Body

COLUMBUS, Ohio - When hospital patients need assistance breathing and are placed on a mechanical ventilator for days at a time, their lungs react to the pressure generated by the ventilator with an out-of-control immune response that can lead to excessive inflammation, new research suggests.

While learning that lungs perceive the ventilation as an infection, researchers also discovered potential drug targets that might reduce the resulting inflammation - a tiny piece of RNA and two proteins that have roles in the immune response.

Scientists are launching the first clinical trial to test whether drug regimens containing maraviroc, a medication currently approved to treat HIV infection, are also safe and tolerable when taken once daily by HIV-uninfected individuals at increased risk for acquiring HIV infection. The eventual goal is to see if the drug regimens can reduce the risk of infection.

Results of a randomised trial carried out by academics at Queen Mary, University of London and published today (Wednesday) in PLoS One [1] show that a four-component Polypill given to people aged 50 and over to reduce their risk of heart attack and stroke, the most common causes of death worldwide, achieved large reductions in blood cholesterol and blood pressure, the main causes of these two diseases.

Building on previous work with the botanical abscisic acida, researchers in the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) have discovered that abscisic acid has anti-inflammatory effects in the lungs as well as in the gut. The results will be published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

One of the challenges to HIV vaccine development has been the lack of an animal model that accurately reflects the human immune response to the virus and how the virus evolves to evade that response. In the July 18 issue of Science Translational Medicine, researchers from the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), MIT and Harvard report that a model created by transplanting elements of the human immune system into an immunodeficient mouse addresses these key issues and has the potential to reduce significantly the time and costs required to test candidate vaccines.

Trees, bushes and other greenery growing in the concrete-and-glass canyons of cities can reduce levels of two of the most worrisome air pollutants by eight times more than previously believed, a new study has found. A report on the research appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The widespread practice of allowing laboratory rats and mice to eat as much as they want may be affecting the outcome of experiments in which scientists use these "test-tubes-on-four-feet" to test new drugs and other substances for toxicity and other effects. That's the conclusion of a new analysis published in ACS' journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Scientists have discovered a way to make worker bees produce an enhanced version of royal jelly (RJ) – the super-nutritious substance that dictates whether larvae become workers or queens, and that is also renowned as a health supplement for people. Their study, which found that the super RJ that makes queen bee larvae grow 2-3 times larger than normal, appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Suppliers of the orange, vanilla and other flavor and fragrance ingredients used in hundreds of foods, beverages and personal care products are putting their faith in microbes as new sources for these substances. That migration away from the natural plant oils used for centuries to delight the taste buds and nose is the topic of a story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

The pattern of genomic alterations in colon and rectal tissues is the same regardless of anatomic location or origin within the colon or the rectum, leading researchers to conclude that these two cancer types can be grouped as one, according to The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project's large-scale study of colon and rectal cancer tissue specimens.

In multiple types of genomic analyses, colon and rectal cancer results were nearly indistinguishable. Initially, the TCGA Research Network studied colon tumors as distinct from rectal tumors.

LA JOLLA, Calif., July 18, 2012 – In their quest to treat cardiovascular disease, researchers and pharmaceutical companies have long been interested in developing new medicines that activate a heart protein called APJ. But researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) and the Stanford University School of Medicine have now uncovered a second, previously unknown, function for APJ—it senses mechanical changes when the heart is in danger and sets the body on a course toward heart failure.

An international research team has published the results of an ocean iron fertilization experiment (EIFEX) carried out in 2004 in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature. Unlike the LOHAFEX experiment carried out in 2009, EIFEX has shown that a substantial proportion of carbon from the induced algal bloom sank to the deep sea floor. These results, which were thoroughly analyzed before being published now, provide a valuable contribution to our better understanding of the global carbon cycle.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Climate change, habitat destruction, pollution and invasive species are all involved in the global crisis of amphibian declines and extinctions, researchers suggest in a new analysis, but increasingly these forces are causing actual mortality in the form of infectious disease.

Amphibians are now, and always have been hosts for a wide range of infectious organisms, including viruses, bacteria and fungi, scientists said in a review published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, July 17, 2012 –Sleep deprivation in the first few hours after exposure to a significantly stressful threat actually reduces the risk of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a study by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and Tel Aviv University.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Most U.S. adults support laws that allow teens to get medical care for sexually transmitted infections without parental consent. But when asked about the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), most adults want parents to have the final say on whether their teen or pre-teen gets the shots.

The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health recently asked a national sample of adults about allowing adolescents age 12 to 17 years old to receive the HPV vaccinations without parental consent.