Body

Blood drives do better with incentives, says University of Toronto study.

Toronto – It's called the gift of life.

But more people will roll up their sleeves to donate blood if a gift card comes with it.

That's according to a new study from the University of Toronto. It shows a 15 to 20 percent rise in blood drive donations when incentives such as T-shirts, jackets, coupons or gift cards are thrown into the mix.

UC Davis Health System researchers are a step closer to launching human clinical trials involving the use of an innovative stem cell therapy to fight the virus that causes AIDS.

Sydney, Australia - A new bio-inspired approach to synthesising polymers will offer unprecedented control over the final polymer structure and yield advances in nanomedicine, researchers say.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Obese people who consume increased amounts of fructose, a type of sugar that is found in particular in soft drinks and fruit juices, are at risk for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NFALD) and more its more severe forms, fatty inflammation and scarring.

Now researchers at Duke University Medical Center believe they better understand what mechanism may account for fructose-related liver injury.

Diseases and injuries trigger warning signals in our cells. As a result, genes are expressed and proteins produced, modified or degraded to adapt to the external danger and to protect the organism. In order to be able to produce a particular protein, the corresponding DNA segment, the gene, needs to be expressed and translated. The DNA is localized in the cell nucleus, and exists as a long string that is coiled and bound by proteins. ARTD1 is one such protein, and therefore has the potential to regulate the expression level of genes through its interaction with DNA.

Collaborative research by groups headed by scientists Joan J. Guinovart and Marco Milán at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) has revealed conclusive evidence about the harmful effects of the accumulation of glucose chains (glycogen) in fly and mouse neurons. These two animal models will allow scientists to address the genes involved in this harmful process and to find pharmacological solutions that allow disintegration of the accumulations or limitation of glycogen production.

Irvine, Calif., May 2, 2012 — A simple test for heart disease risk can go a long way toward determining the long-term prognosis for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to UC Irvine researchers.

Dr. Hwa Mu Lee and Nathan Wong of the UCI Heart Disease Prevention Program found that individuals with moderate to severe COPD who had a low Framingham Heart Study 10-year risk assessment rate lived longer and healthier than COPD patients who scored high on the heart test.

The combination of two inhibitors of protein mTOR stops the growth of primary liver cancer and destroys tumour cells, according to a study by researchers of the Group of Metabolism and Cancer at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL). The study results are been published on the online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Cone beam CT is superior to mutidetector CT for detecting superior semicircular canal dehiscence or the so called third window (a small hole in the bony wall of the inner ear bone that can cause dizziness and hearing loss) and it uses half the radiation dose, a new study shows.

There is now overwhelming evidence that all babies should be offered screening for heart defects at birth, according to a major new study published online in The Lancet.

Heart defects are the most common type of birth defects in the UK. Although newborns often show no visible signs of the condition, if not treated promptly it can be fatal.

The research, led by a Queen Mary, University of London academic with a colleague from the University of Birmingham, shows that a non-invasive test called pulse oximetry offers an accurate and cost effective screening tool.

Researchers from the University of Bristol have created artificial muscles that can be transformed at the flick of a switch to mimic the remarkable camouflaging abilities of organisms such as squid and zebrafish.

They demonstrate two individual transforming mechanisms that they believe could be used in 'smart clothing' to trigger camouflaging tricks similar to those seen in nature.

A Mendelian randomization analysis conducted by Børge Nordestgaard of Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark and colleagues, using data from observational studies, supports a causal relationship between body mass index (BMI) and risk for ischemic heart disease (IHD). The findings, published in this week's PLoS Medicine, have important implications for public health policy because they show that the association between BMI (which is modifiable by lifestyle changes) and IHD is continuous.

A scheme supporting newly graduated, unemployed, and retired midwives to work in rural areas of Nigeria and provide essential obstetric care has helped to improve maternal, newborn, and child health and could potentially serve as a model for other low-income countries. This includes helping redistribute health workforce in low-income countries to reduce the health inequities between urban and rural areas.

Vision and hearing are so crucial to our daily lives that any impairments usually become obvious to an affected person. Although a number of known genetic mutations can lead to hereditary defects in these senses, little is known about our sense of touch, where defects might be so subtle that they go unnoticed.

In addition to the many risk factors associated with poor health, reducing body mass index (BMI) will have a considerable and independent impact if you want to reduce the risk of developing ischemic heart disease (IHD). This is the key finding from new research, published in PLoS Medicine, which evaluated the causal relationship between BMI and heart disease in 76,000 individuals.