Body

Bethesda, MD (Oct. 22, 2013) -- Coffee consumption reduces risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer, by about 40 percent, according to an up-to-date meta-analysis published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Further, some data indicate that three cups of coffee per day reduce liver cancer risk by more than 50 percent.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) causes progressive paralysis by destroying nerve cells and the spinal cord. It interrupts vision, balance and even thinking.

On a suggestion from a colleague, Jeri-Anne Lyons decided to test how the disease responded to a radical therapy – exposure to a certain wavelength of light called near-infrared (NIR).

"Never in a million years did I think it would help," says Lyons, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), who studies the role of the immune response in MS.

BOSTON — A functional biomarker that can predict whether BRAF-mutant melanomas respond to drugs targeting BRAF could help guide the treatment of patients with these cancers, according to results presented here at the AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, held Oct. 19 – 23.

BOSTON — A new diagnostic platform to detect BRAF mutations in melanoma and other cancer types is faster and more accurate compared with the standard method currently used in clinics, and this could help accelerate diagnosis and treatment, according to results presented here at the AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, held Oct. 19-23.

BOSTON — An investigational new PARP inhibitor, BMN 673, is showing early responses in patients with heavily pretreated, advanced, BRCA-related cancers of the breast and ovary, according to phase I clinical trial results presented here at the AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, held Oct. 19-23.

Hercules, CA – October 22, 2013 – More accurate and precise assessment of copy number variation (CNV), the number of copies of a particular gene that are present in a genome, may lead to improved diagnosis and therapy for cancer and other diseases including autoimmune disorders.

Intriguingly, the new fossil shows that baby Parasaurolophus had a low bump on top of its head, which only later morphed into the curved tube of adults. "Our baby Parasaurolophus is barely one-quarter of adult size, but it had already started growing its crest," stated lead project scientist Andrew Farke, who is Augustyn Family Curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology. "This is surprising, because related dinosaurs didn't sprout their ornamentation until they were at least half-grown.

San Francisco, CA, October 22, 2013 – A study performed at Children's Hospital Los Angeles found no evidence that stem cell therapy improves vision for children with optic nerve hypoplasia (ONH). Their results are reported in the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus (AAPOS).

New research shows that in sub-Saharan Africa the virus responsible for foot and mouth disease (FMD) moves over relatively short distances and the African buffalo are important natural reservoirs for the infection. The study, published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, sheds light on how the type of FMD virus called SAT 2 emerged in sub-Saharan Africa and identifies patterns of spread in countries where SAT 2 is endemic.

San Francisco, CA, October 22, 2013 – A new study published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus (AAPOS) suggests that the biologic agent adalimumab may be a viable treatment option for patients with steroid-resistant refractory pediatric uveitis. In a study of fifteen children with the disease 85.7% showed initial improvement of anterior/posterior chamber inflammatory activity after almost three months of treatment.

Boston, MA – A new report by researchers from Harvard University and others in a working group convened by the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center (MRCT) at Harvard proposes recommendations for addressing a problem that has vexed drug regulators: how to expand public access to data from clinical trials while protecting patients' privacy and weighing pharmaceutical companies' business interests.

New results from a prospective study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology show that patients with a body mass index (BMI) in the obese range live on average two to three months less after a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, compared with healthy weight patients, even after adjusting for factors that are known to predict survival for patients with this disease, such as age and disease stage. This association was statistically strongest for people who were overweight two decades before their diagnosis.

Bottle feeding appears to increase the risk infants will develop hypertrophic pyloric stenosis (HPS), a form of stomach obstruction, and that risk seems to be magnified when mothers are older and have had more than one child, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication.

A survey finds that most patients are not being told about the possibility of overdiagnosis and overtreatment as a result of cancer screenings, according to report in a research letter by Odette Wegwarth, Ph.D., and Gerd Gigerenzer, Ph.D., of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

STANFORD, Calif. — In a feat of modern-day alchemy with huge potential for regenerative medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have developed a fast, efficient way to turn cells extracted from routine liposuction into liver cells.

The advance is described in a study to be published Oct. 21 in Cell Transplantation.