ScienceDaily: Health & Medicine News

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• Engineers make strides toward artificial cartilage
• Jailhouse wine not as delicious as it sounds, could be deadly
• Evidence of savings in accountable care organizations, cancer care
• Misunderstanding of palliative care leads to preventable suffering
• Laying siege to chemoresistance
• Zebrafish help decode link between calcium deficiency, colon cancer
• Clot-busters, caught on tape
• Newly discovered gene interaction could lead to novel cancer therapies
• Study breaks blood-brain barriers to understanding Alzheimer's
• Snail fever expected to decline in Africa due to climate change
• Wrist fracture significantly raises risk of hip fracture
• A stop sign for cancer
• New discovery on how skin cells form 'bridges' paves the way for advances in wound healing and tissue engineering
• Deep sequencing of breast cancer tumors predict outcomes after single dose of therapy
• Family structure linked to high blood pressure in African-American men
• Low-power tunneling transistor for high-performance devices at low voltage
• New treatment for skin, corneal wound healing in diabetic patients
• Using air transportation data to predict pandemics
• Study documents secondhand exposure to nicotine from electronic cigarettes
• Helping cancer researchers make sense of deluge of genetic data
• Children with autism benefit from peer solicitation
• New way to predict prognosis for heart failure patients
• Targeted antibody, immune checkpoint blocker rein in follicular lymphoma
• In search of treatment for rare bone cancer
• Rare gene variants double risk for Alzheimer's disease
• Scientists resolve decades-old mystery of ‘chlamydial anomaly’

Engineers make strides toward artificial cartilage Posted: 13 Dec 2013 10:55 AM PST A research team has developed a better recipe for synthetic replacement cartilage in joints, calling for a newly designed durable hydrogel to be poured over a three-dimensional fabric "scaffold."

Jailhouse wine not as delicious as it sounds, could be deadly Posted: 13 Dec 2013 10:55 AM PST In a case series seemingly tailor-made for cinematic tragedy or farce, emergency physicians report severe botulism poisoning from a batch of potato-based "wine" (also known as pruno) cooked up in a Utah prison.

Evidence of savings in accountable care organizations, cancer care Posted: 13 Dec 2013 10:55 AM PST Approximately 10 percent of Medicare spending is for cancer care, and Medicare spending is nearly four times higher for beneficiaries with cancer than in those without the disease.

Misunderstanding of palliative care leads to preventable suffering Posted: 13 Dec 2013 10:54 AM PST A new review says palliative care's association with end of life has created an "identity problem" that means the majority of patients facing a serious illness do not benefit from treatment of the physical and psychological symptoms that occur throughout their disease.

Laying siege to chemoresistance Posted: 13 Dec 2013 10:54 AM PST Some lymphoma types resistant to conventional therapies could be treated more effectively by using drugs geared towards the specific molecular alteration of the tumor.

Zebrafish help decode link between calcium deficiency, colon cancer Posted: 13 Dec 2013 10:54 AM PST A tiny, transparent fish embryo and a string of surprises led scientists to a deeper understanding of the perplexing link between low calcium and colon cancer.

Clot-busters, caught on tape Posted: 13 Dec 2013 10:53 AM PST Ultrasound-stimulated microbubbles have been showing promise in recent years as a non-invasive way to break up dangerous blood clots. But though many researchers have studied the effectiveness of this technique, not much was understood about why it works. Now a team of researchers has collected the first direct evidence showing how these wiggling microbubbles cause a blood clot's demise.

Newly discovered gene interaction could lead to novel cancer therapies Posted: 13 Dec 2013 06:49 AM PST Scientists have revealed how two genes interact to kill a wide range of cancer cells. The genes known as mda-7/IL-24 and SARI could potentially be harnessed to treat both primary and metastatic forms of brain, breast, colon, lung, ovary, prostate, skin and other cancers.

Study breaks blood-brain barriers to understanding Alzheimer's Posted: 13 Dec 2013 06:48 AM PST A study in mice shows how a breakdown of the brain's blood vessels may amplify or cause problems associated with Alzheimer's disease. The results suggest that blood vessel cells called pericytes may provide novel targets for treatments and diagnoses.

Snail fever expected to decline in Africa due to climate change Posted: 13 Dec 2013 06:48 AM PST The dangerous parasite Schistosoma mansoni that causes snail fever in humans could become significantly less common in the future, a new international study predicts. The results are surprising because they contradict the general assumption that climate change leads to greater geographical spread of diseases. The explanation is that the parasite's host snails stand to lose suitable habitat due to climate change.

Wrist fracture significantly raises risk of hip fracture Posted: 13 Dec 2013 06:48 AM PST A new study showed that patients with Colles' fracture are at higher risk than patients with osteoporosis to have a subsequent hip fracture within one year; Colles' fracture and osteoporosis together further increase the risk of hip fracture.

A stop sign for cancer Posted: 13 Dec 2013 06:33 AM PST A particularly aggressive form of leukemia is the acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). It is especially common among children and very difficult to treat. Researchers have now discovered completely new targets for the treatment of blood cancers. Studying the cancer protein STAT5, the scientists found new opportunities for the development of effective anti-cancer drugs.

New discovery on how skin cells form 'bridges' paves the way for advances in wound healing and tissue engineering Posted: 13 Dec 2013 06:28 AM PST Scientists have discovered that outer skin cells are able to unite to form suspended "bridges" during wound healing. The new findings will pave the way for tissue engineering, such as the design of artificial skin, and better wound treatment.

Deep sequencing of breast cancer tumors predict outcomes after single dose of therapy Posted: 12 Dec 2013 03:59 PM PST New research examined how changes in the genetic composition of breast cancer tumors after brief exposure to either biologic therapy or chemotherapy can predict future clinical outcomes in patients.

Family structure linked to high blood pressure in African-American men Posted: 12 Dec 2013 03:58 PM PST In a study of African-American men, researchers found that boys who grew up in two-parent homes were less likely to have high blood pressure as adults compared to those raised by a single parent. This is the first study of an African-American population to document an association between childhood family living arrangements and blood pressure.

Low-power tunneling transistor for high-performance devices at low voltage Posted: 12 Dec 2013 01:03 PM PST A new type of transistor that could make possible fast and low-power computing devices for energy-constrained applications such as smart sensor networks, implantable medical electronics and ultra-mobile computing is feasible, according researchers. Called a near broken-gap tunnel field effect transistor, the new device uses the quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons through an ultra-thin energy barrier to provide high current at low voltage.

New treatment for skin, corneal wound healing in diabetic patients Posted: 12 Dec 2013 01:01 PM PST A team of researchers recently developed several diabetic models to study impaired wound healing in diabetic corneas. Using a genome-wide cDNA array analysis, the group identified genes, their associated pathways and the networks affected by DM in corneal epithelial cells and their roles in wound closure. Their findings may bring scientists one step closer to developing new treatments that may slow down or thwart the impact on vision.

Using air transportation data to predict pandemics Posted: 12 Dec 2013 11:21 AM PST Computational work has led to a new mathematical theory for understanding the global spread of epidemics. The resulting insights could not only help identify an outbreak's origin but could also significantly improve the ability to forecast the global pathways through which a disease might spread. Scientists could use the theory to reconstruct outbreak origins with higher confidence, compute epidemic spreading speed and forecast when an epidemic wave front is to arrive at any location worldwide.

Study documents secondhand exposure to nicotine from electronic cigarettes Posted: 12 Dec 2013 11:19 AM PST Study compared emissions from electronic and conventional cigarettes, and found that secondhand exposure to nicotine from e-cigarettes is on average 10 times less than from tobacco smoke.

Helping cancer researchers make sense of deluge of genetic data Posted: 12 Dec 2013 11:19 AM PST A web research tool is helping cancer researchers and physicians make sense out of genetic data from nearly 100,000 patients and more than 50,000 mice. The Gene Expression Barcode 3.0 is a vital resource in the new era of personalized medicine.

Children with autism benefit from peer solicitation Posted: 12 Dec 2013 11:19 AM PST Peer solicitation – a child inviting another to play – can improve reciprocal social interaction among children with autism, according to a study.

New way to predict prognosis for heart failure patients Posted: 11 Dec 2013 03:50 PM PST Researchers have identified a new way to predict which heart failure patients are likely to see their condition get worse and which ones have a better prognosis. Their study is one of the first to show that energy metabolism within the heart, measured using a noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test, is a significant predictor of clinical outcomes, independent of a patient's symptoms or the strength of the heart's ability to pump blood, known as the ejection fraction.

Targeted antibody, immune checkpoint blocker rein in follicular lymphoma Posted: 11 Dec 2013 03:38 PM PST One drug attacks tumor cells directly, the other treats the immune system by taking the brakes off T cell response. Together, they put half of the patients with relapsed follicular lymphoma into complete remission in a phase II clinical trial.

In search of treatment for rare bone cancer Posted: 11 Dec 2013 11:19 AM PST Researchers say that a drug approved to treat lung cancer substantially shrank tumors in mice that were caused by a rare form of bone cancer called chordoma.

Rare gene variants double risk for Alzheimer's disease Posted: 11 Dec 2013 10:39 AM PST A team of researchers has identified variations in a gene that double a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease later in life. The newly identified variations occur rarely in the population, making them hard for researchers to identify. But they're important because individuals who carry them are at substantially increased risk.

Scientists resolve decades-old mystery of ‘chlamydial anomaly’ Posted: 11 Dec 2013 10:39 AM PST A 50-year-old mystery surrounding the existence of a cell wall in the bacterial pathogen Chlamydia trachomatis, or chlamydia, has been solved. Chlamydia is the leading cause of sexually transmitted infections worldwide, infecting nearly 1.5 million Americans each year. It can cause sterility and other complications, and is the leading cause of preventable blindness. Other types of chlamydia cause a variety of diseases in humans and animals, including two strains of the bacterium that are threatening survival of the koala population in Australia.

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