Body

Countless mice, rats and rabbits die every year in the name of science – and the situation is getting worse. While German laboratories used some 2.41 million animals for scientific research in 2005, by 2009 this number had grown to 2.79 million. One third were destined for fundamental biology research, and the majority were used for researching diseases and developing medical compounds and devices. People demand medicines that are safe and therapies that are tolerable, but hardly anyone is happy to accept the need for animal testing.

A group of experts has prepared a report on vitamin D supplementation for menopausal women after it was revealed that Europeans have suffered an alarming decrease in their levels of this vitamin. In their opinion, the ideal would be to maintain blood levels above 30 ng/ml. Vitamin D is essential to the immune system and processes such as calcium absorption.

A new study supports previous findings that children delivered by cesarean section have an increased risk of developing asthma.The study from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) suggests that children delivered by cesarean section have an increased risk of asthma at the age of three. This was particularly seen among children without a hereditary tendency to asthma and allergies.

Researchers at Linköping University in Sweden are now launching a plan to effectively treat psoriasis.

An estimated 125 million people worldwide suffer from the difficult to treat disease, which manifests itself in scaly and often itchy patches on the skin. The reason is that cells divide without restraint as new blood vessels form in the deeper layers of the skin.

January 10, 2012 (PORTLAND, Ore.) — Older women who have lost more than two inches in height face an increased risk of breaking bones and dying, according to a new study published in the January issue of the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research and funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The study found that women 65 and older who lost more than two inches over 15 years were 50 percent more likely to both fracture a bone and to die in the subsequent five years, compared to women who lost less than two inches in height.

SAN DIEGO — Sorafenib was effective in patients with non-small cell lung cancer and a KRAS mutation, but survival rates were reportedly "unsatisfactory," according to data presented at the AACR-IASLC Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer: Biology, Therapy and Personalized Medicine, held Jan. 8-11, 2012.

Deerfield, Il -- Internet-based news and Twitter feeds were faster than traditional sources at detecting the onset and progression of the cholera epidemic in post-earthquake Haiti that has already killed more than 6500 people and sickened almost half a million, according to a new study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The underlying reason autism is often associated with gastrointestinal problems is an unknown, but new results to be published in the online journal mBio® on January 10 reveal that the guts of autistic children differ from other children in at least one important way: many children with autism harbor a type of bacteria in their guts that non-autistic children do not. The study was conducted by Brent Williams and colleagues at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Using a nicotine patch may help improve mild memory loss in older adults, according to a study published in the January 10, 2012, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

BRONX, NY – With the trend in healthcare moving toward an era of personalized medicine, there is much anticipation and hope that customized approaches to prevention and treatment based on a person's genetic make-up will result in better health outcomes. Some advances, most notably with prevention and treatment of breast and colon cancer, have been widely heralded, raising questions about the potential for personalized medicine for other common diseases, such as diabetes.

More people will survive sudden cardiac arrest when 9-1-1 dispatchers help bystanders assess victims and begin CPR immediately, according to a new American Heart Association scientific statement published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

In the 2010 resuscitation guidelines, the association advised 9-1-1 dispatchers to help bystanders assess anyone who may have had a cardiac arrest and then direct them to begin CPR.

CHICAGO – The anticoagulant dabigatran is associated with an increased risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack) or acute coronary syndrome in a broad spectrum of patients when tested against some other medicines, according to a study published Online First by the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

"Clinicians should consider the potential of these serious harmful cardiovascular effects with use of dabigatran," the study concludes.

CHICAGO – The use of statins in postmenopausal women is associated with increased diabetes risk, according to a study published Online First by the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

But researchers note statins address the cardiovascular consequences of diabetes and current American Diabetes Association guidelines for primary and secondary prevention should not change. Likewise, researchers write that guidelines for statin use in nondiabetic populations also should not change.

BOSTON, MA -- Honing chemotherapy delivery to cancer cells is a challenge for many researchers. Getting the cancer cells to take the chemotherapy "bait" is a greater challenge. But perhaps such a challenge has not been met with greater success than by the nanotechnology research team of Omid Farokhzad, MD, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) Department of Anesthesiology Perioperative and Pain Medicine and Research.

Monitoring Internet search traffic about influenza may prove to be a better way for hospital emergency rooms to prepare for a surge in sick patients compared to waiting for outdated government flu case reports. A report on the value of the Internet search tool for emergency departments, studied by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine over a 21-month period, is published in the January 9 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.