Body

Athens, Ga. - Infectious disease researchers at the University of Georgia have identified a signaling protein critical for host defense against influenza infection. The findings, recently published in PLoS Pathogens, shed light on how a single component of the body's defense system promotes effective immunity against viral infections -- particularly respiratory viruses -- that affect mucosal sites.

By licking a wound it heals faster -- this is not simply popular belief, but scientifically proven. Our saliva consists of water and mucus, among other things, and the mucus plays an important role. It stimulates white blood cells to build a good defense against invaders, according to a group of researchers at Lund University in Sweden together with colleagues from Copenhagen and Odense in Denmark.

Ocean acidification may well be helping invasive species of algae, jellyfish, crabs and shellfish to move to new areas of the planet with damaging consequences, according to the findings of a new report.

Slimy, jelly-like creatures are far more tolerant of rising carbon dioxide levels than those with hard structures like corals, since exposed shells and skeletons simply dissolve away as CO2 levels rise.

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 6, 2015 - University of Utah chemists devised a new way to detect chemical damage to DNA that sometimes leads to genetic mutations responsible for many diseases, including various cancers and neurological disorders.

There's a typical "career" for some allergic people, and it starts very early on the skin: babies develop atopic dermatitis, food allergies may follow, then comes asthma and later on hay fever. A group of scientists led by Ingo Marenholz and Young-Ae Lee at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC), working with colleagues from several institutions, has now identified seven genetic risk loci for this course of disease. Two of these loci were previously unknown and mainly influence the connection between atopic dermatitis and asthma.

Philadelphia, PA, November 6, 2015 - A mitochondrial defect is responsible for a type of human hereditary deafness that worsens over time and can lead to profound hearing loss. Using a genetically-modified mice model with a mitochondrial dysfunction that results in a similar premature hearing loss, researchers showed that precise genetic reduction of an enzyme, AMP kinase (AMPK), can rescue the hearing loss. Their results are reported in the American Journal of Pathology.

Anaemia is often the result of an iron deficiency. In such cases the patients, who are typically female, will be prescribed iron supplements to be taken daily. In cases of severe deficiency, the dosage is increased to several tablets a day.

A new study recently published in the medical journal Blood reveals that it may be difficult for the body to absorb iron in quantities that are necessary and desirable when the supplement doses are administered in 24-hour intervals.

A team of scientists, led by researchers at University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, report that a genetic biomarker called loss of heterozygosity or LOH is able to predict which patients with premalignant mouth lesions are at highest risk of developing oral cancer.

Patients with meniscus lesions benefit from a combination of sham surgery and physiotherapy just as much as from a real surgical procedure-- this was the conclusion reached in the Finnish FIDELITY study published in 2013. Ever since then, there has been considerable discussion about the benefits of meniscus surgery compared with physiotherapy. After all, about 300,000 meniscus procedures were performed in Germany in 2013. The question is: Should the non-surgical approach be preferred over surgical treatment or are there still advantages offered by surgery.

New and better drugs to treat diseases such as advanced breast cancer will have little effect on improving patient outcomes if a country does not have good healthcare structures in place, Professor Richard Sullivan told the Advanced Breast Cancer Third International Consensus Conference today (Friday).

Athens, Ga. - First-time expectant mothers who do not plan to follow the recommended childhood immunization schedule differ in a number of ways from mothers who do, according to a recent study led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Georgia.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - For various reasons, wild pollinators are in decline across many parts of the world. To combat this, managed honey bees and bumblebees are frequently shipped in to provide valuable pollination services to crops. But does this practice pose any risk to the wild bees?

An entomologist at the University of California, Riverside has examined the evidence by analyzing the large body of research done in this area to come to the conclusion that managed bees are spreading diseases to wild bees.

Current antiretroviral therapy can keep HIV in check and prevent AIDS in the vast majority of treated patients. However, as it is unable to eliminate viral reservoirs and cure the infection, patients need to stay on the life-long treatment, and deal with the potential side effects of drugs and chronic inflammation due to low-level viral infection.

Make room, cholesterol. A new disease marker is entering the medical lexicon: suPAR, or soluble urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that suPAR, a circulating protein measured by a simple blood test, can reliably predict a person's chances of developing chronic kidney disease as much as five years before this common killer starts causing damage.

Why some patients respond well to immunotherapy and others do not is unclear, but two new studies now provide evidence that the gut microbiome can play a role. In one case, Marie Vetizou et al. studied the efficacy of the immunotherapy agent anti-CTLA4 9D9 Ab (ipilimumab) against established sarcomas in mice under specific pathogen-free (SPF) and germ-free (GF) conditions, finding that ipilimumab treated SPF but not GF mice. As well, the authors found that antibiotics compromised the antitumor effects of ipilimumab.