The ability to control whether certain stem cells ultimately become bone cells holds great promise for regenerative medicine and potential therapies aimed at treating metabolic bone diseases. Now, UCLA School of Dentistry professor and leading cancer scientist Dr. Cun-Yu Wang and his research team have made a significant breakthrough in that direction. The scientists have discovered two key epigenetic regulating genes that govern the cell-fate determination of human bone marrow stem cells. Wang's new research is featured on the cover of the July 6 issue of Cell ...

Amsterdam, NL, July 8, 2012 – In the last ten years, a new understanding of pediatric brain injury and recovery has emerged. Professionals now understand that recovery may be a lifelong process for the child's entire circle of family, friends, and healthcare providers. The latest efforts to advance medical and rehabilitative services to move children from medical care and rehabilitation to community reintegration are discussed by the leading experts in a recently published special issue of NeuroRehabilitation. "Recovery extends well beyond the technical period of rehabilitation," ...

Observations with CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array have confirmed that astronomers have found the first known "middleweight" black hole. Outbursts of super-hot gas observed with a CSIRO radio telescope have clinched the identity of the first known "middleweight" black hole, Science Express reports online today. Called HLX-1 ("hyper-luminous X-ray source 1"), the black hole lies in a galaxy called ESO 243-49, about 300 million light-years away. Before it was found, astronomers had good evidence for only supermassive black holes — ones a million to a billion ...

Research analysing 235 types of rice from around the world has found its glycemic index (GI) varies from one type of rice to another with most varieties scoring a low to medium GI. This finding is good news because it not only means rice can be part of a healthy diet for the average consumer, it also means people with diabetes, or at risk of diabetes, can select the right rice to help maintain a healthy, low GI diet. The study found that the GI of rice ranges from a low of 48 to a high of 92, with an average of 64, and that the GI of rice depends on the type of rice ...

Opioid Use and Misuse for Chronic Pain: What is the Appropriate Role of Prescription Painkillers? A cluster of articles in the July/August issue of Annals looks at opioid use for the management of chronic pain, including the escalating levels of misuse, overdose and addiction associated with opioid pain relievers. The role of opioids in the management of chronic pain is timely and consequential — the volume of prescribed opioids has increased 600 percent from 1997 to 2007, and during roughly the same period, the number of unintentional lethal overdoses involving prescription ...

1. Free Curriculum Aims to Educate Internal Medicine Residents About Wasteful Health Care Spending Developed by the American College of Physicians and the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, the New Curriculum is Part of ACP's Ongoing High-Value, Cost-Conscious Care Initiative Economists warn that health care spending in the United States is rising at an unsustainable rate. To slow the rate of increase, while preserving high quality care, thought leaders in academic medicine suggest that clinicians focus on using medical interventions that provide good value. This ...

Breathing easy: keeping airways open Asthma is an increasingly common chronic disorder characterized by wheezing and shortness of breath. Symptoms are caused by excessive airway smooth muscle contraction; however mechanisms serving to keep airways open are not fully understood. Dean Sheppard and colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco have revealed a pathway required for preventing exaggerated airway smooth muscle contraction. Their work investigates a protein called α9β1, which is highly expressed in airway smooth muscle, and makes use ...

Inflammatory bowel disease is caused by chronic inflammation , which leads to damage of the intestinal epithelium. Patients with inflammatory bowel disease have an elevated risk for developing colorectal cancer because of this chronic inflammation. In an effort to develop strategies to break the cycle of inflammation, Dr. Brent Polk and colleagues at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles examined two mouse models of colorectal cancer. Their work shows that inactivating a key receptor, known as epidermal growth factor receptor, increases the frequency and ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (July 9, 2012, 3 PM EST) Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have discovered a way to maintain the potency of vaccines and other drugs -- that otherwise require refrigeration -- for months and possibly years at temperatures above 110 degrees F, by stabilizing them in a silk protein made from silkworm cocoons. Importantly, the pharmaceutical-infused silk can be made in a variety of forms such as microneedles, microvesicles and films that allow the non-refrigerated drugs to be stored and administered in a single device. The ...

A Duke University study of well water in northeastern Pennsylvania suggests that naturally occurring pathways could have allowed salts and gases from the Marcellus shale formation deep underground to migrate up into shallow drinking water aquifers. The study found elevated levels of salinity with similar geochemistry to deep Marcellus brine in drinking water samples from three groundwater aquifers, but no direct links between the salinity and shale gas exploration in the region. "This is a good news-bad news kind of finding," said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPfAR) began in 2003 with good intentions, but it was not until the U.S. government's massive overseas public health campaign adopted generic drugs that it became a success, according to a new article by Brown University researchers in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs. Nearly a decade later, expanding the availability of generics remains urgent, especially as doctors in the field encounter resistance to first-line treatment regimens. "By 2002 generic drugs had been shown ...

Uncircumcised boys are at higher risk of urinary tract infection, regardless of whether the urethra is visible, found a new study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Urinary tract infections are one of the most common serious bacterial infections in children and, if not treated, can cause an infection of the blood or scar the kidneys. To determine whether the risk for infection is higher in boys with a visible urethral meatus, researchers looked at a cross-section of 393 boys who visited an emergency department with symptoms of a possible urinary ...

The Canadian government's proposed Bill C-31 to change the country's immigration act could have serious negative impacts on the mental health of refugees, states a commentary in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Under the proposed Bill C-31, the Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, which targets refugee claimants, children under age 16 will be separated from their parents or held informally in a detention centre with their mothers. Family reunification for recognized refugees will be delayed until five years and detention reviews will not occur for ...

A new study finds that the use of drug-eluting stents after angioplasty bears little relationship to patients' predicted risk of restenosis (reblockage) of the treated coronary artery, the situation the devices are designed to prevent. In an Archives of Internal Medicine paper receiving early online publication, a multi-institutional research team reports that the devices are used in treating more than 70 percent of patients at low risk of restenosis. Since patients receiving these stents need to take costly anticlotting medications for at least a year – medicines that ...

While HIV programs provide lifesaving care and treatment to millions of people in lower-income countries, there have been concerns that as these programs expand, they divert investments from other health priorities such as maternal health. Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health assessed the effect of HIV programs supported by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) on access to maternal health care in sub-Saharan Africa for women who are not infected with HIV. The findings show that, in fact, PEPFAR-funded, HIV-related projects ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: 3 P.M. (CT), MONDAY, JULY 9, 2012 CHICAGO – Use of cranberry-containing products appears to be associated with prevention of urinary tract infections in some individuals, according to a study that reviewed the available medical literature and was published by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common bacterial infections and adult women are particularly susceptible. Cranberry-containing products have long been used as a "folk remedy" to prevent the condition, according to the study background. Chih-Hung ...

CHICAGO – Better quality of life at the end of life for patients with advanced cancer was associated with avoiding hospitalizations and the intensive care unit, worrying less, praying or meditating, being visited by a pastor in a hospital or clinic, and having a therapeutic alliance with their physician, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. When treatments to cure a patient's cancer are no longer an option, the focus of care often shifts from prolonging life to promoting the quality of life (QOL) at ...

CHICAGO – A study based on more than 1.5 million percutaneous coronary intervention procedures (such as balloon angioplasty or stent placement to open narrowed coronary arteries) suggests that the use of drug-eluting stents varies widely among U.S. physicians, and is only modestly correlated with the patient's risk of coronary artery restenosis (renarrowing), according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Drug-eluting stents (DES) are effective in reducing restenosis and the benefits are greatest in patients ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: 3 P.M. (CT), MONDAY, JULY 9, 2012 CHICAGO – A study of patients with stroke admitted to English National Health Service public hospitals suggests that patients who were hospitalized on weekends were less likely to receive urgent treatments and had worse outcomes, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Neurology, a JAMA Network publication. Studies from other countries have suggested higher mortality in patients who were admitted to the hospital on weekends for a variety of medical conditions, a phenomenon known as "the weekend ...

Using lights to make aircraft more visible to birds could help reduce the risk of bird strikes, new research by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found. The study, which examined how Canada geese responded to different radio-controlled model aircraft, is the first of its kind and is published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology. Aircraft collisions with wildlife – primarily birds – is a serious and growing threat to civil and military aviation, as well as an expensive one: bird strikes cost civil aviation alone more than $1.2 billion ...

Men who are recent immigrants and over qualified for their jobs are more than three times as likely to sustain an injury at work as their appropriately qualified peers who have been in the country for some time, suggests Canadian research published online in Injury Prevention. In Canada, in 2008, one in four employees between the ages of 25 and 54 was overqualified for the job they were doing, figures indicate. The researchers drew on almost 63,500 responses to the representative household Canadian Community Health Surveys of 2003 and 2005 to look at the relationship ...

[Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a cause-deleted life table analysis doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2012-000828] Restricting the amount of time spent seated every day to less than 3 hours might boost the life expectancy of US adults by an extra 2 years, indicates an analysis of published research in the online journal BMJ Open. And cutting down TV viewing to less than 2 hours every day might extend life by almost 1.4 years, the findings suggest. Several previous studies have linked extended periods spent sitting down and/or watching TV to poor health, ...

Nearly a third of adults with the most common type of brain cancer develop recurrent, invasive tumors after being treated with a drug called bevacizumab. The molecular underpinnings behind these detrimental effects have now been published by Cell Press in the July issue of Cancer Cell. The findings reveal a new treatment strategy that could reduce tumor invasiveness and improve survival in these drug-resistant patients. "Understanding how and why these tumors adopt this invasive behavior is critical to being able to prevent this recurrence pattern and maximizing the benefits ...

Investigators reporting in the July issue of the Cell Press journal Cancer Cell have found that blocking a fundamental process deep within cancer cells can selectively kill them and spare normal cells. For more than a century, clinicians have known that abnormalities of the nucleolus—a small, rounded mass within the cell nucleus—can be diagnostic for cancer. The nucleolus is where certain genes are read to form the components of ribosomes, the cellular machines that make proteins. While abnormalities in the nucleolus are known to be diagnostic for cancer, researchers ...

Stem cells that come from a specific part of the developing brain help fuel the growth of brain tumors caused by an inherited condition, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report. Scientists showed in mice that disabling a gene linked to a common pediatric tumor disorder, neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), made stem cells from one part of the brain proliferate rapidly. But the same genetic deficit had no effect on stem cells from another brain region. The results can be explained by differences in the way stem cells from these regions ...