Body

AUGUSTA, Ga. - Elevated levels of the enzyme arginase contribute to vascular eye damage and Medical College of Georgia researchers say therapies to normalize its levels could halt progression of potentially blinding diseases such as diabetic retinopathy.

Their work, published in the August issue of The American Journal of Pathology, is the first to make the connection between eye disease and arginase, an enzyme known to be a player in cardiovascular disease, according to researchers at MCG and Charlie Norwood Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Researchers at Uppsala University have found that the protein coding parts of a gene are packed in special nucleosomes. The same type of packaging is found in the roundworm C elegans, which is a primeval relative of humans. The mechanism can thereby be traced back a billion years in time, according to the study presented in the journal Genome Research.

In the first in a series on evaluating eHealth in the open access journal PLoS Medicine, Aziz Sheikh and Lorraine Catwell from The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland outline the background to the series and discuss the importance of evaluating the widespread investments in and adoption of information communication technology in health care.

Persistently present levels of unmetabolized folic acid found in the population indicate that introducing mandatory food fortification may result in an 'overdosing' effect. A study of blood donors, new mothers and babies, published in the open access journal BMC Public Health, has found that most already get enough folic acid from voluntarily fortified foods.

WHAT: Moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea is associated with an increased risk of death from any cause in middle-aged adults, especially men, according to new results from a landmark study supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The new findings provide the strongest evidence to date of a link between increased risk of death and sleep apnea, a common disorder in which the upper airway is intermittently narrowed during sleep, causing breathing to be difficult or completely blocked.

Severe breathing disorders during sleep are associated with an increased risk of dying from any cause according to research published this week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine. The study finds that the increased risk of dying is most apparent in men between 40 and 70 years of age with severe sleep-disordered breathing, and suggests a specific link between this condition and death from coronary heart disease in men.

The walls of blood vessels contain muscle cells known as vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs). These cells contract and relax to modulate blood pressure and distribute blood to the areas of the body that need it most. However, some environmental signals, many of which are associated with human disease, cause VSMCs to switch from being contractile in nature to being dividing cells that produce large amounts of the proteins that form tissue matrix.

Crosstalk between cells lining the lung (epithelial cells) and airway smooth muscle cells is important in lung development. However, it has also been shown to contribute to several lung diseases, including asthma and pulmonary hypertension. A team of researchers, at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, has now molecularly characterized one crosstalk pathway in mice, providing potential new therapeutic targets for treating individuals with lung diseases, such as asthma and pulmonary hypertension, which are caused, at least in part, by affects on airway smooth muscle cells.

New research led by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine has found a drug target that suggests a potent way to kill colon cancers that resist current drugs aimed at blocking a molecule found on the surface of cells.

Drugs that target the epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, have been used for a number of cancers. But these drugs called EGFR inhibitors, such as cetuximab, have not been very effective against colon cancer.

Contrary to a belief widely held by obstetricians, inducing labor does not need to increase a woman's risk for cesarean section delivery in childbirth, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and the Stanford University School of Medicine have found.

In a new approach to an effective "electronic tongue" that mimics human taste, scientists in Illinois are reporting development of a small, inexpensive, lab-on-a-chip sensor that quickly and accurately identifies sweetness — one of the five primary tastes. It can identify with 100 percent accuracy the full sweep of natural and artificial sweet substances, including 14 common sweeteners, using easy-to-read color markers.

Antioxidant supplements do not appear to be associated with an increased risk of melanoma, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Dermatology.

Most melanomas detected in a general-practice dermatology clinic were found by dermatologists during full-body skin examinations of patients who had come to the clinic for different complaints, according to a report in the Archives of Dermatology. In addition, cancers detected by dermatologists were thinner and more likely to be in situ (only on the outer layer of skin) than were cancers detected by patients.

A preliminary study suggests that a negative, inhibited personality type (type D personality) appears to predict an increased risk of death over four years among patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD), according to a report in Archives of Surgery.

Corticosteroid injections appear to offer an alternative to surgery for treating polyps on the vocal cords, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.