer of the throat and who are positive for the Human Papilloma virus (HPV+) have a good prognosis, but until now the effect of being HPV+ on the prognosis of tumours located elsewhere in the head and neck was unknown. Danish researchers have now shown that HPV status appears to have no prognostic effect on the outcome of primary radiotherapy in head and neck cancer outside the oropharynx (the part of the throat located behind the mouth, and which contains the soft palate and the base of the tongue), the ESTRO 33 congress will hear today (Sunday).

Vienna, Austria: For the first time, researchers have been able to demonstrate that the use of helium ions in radiation therapy could provide accurate treatment to tumours while helping to spare healthy organs. A treatment planning study to be presented at the ESTRO 33 congress today [Sunday] has been able to show that helium may have effects that are superior to radiotherapy using protons, themselves a considerable advance on conventional photon beam radiotherapy.