Genetic mutations may cause more cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) than scientists previously had realized, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The scientists also showed that the number of mutated genes influences the age when the fatal paralyzing disorder first appears. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, destroys the nerve cells that control muscles, leading to loss of mobility, difficulty breathing and swallowing, and eventually paralysis and death. Understanding ...

The Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) investigated in a dossier assessment whether propranolol offers an added benefit in comparison with the appropriate comparator therapy in infants with proliferating infantile haemangioma (sometimes called "strawberry mark"). According to the findings, there is an indication of major added benefit of propranolol in some children, i.e. those with haemangioma with a risk of permanent scars or disfigurement. In contrast, an added benefit is not proven for children with life- or function-threatening haemangioma, ...

The vicious cycle of diabetes describes a scenario where people are becoming fatter, often with elevated levels of glucose, and at increased risk for women to develop gestational diabetes (GDM). Intrauterine exposure to GDM, itself, is a major risk factor for later obesity and diabetes, thus perpetuating this maternal-offspring cycle of disease. Researchers from Lund University have published an overview of evidence across the past few decades in the journal Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy. They emphasize the need to update diabetes prevention ...

It means cancer "in place" but a carcinoma "in situ" often does not want to keep its place. Standing between a cancer cell in situ and the surrounding tissue of fibroblasts and extracellular matrix is the basement membrane, a thin sheet of fibers that normally cradles the cells above it. The basement membrane is also the frontline physical barrier that keeps primary tumors from spreading into the matrix below. Perforating the basement membrane is a cancer cell's first move toward invasion, but how? Fibroblasts are most commonly found in connective tissue that synthesizes ...

In the human brain, the BBB is not the Better Business Bureau but the blood brain barrier and the BBB is serious business in human physiology. The human BBB separates circulating blood from the central nervous system, thus protecting the brain from many infections and toxins. But the BBB also blocks the passage of many potentially useful drugs to the brain and it has long stymied scientists who want to learn more about this vital tissue because of the lack of realistic non-human lab models. Even less is known about the BBB in children. There are significant structural and ...

VIDEO: This 19-second time lapse video shows the first six hours of neuronal conversion of skin fibroblasts from a patient with Alzheimer's disease. Click here for more information. The search for a living laboratory model of human neurons in the grip of Alzheimer's disease (AD)--the so-called "Alzheimer's in a dish"--has a new candidate. In work presented at the ASCB/IFCB meeting in Philadelphia, Håkan Toresson and colleagues at Lund University in Sweden report success ...

Location, location, location goes the old real estate proverb but cancer also responds to its neighborhood, particularly in the physical surroundings of bone marrow cells where human myeloid leukemias arise and where, according to two Harvard bioengineers, stiffness in the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM) can predict how cancer subtypes react to chemotherapy. Correcting for the matrix effect could give oncologists a new tool for matching drugs to patients, the researchers say. In work to be presented at the ASCB/IFCB meeting in Philadelphia, Jae-Won Shin and David ...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) progresses inside the brain in a rising storm of cellular chaos as deposits of the toxic protein, amyloid-beta (Aβ), overwhelm neurons. An apparent side effect of accumulating Aβ in neurons is the fragmentation of the Golgi apparatus, the part of the cell involved in packaging and sorting protein cargo including the precursor of Aβ. But is the destruction the Golgi a kind of collateral damage from the Aβ storm or is the loss of Golgi function itself part of the driving force behind Alzheimer's? This was the question for Yanzhuang ...

VIDEO: Nucleoli (green), small liquid-like nuclear bodies, are kept small and afloat by a fine actin mesh. When the mesh breaks, the nucleoli quickly being to fall and coalesce into larger... Click here for more information. Everybody knows that cells are microscopic, but why? Why aren't cells bigger? The average animal cell is 10 microns across and the traditional explanation has been cells are the perfect size because if they were any bigger it would be difficult to get enough ...

Cells are restless. They move during embryogenesis, tissue repair, regeneration, chemotaxis. Even in disease, tumor metastasis, cells get around. To do this, they have to keep reorganizing their cytoskeleton, removing pieces from one end of a microtubule and adding them to the front, like a railroad with a limited supply of tracks. The EB family of proteins helps regulate this process and can act as a scaffold for other proteins involved in pushing the microtubule chain forward. Still, how these EB proteins function in space and time has remained a mystery. Now Peng ...

The antioxidant activity of citrus juices and other foods is undervalued. A new technique developed by researchers from the University of Granada for measuring this property generates values that are ten times higher than those indicated by current analysis methods. The results suggest that tables on the antioxidant capacities of food products that dieticians and health authorities use must be revised. Orange juice and juices from other citrus fruits are considered healthy due to their high content of antioxidants, which help to reduce harmful free radicals in our body, ...

Penicillin, the wonder drug discovered in 1928, works in ways that are still mysterious almost a century later. One of the oldest and most widely used antibiotics, it attacks enzymes that build the bacterial cell wall, a mesh that surrounds the bacterial membrane and gives the cells their integrity and shape. Once that wall is breached, bacteria die -- allowing us to recover from infection. That would be the end of the story, if resistance to penicillin and other antibiotics hadn't emerged over recent decades as a serious threat to human health. While scientists continue ...

Physicians often ask their patients to "Please stick out your tongue". The tongue can betray signs of illness, which combined with other symptoms such as a cough, fever, presence of jaundice, headache or bowel habits, can help the physician offer a diagnosis. For people in remote areas who do not have ready access to a physician, a new diagnostic system is reported in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology that works to combine the soft inputs of described symptoms with a digital analysis of an image of the patient's tongue. Karthik Ramamurthy ...

Montréal, December 5, 2014 - A new study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) sheds new light on a well-known mechanism required for the immune response. Researchers at the IRCM, led by Tarik Möröy, PhD, identified a protein that controls the activity of the p53 tumour suppressor protein known as the "guardian of the genome". The researchers study the development of T cells and B cells, which are lymphocytes (or immune cells) that play a central role in protecting our ...

The drugs we release into the environment are likely to have a significant impact on plant growth, a new study has revelealed. By assessing the impacts of a range of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, researchers at the University of Exeter Medical School and Plymouth University have shown that the growth of edible crops can be affected by these chemicals - even at the very low concentrations found in the environment. Published in the Journal of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, the research focused its analysis on lettuce and radish plants and tested the ...

CORAL GABLES, Fla (December 4, 2014) -- How does the brain determine what matters? According to a new scientific article, a brain structure called the insula is essential for selecting things out of the environment that are "salient" for an individual, and dysfunction of this system is linked to brain disorders such as autism, psychosis and dementia. In psychology and neuroscience, the term "salient" is used to describe a thing, person, place or event that stands out, or that is set apart from others. The current article, published online by Nature Reviews Neuroscience ...

Apixaban (trade name Eliquis) has been approved since July 2014 for acute treatment of adults with deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. In addition, the drug can be used for low-dose long-term treatment to prevent recurrent thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether in these cases the drug offers patients an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies. According to the findings, considerable added benefit of apixaban is proven for the initial treatment ...

Emergencies at educational establishments are on the increase in recent years and campus officials are beginning to recognize that better communications with their students are now needed. Writing in the International Journal of Business Information Systems, US researchers describe how social networking sites might be exploited when an emergency situation arises to help safeguard students as well as keeping those not directly involved in the situation informed of events. The same insights might be applied in the business environment too. Wencui Han of the Department of ...

The El Niño Southern Oscillation is Earth's main source of year-to-year climate variability, but its response to global warming remains highly uncertain. Scientists see a large amount of variability in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) when looking back at climate records from thousands of years ago. Without a clear understanding of what caused past changes in ENSO variability, predicting the climate phenomenon's future is a difficult task. A new study shows how this climate system responds to various pressures, such as changes in carbon dioxide and ice ...

Athens, Ga. - A new article detailing the relationship of two U.S. Supreme Court cases and how they work together to uphold freedom of expression has been published in the Georgia Law Review by William E. Lee, professor of journalism in the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Lee's article focuses on New York Times v. Sullivan and its companion case, Abernathy v. Sullivan, in which the court upheld the First Amendment rights of both the press and ministers active in the civil rights movement. These rulings affect today's citizen ...

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is among the most frequent leukemias affecting adults in Western countries. It usually occurs in older patients, does not cause any symptoms for a long time and is often only discovered by accident. Despite treatment, relapses frequently occur. The immunologists Dr. Kristina Heinig and Dr. Uta Höpken (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, MDC, Berlin-Buch) and the hematologist Dr. Armin Rehm (MDC and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin) have now discovered why this is so. In a mouse model they developed, the ...

This news release is available in German. How can light which has been captured in a solar cell be examined in experiments? Jülich scientists have succeeded in looking directly at light propagation within a solar cell by using a trick. The photovoltaics researchers are working on periodic nanostructures that efficiently capture a portion of sunlight which is normally only poorly absorbed. Until recently, light trapping within periodically nanostructured solar cells could only be analysed using indirect methods, as captured light is not visible from outside ...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags--devices that can transmit data over short distances to identify objects, animals or people--have become increasingly popular for tracking everything from automobiles being manufactured on an assembly line to zoo animals in transit to their new homes. Now, thanks to a new NIST report, the next beneficiaries of RFID technology may soon be law enforcement agencies responsible for the management of forensic evidence. A typical RFID system consists of a microchip programmed with identifying data--the "tag"--and a two-way radio transmitter-receiver, ...

A study of more than 9,000 men with fertility problems has revealed a correlation between the number of different defects in a man's semen and the likelihood that the man has other health problems. The study, conducted by investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine, also links poor semen quality to a higher chance of having various specific health conditions, such as hypertension, and more generally to skin and endocrine disorders. The findings, to be published online Dec. 10 in Fertility and Sterility, may spur more-comprehensive approaches to treating ...

Nagoya, Japan - Professor Stephan Irle and Yoshio Nishimoto at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM) of Nagoya University and Dr. Dmitri Fedorov of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST, Tsukuba) have developed a novel ultrafast quantum chemical method enabling rapid simulations of molecules containing more than a million atoms without detrimental loss in accuracy. This method consists of a combination of the Fragment Molecular Orbital (FMO) approach and the Density-Functional Tight-Binding (DFTB) method, called FMO-DFTB ...