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Medical oncologists have a vital role to play in cancer care, particularly as treatments become ever more complex, a new position statement [1] from the European Society for Medical Oncology says.

Medical oncologists are specialist cancer physicians trained to provide treatment with drugs, spanning from the old one-fits-all chemotherapy to newer targeted agents or immunotherapies attacking the disease at its core.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A deadly fungus, and not climate change as is widely believed, is the primary culprit behind the rapid decline of frog populations in the Andes mountains, according to a new study published today in the journal Conservation Biology.

The dangerous parasite Schistosoma mansoni that causes snail fever in humans could become significantly less common in the future a new international study led by researchers from the University of Copenhagen predicts. The results are surprising because they contradict the general assumption that climate change leads to greater geographical spread of diseases. The explanation is that the parasite's host snails stand to lose suitable habitat due to climate change.

Patients named Brady could be at an increased risk of requiring a pacemaker compared with the general population, say researchers in a paper published in the Christmas edition of The BMJ this week.

"Nominative determinism" describes how certain people are more likely to choose a profession because of the influence of their surname with a study by Pelham et al concluding that people have a preference for things "that are connected to the self" and are disproportionately more likely to find careers whose "label is closely related to their name".

Laughter may not be the best medicine after all and can even be harmful to some patients, suggests the authors of a paper published in the Christmas edition of The BMJ.

Researchers from Birmingham and Oxford, in the UK, reviewed the reported benefits and harms of laughter. They used data published between 1946 and 2013. They concluded that laughter is a serious matter.

They identified benefits from laughter; harms from laughter; and conditions causing pathological laughter.

SAN ANTONIO ¬¬– More than one third of younger, early stage breast cancer patients undergo unnecessary imaging procedures – including position emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), nuclear medicine bone scans (NMBS) and tumor markers (TM) -- at the time of staging and diagnosis, according to research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A Phase I trial of endoxifen, an active metabolite of the cancer drug tamoxifen, indicates that the experimental drug is safe, with early evidence for anti-tumor activity, a Mayo Clinic study has found. The findings indicate that Z-endoxifen, co-developed by Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), may provide a new and better treatment for some women with estrogen positive breast cancer and, in particular, for those women who do not respond to tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors.

Benign bacteria can evolve and become virulent. That is the case of Escherichia coli (E. coli), which inhabits our gut. Now and then E. coli becomes virulent, inducing disease and even death. How a benign bacterium turns pathogenic has been a puzzle to scientists. In a pioneering study at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC; Portugal), a research team led by Isabel Gordo, reveals how this can happen. The team followed the evolution of non-pathogenic E.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – December 12, 2013 – Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation research cardiologist Dr. Michael Miedema is the lead author of a paper published by Circulation – Cardiovascular Imaging, a journal of the American Heart Association, that suggests a connection between an adult's height and the prevalence of coronary artery calcium (CAC), a direct marker of plaque in the arteries that feed the heart. Coronary artery calcium is a strong predictor of future heart attacks with a nearly 10 fold increase in the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) in patients with elevated CAC.

In a study of African-American men, researchers from the National Institutes of Health found that boys who grew up in two-parent homes were less likely to have high blood pressure as adults compared to those raised by a single parent. Reported in the Dec. 12, 2013, issue of the journal Hypertension, this is the first study of an African-American population to document an association between childhood family living arrangements and blood pressure.

Health care spending is a large – and ever increasing - portion of government budgets. Improving its efficiency has therefore become critically important. In the first-ever study to estimate health spending efficiency by gender across 27 industrialized nations, researchers discovered significant disparities within countries, with stronger gains in life expectancy for men than for women in nearly every nation.

NEW ORLEANS, LA—DECEMBER 12, 2013—They are coming to New Orleans to talk science with their fellow members of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) on Monday, December 16, but the ASCB winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine, Randy Schekman, PhD, and James Rothman, PhD, are speaking out on controversial issues they believe threaten American science and American society.

Human breast tumors transplanted into mice are excellent models of metastatic cancer and are providing insights into how to attack breast cancers that no longer respond to the drugs used to treat them, according to research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

CLEVELAND: New research from University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center Seidman Cancer Center and Case Comprehensive Cancer Center at Case Western Reserve University examined how changes in the genetic composition of breast cancer tumors after brief exposure to either biologic therapy or chemotherapy can predict future clinical outcomes in patients.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — A method of assessing the stability of large-scale power grids in real time could bring the world closer to its goal of producing and utilizing a smart grid. The algorithmic approach, developed by UC Santa Barbara professor Igor Mezic along with Yoshihiko Susuki from Kyoto University, can predict future massive instabilities in the power grid and make power outages a thing of the past.