T-regulatory lymphocytes (Tregs) are a subset of T lymphocytes that are involved in the mechanism of immunotolerance to self- and allo-antigens. Activity of these cells is one of the mechanisms of immune evasion of tumors, which inhibits the antitumor activity of effector cells. Tregs are among the tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and circulate in the peripheral blood. In various cancer types, increased prevalence of Tregs has been observed, and in some studies, this has been reported as a prognostic factor. A research article published on January 21, 2011 in the World ...

Sphincter of Oddi dysfunction (SOD) is a pathological syndrome that is usually classified into the biliary type or the pancreatic type according to the Milwaukee criteria. However, this classification has some drawbacks in clinical practice, some of which result in flawed classification and failure to properly guide diagnosis and treatment. A research article published on January 21, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The authors proposed a new classification system for SOD according to anatomy, symptoms, endoscope tests and radiological ...

Patients undergoing liver surgery have long been considered to be at low risk of venous thromboembolism. However, pulmonary embolism has recently emerged as an increasingly frequent and potentially fatal complication following liver resections. A research article published on January 21, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The authors shed a new light on this discrepancy by reporting two patients who developed thrombi in their hepatic veins following hepatectomy. The report indicated that thrombosis may occur in hepatic veins after ...

E2F5 is a member of the E2F transcription factor family, and plays a key role in cell growth and proliferation. Overexpression of E2F5 has been reported in various human cancers, but not in liver cancer, and its biological implication is largely unknown. It is not known whether E2F5 plays a tumor suppressor role or an oncogenic role. Furthermore, there has been no report on the expression profile of E2F5 in HCC and its biological implications on hepatocarcinogenesis. A research article published on January 28, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this ...

Iron overload is a common and serious problem in thalassemic major patients. As iron accumulation is toxic in the body's tissues, accurate estimation of iron stores is of great importance in these patients to prevent iron overload by an appropriate iron chelating therapy. Liver biopsy is the gold standard for evaluating iron stores but it is an invasive method which is not easily repeatable in patients. Introduction of other more applicable methods seems to be necessary. A research article published on January 28, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses ...

Failure to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions effectively has led to intensifying debate on geoengineering - deliberate large-scale schemes to slow the rate at which Earth is heating up. The public debate often mixes opinion with fact so scientists have now released the first summary for policymakers on ocean fertilization, one of the earliest geoengineering proposals. The authors report that the chances of success of using ocean fertilization to deal with climate change is low. Ocean fertilization involves adding iron or other nutrients to the surface of the ocean ...

Nearly ten percent of all cases of depression are so severe that the patients do not respond to any established treatment method. Targeted stimulation of areas in the brain using a type of "brain pacemaker" has recently raised hopes: According to initial studies, half of patients with the most severe depression treated in this manner see a significant improvement in mood. Physicians from the University of Bonn, together with colleagues from the US, have suggested a new target structure for deep brain stimulation (as it is technically called). They hope to achieve an even ...

Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the "cores" on a computer chip communicate with each other. The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate with each other. But there are no direct ways for cores to communicate. Instead, one core sends data ...

In order to arrive at this result the researchers calculated the price with a model that measures the number of medals according to government expenditure in sport, along with other variables. "This model allows accurate measurement of how much extra expense is necessary to win each medal," the UC3M professors Juan de Dios Tena and Ramón J. Flores explained, who carried out this study within the Sports Economics Research Group, headed by professor David Forrest, of the University of Salford (England) and which also includes Ismael Sanz from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos ...

If you think histamines are your nemesis during allergy season, here's something that might change your perspective. New research published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (http://www.jleukbio.org) shows that histamine could be an important molecule to developing new treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS). In the study, the scientists analyzed the role of histamine in an animal model of multiple sclerosis and found that histamine plays a critical role in preventing MS or lessening its effects. "We hope that our study will help design new therapies for autoimmune ...

Milan, Italy, 31 January 2010 – Wouldn't life be easy if everything happened as we anticipated? In reality, our brains are able to adapt to the unexpected using an inbuilt network that makes predictions about the world and monitors how those predictions turn out. An area at the front of the brain, called the orbitofrontal cortex, plays a central role and studies have shown that patients with damage to this area confuse memories with reality and continue to anticipate events that are no longer likely to happen. The brain's ability to react adaptively, becomes crucial for ...

From the highest mountaintop comes a new research report in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) that gets to the bottom of what happens to the hearts of people when exposed to low-levels of oxygen, such as those on Mount Everest or in the intensive care unit of a hospital. In the study, researchers monitored subjects who spent time at the Mount Everest Base Camp and found that the low-level oxygen conditions at the base came caused changes in heart function resembling what is seen in conditions that severely restrict the amount of oxygen to the heart, such as cystic ...

Bats tend to have a bad reputation. They sleep all day, party at night, and are commonly thought to be riddled with rabies. A study by University of Calgary researchers has confirmed that bats are not as disease-ridden as the stigma suggests. "The notion that bats have high rates of rabies is not true," says Brandon Klug, a graduate student at the University of Calgary and the lead author of a paper published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. "Those of us that work with bats have always known the rates are low; and now we have evidence that bats aren't disease-ridden ...

Tel Aviv — The new environmentally-friendly concept of municipal "bike-sharing" is taking over European cities like Paris, and American cities like New York are also looking into the idea. It allows a subscriber to "borrow" a bike from one of hundreds of locations in the city, use it, and return it to another location at the end of the journey. It's good for commuters and for running short errands. While the idea is gaining speed and subscribers at the 400 locations around the world where it has been implemented, there have been growing pains — partly because the projects ...

The ability of some forms of plankton and bacteria to build an extra natural layer of nanoparticle-like armour has inspired chemists at the University of Warwick to devise a startlingly simple way to give drug bearing polymer vesicles (microscopic polymer based sacs of liquid) their own armoured protection. The Warwick researchers have been able to decorate these hollow structures with a variety of nanoparticles opening a new strategy in the design of vehicles for drug release, for example by giving the vesicle "stealth" capabilities which can avoid the body's defences ...

Milan, Italy, 31 January 2010 – Most people who survive a stroke recover some degree of their motor, sensory and cognitive functions over the following months and years. This recovery is commonly believed to reflect a reorganisation of the central nervous system that occurs after brain damage. Now a new study, published in the February 2011 issue of Elsevier's Cortex, sheds further light on the recovery process through its effect on language skills. For almost all right-handed people and for about 60% of left-handers, damage to the left side of the brain causes a condition ...

The endothelium is the inner lining of our blood vessels and normal functions of endothelial cells include enabling coagulation, platelet adhesion and immune function. Endothelial dysfunction is associated with reduced anticoagulant properties and the inability of arteries and arterioles to dilate fully. The gradual decrease in endothelial function over time is a key factor in the development of diseases associated with ageing, especially cardiovascular disease (CVD). Many epidemiologic studies suggest protection against CVD from moderate intake of alcoholic beverages, ...

The recalled Sprint Fidelis implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) leads (Medtronic) failed more often in younger patients, women, and individuals with hereditary heart disease, according to a multicenter study published online Jan. 17 in Circulation. The researchers found that lead failure was not associated with death or serious injuries. However, about half of the patients whose leads fractured experienced painful inappropriate shocks, according to lead author Robert G. Hauser, MD, of the Minneapolis Heart Institute® at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. In a previous ...

Cancer researchers have discovered an important protein, produced naturally inside cells, that appears to suppress the growth of prostate cancer cells in the laboratory. The findings, published tomorrow in the journal Cancer Research, offer promising leads for research towards new treatments. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the UK, with 37,500 men diagnosed with the disease every year. Many prostate cancers are slow growing, but in some cases the cancer is aggressive and spreads to other parts of the body, such as the bone. These cases are much ...

Boys predominantly pass on flu to other boys and girls to girls, according to a new study of how swine flu spread in a primary school during the 2009 pandemic, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results also suggest that flu transmission is most intensive between children of the same class, but that sitting next to an infected person does not significantly increase a child's risk of catching flu. The data will help researchers to model how epidemics spread and how interventions such as school closures can help contain an ...

New Haven, Conn.—Triceratops and Torosaurus have long been considered the kings of the horned dinosaurs. But a new discovery traces the giants' family tree further back in time, when a newly discovered species appears to have reigned long before its more well-known descendants, making it the earliest known member of its family. The new species, called Titanoceratops after the Greek myth of the Titans, rivaled Triceratops in size, with an estimated weight of nearly 15,000 pounds and a massive eight-foot-long skull. Titanoceratops, which lived in the American southwest ...

Scientists have discovered why orchids are one of the most successful groups of flowering plants - it is all down to their relationships with the bees that pollinate them and the fungi that nourish them. The study, published tomorrow in the American Naturalist, is the culmination of a ten-year research project in South Africa involving researchers from Imperial College London, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and other international institutions. The orchid family is one of the largest groups of flowering plants, with over 22,000 species worldwide. Today's research suggests ...

Using funding provided under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory has launched a demonstration project near one of the Savannah River Site's former production reactor sites to clean up chemically contaminated groundwater, naturally. A portion of the subsurface at the Site's P Area has become contaminated with chlorinated volatile organic compounds that are essentially like dry-cleaning fluid. SRNL and Clemson University have patented a consortium of microbes that have an appetite for that kind ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis biophysicist has developed a new method to identify communication pathways connecting distant regions within proteins. With this tool, Andrew J. Rader, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics, has identified a mechanism for cooperative behavior within an entire molecule, a finding that suggests that in the future it may be possible to design drugs that target anywhere along the length of a molecule's communication pathway rather than only in a single location as they do today. The discovery ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Genetic research is showing that healthy steelhead runs in Pacific Northwest streams can depend heavily on the productivity of their stay-at-home counterparts, rainbow trout. Steelhead and rainbow trout look different, grow differently, and one heads off to sea while the other never leaves home. But the life histories and reproductive health of wild trout and steelhead are tightly linked and interdependent, more so than has been appreciated, a new Oregon State University study concludes. The research could raise new challenges for fishery managers ...