Hamilton, ON - For decades, the blood thinner heparin has been used to prevent and treat blood clots. Could it be just as effective in treating cancer? In an editorial published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from McMaster University and the University at Buffalo suggest conclusive answers to key questions on the benefits of low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) for cancer patients remain elusive - despite promising results from large studies. Co-authors of the editorial are Dr. Elie Akl, associate professor in the Department of Medicine in ...

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one-third of the world's population is currently infected with tuberculosis bacteria. The bacteria is incredibly resistant to treatment, and despite its prevalence, very little is known about why it is so stress tolerant. But, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have been developing a new way of culturing tuberculosis bacteria, which could lead to new insights and treatments. "This is a significant step forward in TB research," said paper-author Dr. Anil Ojha, "because it shows in a very reproducible way how to ...

The Taurus Molecular Cloud, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull), lies about 450 light-years from Earth. This image shows two parts of a long, filamentary structure in this cloud, which are known as Barnard 211 and Barnard 213. Their names come from Edward Emerson Barnard's photographic atlas of the "dark markings of the sky", compiled in the early 20th century. In visible light, these regions appear as dark lanes, lacking in stars. Barnard correctly argued that this appearance was due to "obscuring matter in space". We know today that these dark markings are actually ...

UPTON, NY - Brain scans of two strains of mice imbibing significant quantities of alcohol reveal serious shrinkage in some brain regions - but only in mice lacking a particular type of receptor for dopamine, the brain's "reward" chemical. The study, conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and published in the May 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, now online, provides new evidence that these dopamine receptors, known as DRD2, may play a protective role against alcohol-induced brain damage. "This study clearly ...

Drug delivery into muscle using an autoinjector, akin to the EpiPen used to treat serious allergic reactions, is faster and may be a more effective way to stop status epilepticus, a prolonged seizure lasting longer than five minutes, according to a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Status epilepticus is a potentially life-threatening emergency that causes 55,000 deaths each year. Anticonvulsant drugs are typically delivered intravenously (IV) as a first-line treatment. Starting an IV in a patient experiencing seizures can pose a challenge for paramedics ...

Oral nutritional interventions help increase nutritional intake and improve some aspects of quality of life (QOL) in malnourished cancer patients or those who are at nutritional risk, but do not effect mortality, according to a study published February 15 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The American Cancer Society estimated 12 million new cancer diagnoses worldwide in 2007, expecting this to more than double in the next 50 years. While international guidelines have suggested a nutritional intervention with dietary advice and/or oral nutritional supplements ...

Advisor Websites, a leading web-based software used by financial professionals to create and manage compliant websites, today announced the immediate release of its new mobile websites. The new feature gives advisory firms an edge in this extremely competitive market and meets the needs of the consumer. With Advisor Websites for Mobile, financial professionals can now reach the broadest possible audience using a mobile site that works on every popular mobile, tablet and e-reader. Advisor Websites for Mobile is the newest addition to Advisor Websites' growing list of ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (February 15, 2012) – Prions, the much-maligned proteins most commonly known for causing "mad cow" disease, are commonly used in yeast to produce beneficial traits in the wild. Moreover, such traits can be passed on to subsequent generations and eventually become "hard-wired" into the genome, contributing to evolutionary change. Prions were first found to produce heritable new traits more than a decade ago in laboratory studies of simple baker's yeast. The key discovery then was that some proteins could spontaneously switch from a normal shape into a ...

HOUSTON - Highly elevated platelet levels fuel tumor growth and reduce the survival of ovarian cancer patients, an international team of researchers led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer center reports in the New England Journal of Medicine. By pinpointing a powerful cause-and-effect relationship at the heart of a clinical observation that dates back more than 100 years, the team's findings reveal a new factor in cancer progression and new potential approaches for treatment. "We've long known that ovarian cancer patients often have markedly ...

Four new species of miniaturized lizards have been identified in Madagascar. These lizards, just tens of millimeters from head to tail and in some cases small enough to stand on the head of a match, rank among the smallest reptiles in the world. The full report can be found in the Feb. 15 issue of the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Frank Glaw of the Zoological State Collection of Munich in Germany, also conducted a genetic analysis to determine that the mini lizards, though similar in appearance, are in fact distinct species. The smallest of the ...

A recent study finds no statistically significant correlation between urinary mercury levels and autism, according to a Feb. 15 report in the open access journal PLoS ONE. There has been some concern that mercury may play a role in autism development. To investigate one aspect of this link, Barry Wright of North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust led a team of researchers in a study of 56 children with autism spectrum disorders, and mainstream, special school and sibling controls. The team found that the group with autism did not have elevated or reduced levels of ...

Organic farms produce strawberries with fewer malformations and a higher proportion of fully pollinated berries relative to conventional forms, according to a Feb. 15 report in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The study, led by Georg Andersson of Lund University in Sweden, investigated the effect of organic farming compared to conventional. They found that the pollination success increased greatly with organic farming, and speculate that this effect may be due to an increase in insect pollinator abundance and/or diversity. They also determined that this effect was apparent ...

BOSTON, MA—Mutations in TTN—the largest gene in the human genome—cause idiopathic (unknown cause) dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a common form of heart failure, according to a study by Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) researchers. The TTN gene encodes a protein that functions as a scaffold for assembly of contractile proteins in muscle cells and also regulates the production of force in cardiac muscle cells. Because of its enormous size, the TTN gene was, until recently, too difficult to sequence and analyze in large numbers of patients. But with the development of ...

A medication commonly used to help people stop smoking may have an unanticipated positive side effect for an entirely different vice: drinking alcohol. A new study by University of Chicago researchers finds that varenicline, sold as Chantix, increases the negative effects of alcohol and therefore could hold promise as a treatment for alcoholism. A group of heavy-to-moderate social drinkers given a single dose varenicline three hours before an alcoholic beverage reported increased dysphoria and reduced "liking," even when researchers controlled for the effects of nausea ...

A team led by a University of British Columbia professor has developed a new class of drugs that completely suppress absence seizures – a brief, sudden loss of consciousness – in rats, and which are now being tested in humans. Absence seizures, also known as "petit mal seizures," are a symptom of epilepsy, most commonly experienced by children. During such episodes, the person looks awake but dazed. The seizures, arising from a flurry of high-frequency signals put out by the neurons of the thalamus, can be dangerous if they occur while a person is swimming or driving, ...

The ability to change vocal sounds (vocal plasticity) and develop an accent is potentially far more widespread in mammals than previously believed, according to new research on goats from Queen Mary, University of London. Vocal plasticity is the ability of an individual to modify the sound of their voice according to their social environment. Humans benefit from an extreme form of vocal plasticity which allows us to produce a wide range of sounds and accents, but in most other mammals (except, for example, bats and whales) vocalisations were thought to be genetically ...

The study of more than 11,000 pregnant women, in partnership with Mars Petcare, showed that those who owned dogs were approximately 50% more likely to achieve the recommended 30 minutes of exercise a day through high levels of brisk walking than those without dogs. Scientists suggest that as it is a low-risk exercise, walking a dog could form part of a broader strategy to improve the health of pregnant women. Previous studies have shown that maternal obesity and large weight gain during pregnancy has adverse outcomes for mother and child. Studies show, for example, that ...

CINCINNATI -- As part of the first national, randomized clinical trial to study two methods of drug delivery for seizing patients, researchers have shown that using an auto-injector, similar to an EpiPen, to deliver anticonvulsant medication stops prolonged seizures more quickly and effectively than drug delivery through an IV line. The research, which will be published in the Feb. 16 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, was conducted as part of the Rapid Anticonvulsant Medication Prior to Arrival Trial (RAMPART), which included University of Cincinnati (UC) ...

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the leading multi-technological applied research organisation in Northern Europe, has developed an optical accessory that turns an ordinary camera phone into a high-resolution microscope. The device is accurate to one hundredth of a millimetre. Among those who will benefit from the device are the printing industry, consumers, the security business, and even health care professionals. A new Finnish enterprise called KeepLoop Oy and VTT are already exploring the commercial potential of the invention. The first industrial applications ...

BOSTON, MA (February 15, 2012) — For decades, researchers have sought a genetic explanation for idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a weakening and enlargement of the heart that puts an estimated 1.6 million Americans at risk of heart failure each year. Because idiopathic DCM occurs as a familial disorder, researchers have long searched for genetic causes, but for most patients the etiology for their heart disease remained unknown. Now, new work from the lab of Christine Seidman, a Howard Hughes Investigator and the Thomas W. Smith Professor of Medicine and Genetics ...

When a person is experiencing a prolonged convulsive seizure, quick medical intervention is critical. With every passing minute, the seizure becomes harder to stop, and can place the patient at risk of brain damage and death. This is why paramedics are trained to administer anticonvulsive medications as soon as possible -- traditionally giving them intravenously before arriving at the hospital. Now a major clinical trial has shown that an even faster method that involves injecting the drugs into the thigh muscle using an autoinjector (similar to a pre-loaded syringe) ...

Like a stream of air shooting out of an airplane's broken window to relieve cabin pressure, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego say lava formations in eastern Oregon are the result of an outpouring of magma forced out of a breach in a massive slab of Earth. Their new mechanism explaining how such a large volume of magma was generated is published in the Feb. 16 issue of the journal Nature. For years scientists who study the processes underlying the planet's shifting tectonic plates and how they shape the planet have debated the origins of ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a cluster of young, blue stars encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole ever discovered. The presence of the star cluster suggests that the black hole was once at the core of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy. The discovery of the black hole and the star cluster has important implications for understanding the evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies. "For the first time, we have evidence on the environment, and thus the origin, of this middle-weight black hole," said Mathieu Servillat, who worked ...

VIDEO: An argon plasma jet forms a rapidly growing corkscrew, known as a kink instability. This instability causes an even faster-developing behavior called a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, in which ripples grow and... Click here for more information. PASADENA, Calif.—January saw the biggest solar storm since 2005, generating some of the most dazzling northern lights in recent memory. The source of that storm—and others like it—was the sun's magnetic field, described by ...

On the health front, the poor often have at least two things going against them: a lack of insurance and chronic illnesses, of which diabetes is among the most common. The federal Affordable Care Act would expand the capacity of the nation's 8,000 community health centers to provide care for low-income, largely minority patients — from the current 20 million to about 40 million by 2015. The federal government is also trying to ensure that these community health centers deliver high-quality primary care, including diabetes care. A crucial part of this is the implementation ...