Body

COLUMBIA, Mo. (Oct. 29, 2015) - Rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm is one of the most dramatic medical emergencies a person can face. It usually strikes without warning, killing approximately 50 percent of those who experience it before they reach a hospital. Of those who do get to a health facility alive, only about 50 percent survive. When diagnosed through screening, aortic aneurysms are carefully monitored for signs of enlargement, and surgical intervention often is needed to prevent rupture of the vessel.

Gastric cancer, otherwise known as stomach cancer, does not respond well to existing treatments and it is currently the third leading cause of cancer death in the world (after lung and liver cancer). Researchers have discovered that certain drugs, currently used to treat breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers, could also be used to treat certain gastric cancers with a particular pattern of mutations (genomic molecular fingerprint).

Researchers have made another important step in the progress towards being able to block the development of multiple sclerosis (MS) and other autoimmune diseases.

Published today in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers at the University of Adelaide have identified a key protein involved in a 'super-inflammatory' immune response that drives the progression of MS and other autoimmune diseases.

A new pair of studies suggests that statins, drugs widely used to reduce cholesterol, may have a detrimental effect on the immune response to influenza vaccine and the vaccine's effectiveness at preventing serious illness in older adults. Published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, the findings, if confirmed by additional research, may have implications for flu vaccine recommendations, guidelines for statin use around the time of vaccination, and future vaccine clinical trials in seniors.

London, UK (October 29, 2015). Many transgender men who have the capacity to bear children are faced with barriers in the healthcare system as a result of a lack of training, argue Juno Obedin-Maliver and Harvey Makadon in a commentary published in SAGE journal Obstetric Medicine.

Following the success of the 2013 Lancet Oncology Commission on cancer care in Latin America [1], The Lancet Oncology today launches a second Commission on cancer in this region, highlighting the promising progress that has been made in just 2 years, but also the substantial barriers that remain to ensure all those that need cancer treatment and care receive optimal clinical management.

A pioneering drug developed to treat women with inherited cancers can also benefit men with advanced prostate cancer, a major new clinical trial concludes.

The trial is a milestone in cancer treatment as the first to show the benefits of 'precision medicine' in prostate cancer - with treatment matched to the particular genetic characteristics of a man's tumour.

MINNEAPOLIS - New research suggests that older women who complain of memory problems may be at higher risk for experiencing diagnosed memory and thinking impairment decades later. The study is published in the October 28, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

At the 2015 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings, researcher Michael Cherney of the University of Michigan, presented findings about weaning age (i.e. when a calf stops nursing) in fossil mammoths. By studying modern African elephants at the Toledo Zoo, Cherney was able to characterize the isotopic effects of weaning in a close relative of mammoths. Decreased nursing causes predictable changes in the isotopic composition of elephant tail hairs sampled over time.

(BOSTON) - A consortium of 48 scientists from 50 institutions in the United States - including Pamela Silver, Ph.D., a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University - are calling for a Unified Microbiome Initiative that would span national cross-institutional and cross-governmental agency support.

Much of the world frowns on the practice of polygamy. Most countries around the globe ban or restrict marriages to more than one spouse at a time. And polygyny--where one husband has more than one wife--is decried by the United Nations Human Rights Committee and women's rights organizations as discriminatory to women.

But a new study of polygyny in Tanzania finds that the practice of sharing a husband may, in some circumstances, lead to greater health and wealth for women and their children.

While the anthropogenic impact on global species diversity is clear, the role of ancient human populations in causing extinctions is more controversial. New data presented at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings in Dallas, Texas, implicates early humans in the extinction of large mammals, birds and lizards in Australia. More precise dating of these extinction events places them 10 thousand years after the first arrival of humans in Australia, suggesting human predation was the most likely cause.

In 2001, a paleontology field crew from Burpee Museum of Natural History (Rockford, IL) were prospecting for dinosaur fossils near Ekalaka, Montana, when they discovered bones of a half-grown T. rex weathering out from exposures of the Hell Creek Formation. "Jane", as she was later named, turned out to be the most complete adolescent T. rex ever discovered, filling a critical gap between juvenile and adult that had caused decades of scientific debate.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.-- Bacteria have many methods of adapting to resist antibiotics, but a new class of spiral polypeptides developed at the University of Illinois targets one thing no bacterium can live without: an outer membrane.

Microbes are essential to life on Earth. They're found in soil and water and inside the human gut. In fact, nearly every habitat and organism hosts a community of microbes, called a microbiome. What's more, microbes hold tremendous promise for innovations in medicine, energy, agriculture, and understanding climate change.