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NTU gene research promises better treatment procedures for children with leukemia

2014-08-14
A research team led by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) scientists have made a key finding which is expected to open up improved treatment possibilities for children suffering from leukaemia. They found that two in three cases of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a type of cancer of the white blood cells, may be caused by mutations in one of the two key genes found in children. These genes are however more prevalent in those with Down syndrome. This means that scientists can design better tailored treatment protocols, depending on which mutating gene is carried ...

New technology offers insight into cholesterol

2014-08-14
Researchers from the Copenhagen Center for Glycomics at the University of Copenhagen have studied an important receptor protein called LDLR using new, groundbreaking techniques. The protein plays an important role in the absorption of the bad cholesterol, LDL. The findings have just been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The key to major discoveries within the fields of health and diseases is not just hidden in the human DNA code. The proteins encoded by the genes also play an important role, not least the attached sugar chains which give the proteins ...

Study details shortage of replication in education research

2014-08-14
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 14, 2014 – Although replicating important findings is essential for helping education research improve its usefulness to policymakers and practitioners, less than one percent of the articles published in the top education research journals are replication studies, according to new research published today in Educational Researcher (ER), a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. "Facts Are More Important Than Novelty: Replication in the Education Sciences," by Matthew C. Makel of Duke University and Jonathan A. ...

PTSD can develop even without memory of the trauma

2014-08-14
Philadelphia, PA, August 14, 2014 – There are many forms of memory and only some of these may be critical for the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), reports a new study by researchers at the University at Albany and the University of California Los Angeles. Their findings, published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, suggest that even with no explicit memory of an early childhood trauma, symptoms of PTSD can still develop in adulthood. There are case reports of people who have experienced terrible life events that resulted in brain damage, ...

New Irish research sheds light on how aspirin works to reduce cancer deaths

2014-08-14
Researchers have discovered that women who had been prescribed aspirin regularly before being diagnosed with breast cancer are less likely to have cancer that spread to the lymph-nodes than women who were not on prescription aspirin. These women are also less likely to die from their breast cancer. The study of Irish patients funded by the Irish Health Research Board and Irish Cancer Society and published by the American Association for Cancer Research in the Journal, Cancer Research, analyses records from the National Cancer Registry Ireland (NCRI), and prescription ...

New non-invasive technique controls size of molecules penetrating the blood-brain barrier

New non-invasive technique controls size of molecules penetrating the blood-brain barrier
2014-08-14
New York, NY—August 14, 2014—A new technique developed by Elisa Konofagou, associate professor of biomedical engineering and radiology at Columbia Engineering, has demonstrated for the first time that the size of molecules penetrating the blood-brain barrier (BBB) can be controlled using acoustic pressure—the pressure of an ultrasound beam—to let specific molecules through. The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism. "This is an important breakthrough in getting drugs delivered to specific parts of the brain precisely, ...

Workaholism: The addiction of this century

2014-08-14
In spite of the many positive aspects of work, some people are unable to detach from it – working excessively and compulsively. These are called workaholics. Postdoctoral Fellow Cecilie Schou Andreassen and colleagues from the Department of Psychosocial Science at the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway has been the first to assess workaholism in a nationally representative sample. According to Schou Andreassen, the "workaholism" concept has been studied by scholars for nearly 45 years. Still, reliable statistics on the prevalence of workaholism is hard to find. The ...

EARTH Magazine: La Brea climate adaptation as different as cats and dogs

2014-08-14
Alexandria, Va. — The La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles are a famous predator trap. For every herbivore, a dozen or more carnivores — saber-toothed cats and dire wolves chief among them — are pulled from the prolific Pleistocene fossil site. In fact, the remains of more than 4,000 dire wolves have been excavated, along with more than 2,000 saber-toothed cats. The sheer number of fossils allows researchers to ask population-level questions about the climate and environment as well as how these animals evolved. Now, two new studies focusing dire wolves and saber-toothed ...

Ebola outbreak highlights global disparities in health-care resources

Ebola outbreak highlights global disparities in health-care resources
2014-08-14
The outbreak of Ebola virus disease that has claimed more than 1,000 lives in West Africa this year poses a serious, ongoing threat to that region: the spread to capital cities and Nigeria—Africa's most populous nation—presents new challenges for healthcare professionals. The situation has garnered significant attention and fear around the world, but proven public health measures and sharpened clinical vigilance will contain the epidemic and thwart a global spread, according to a new commentary by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and ...

New blood: Tracing the beginnings of hematopoietic stem cells

New blood: Tracing the beginnings of hematopoietic stem cells
2014-08-14
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) give rise to all other blood cell types, but their development and how their fate is determined has long remained a mystery. In a paper published online this week in Nature, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine elaborate upon a crucial signaling pathway and the role of key proteins, which may help clear the way to generate HSCs from human pluripotent precursors, similar to advances with other kinds of tissue stem cells. Principal investigator David Traver, PhD, professor in the Department of Cellular ...

Novel chip-based platform could simplify measurements of single molecules

2014-08-14
Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a new approach for studying single molecules and nanoparticles by combining electrical and optical measurements on an integrated chip-based platform. In a paper published July 9 in Nano Letters, the researchers reported using the device to distinguish viruses from similarly-sized nanoparticles with 100 percent fidelity. Combining electrical and optical measurements on a single chip provides more information than either technique alone, said corresponding author Holger Schmidt, the Kapany Professor of Optoelectronics in the Baskin ...

Stem cells in the skeletal muscle promote the regeneration of severe nerve peripheral injury

2014-08-14
A research group at the muscle physiology and cell biology unit, the Tokai University School of Medicine, Japan, led by Dr. Tetsuro Tamaki, have developed the stem cell isolation method from the skeletal muscle, termed skeletal muscle-derived multipotent stem cells (Sk-MSCs), which can differentiate into Schwann and perineurial/endoneurial cells, and vascular relating pericytes, endothelial and smooth muscle cells in the damaged peripheral nerve niche. Application of the Sk-MSCs in the bridging conduit of the long nerve gap injury resulted favorable axonal regeneration ...

Up-regulation of neuronal alpha-1 adrenoceptors after peripheral nerve injury

2014-08-14
In a Perspectives paper published in Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 14), Professor Peter Drummond speculates about neuronal changes that might contribute to chronic pain after peripheral nerve injury. Professor Drummond and co-workers at Murdoch University, Perth Western Australia, discovered recently that the expression of α1-adrenoceptors increases on pain-signalling nerve fibers that survive peripheral injury. As these receptors boost neural excitability, an increase in their expression could intensify pain. After tissue injury, resident cells and other ...

New frontiers of fecal microbiota transplantation

2014-08-14
Bethesda, MD (Aug. 14, 2014) – Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is one of the most innovative new treatments of the 21st century. Experts believe that this procedure, which transplants microbes from one human gut to another through fecal matter, could offer the cure to a vast range of diseases and shed new light on the role of the microbiome in gastrointestinal diseases. New research presented this weekend at the American Gastroenterological Association's 2014 James W. Freston Conference in Chicago, IL, highlights significant advances in this field, and confirms the ...

Scientists detail urgent research agenda to address chronic disease toll

Scientists detail urgent research agenda to address chronic disease toll
2014-08-14
Health care systems that keep HIV patients from dying early in low- and middle-income nations need urgently to be repurposed to treat the chronic diseases that many of these patients now have, experts say. According to recommendations resulting from a multidisciplinary conference sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, scientists and physicians in low- and middle-income countries should build on existing HIV research to study and treat chronic conditions. Patients once condemned to death by AIDS now suffer from noncommunicable diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer, ...

Study of Chilean quake shows potential for future earthquake

2014-08-14
Near real-time analysis of the April 1 earthquake in Iquique, Chile, showed that the 8.2 event occurred in a gap on the fault unruptured since 1877 and that the April event was not what the scientists had expected, according to an international team of geologists. "We assumed that the area of the 1877 earthquake would eventually rupture, but all indications are that this 8.2 event was not the 8.8 event we were looking for," said Kevin P. Furlong, professor of geophysics, Penn State. "We looked at it to see if this was the big one." But according to the researchers, ...

People fake to look authentic on social media

2014-08-14
Presenting an authentic image on social network sites (SNSs) includes an element of fakery according to a new study by researchers at Aalto University. During the study, researchers discovered that being authentic is very important for social media users. At the same time, users also admitted faking parts of their online image in order to conform to social norms and expectations. By focusing on two SNSs, Facebook and Last.fm, the researchers came to the conclusion that being real is much more acceptable according to social norms. Although both of these SNSs differ ...

Fukushima's legacy

Fukushimas legacy
2014-08-14
Following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown, biological samples were obtained only after extensive delays, limiting the information that could be gained about the impacts of that historic disaster. Determined not to repeat the shortcomings of the Chernobyl studies, scientists began gathering biological information only a few months after the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan in 2011. Results of these studies are now beginning to reveal serious biological effects of the Fukushima radiation on non-human organisms ranging from ...

Immune cell discovery could help to halt cancer spread

Immune cell discovery could help to halt cancer spread
2014-08-14
Melbourne researchers have revealed the critical importance of highly specialised immune cells, called natural killer cells, in killing melanoma cells that have spread to the lungs. These natural killer cells could be harnessed to hunt down and kill cancers that have spread in the body. The team, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, also found natural killer cells were critical to the body's rejection of donor bone marrow transplants and in the runaway immune response during toxic shock syndrome. The discoveries came after the team showed that a protein called ...

Newborns' genetic code sends infection distress signal

2014-08-14
Babies suffering from life-threatening bacterial infections such as sepsis could benefit from improved treatment, thanks to a ground-breaking study. For the first time, researchers have been able to detect and decode a signal generated from a baby's DNA that can tell doctors whether or not a bacterial infection is present in the bloodstream. The findings could help develop a test for bacterial infection in newborns, using a single drop of blood. Immediate detection of such infections, which are a major cause of death among young children, is currently impossible ...

Bypass commands from the brain to legs through a computer

Bypass commands from the brain to legs through a computer
2014-08-14
VIDEO: The right arm muscles and the locomotion center of the man are artificially connected through a computer. His legs are in a relaxed state. When he moves his right hand,... Click here for more information. Gait disturbance in individuals with spinal cord injury is attributed to the interruption of neural pathways from brain to the spinal locomotor center, whereas neural circuits locate below and above the lesion maintain most of their functions. An artificial connection ...

Aspirin may slow recurrence in breast cancer patients

Aspirin may slow recurrence in breast cancer patients
2014-08-14
SAN ANTONIO (August 14, 2014) — New findings published today in the journal Cancer Research reveal that some postmenopausal overweight breast cancer patients who use common anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen have significantly lower breast cancer recurrence rates. Researchers from the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin began by examining blood serum from CTRC breast cancer patients, said CTRC oncologist Andrew Brenner, M.D., Ph.D. Studying Blood Serum They ...

Protein found to block benefits of vitamin A cancer therapy

Protein found to block benefits of vitamin A cancer therapy
2014-08-14
Retinoic acid is a form of vitamin A that is used to treat and help prevent the recurrence of a variety of cancers, but for some patients the drug is not effective. The reason for this resistance was unclear until this week when researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Massey Cancer Center demonstrated that a protein known as AEG-1 blocks the effects of retinoic acid in leukemia and liver cancer. Because AEG-1 is overexpressed in nearly every cancer, these findings could impact the care of countless cancer patients. Details of the study were published ...

Lionfish characteristics make them more 'terminator' than predator

Lionfish characteristics make them more terminator than predator
2014-08-14
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – New research on the predatory nature of red lionfish, the invasive Pacific Ocean species that is decimating native fish populations in parts of the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, seems to indicate that lionfish are not just a predator, but more like the "terminator" of movie fame. The finding of behavior that was called "alarming" was presented today by Kurt Ingeman, a researcher from Oregon State University, at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Most native predatory fish are attracted to prey when their numbers are high, ...

NSAIDs may lower breast cancer recurrence rate in overweight and obese women

2014-08-14
PHILADELPHIA — Recurrence of hormone-related breast cancer was cut by half in overweight and obese women who regularly used aspirin or other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), according to data published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Our studies suggest that limiting inflammatory signaling may be an effective, less toxic approach to altering the cancer-promoting effects of obesity and improving patient response to hormone therapy," said Linda A. deGraffenried, PhD, associate professor of nutritional sciences ...
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