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Australian first study finds massive diabetic foot disease costs

New research from QUT shows preventable hospitalisation from diabetic foot disease is costing Australia hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology and co-chair of Diabetic Foot Australia, Peter Lazzarini, said the importance of early prevention of diabetic foot disease was never more important.

Mr Lazzarini led the Australian-first study published in BMJ Open finding one in every 22 patients in our hospitals have active diabetic foot disease.

Ship engine emissions adversely affect macrophages

In cooperation with colleagues of the University of Rostock, the University of Luxembourg, the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Eastern Finland, the Munich Scientists have now published the results in the journal PLOS ONE.

Soy-based protein boosts hunger hormone and stimulates appetite

Researchers have discovered a protein that stimulates secretion of ghrelin, an appetite-stimulating hormone produced in the stomach. When fed to mice, the protein, called soy-ghretropin, increased blood levels of ghrelin and boosted their appetite.

The findings, which are published in FEBS Letters, suggest that soy-ghretropin may be developed for elderly people or anorexic patients whose ghrelin levels and food intake are reduced.

Source: Wiley

A mini-antenna for the data processing of tomorrow

With the rapid advance of miniaturization, data processing using electric currents faces tough challenges, some of which are insurmountable. Magnetic spin waves are a promising alternative for the transfer of information in even more compact chips. Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), as part of an international research venture, have now succeeded in generating spin waves with extremely short wavelengths in the nanometer range - a key feature for their future application.

Lower risk of bowel cancer death linked to high omega 3 intake after diagnosis

A high dietary intake of omega 3 fatty acids, derived from oily fish, may help to lower the risk of death from bowel cancer in patients diagnosed with the disease, suggests research published online in the journal Gut.

If the findings can be reproduced in other studies, patients with bowel cancer might benefit from boosting their oily fish intake to help prolong their survival, say the researchers.

Big data for small cells

Certain questions in modern cell biology can only be answered by specifically observing the fate of individual cells. For example, researchers are interested in how stem cells develop into other cell types. Since in some cases such processes take several days to complete, the analysis with standard methods, which often measure only a single time point of the process, is not adequate.

Home-cooked meals for infants not always better than shop-bought ones

Home cooked meals specifically designed for infants and young children, are not always better than commercially available baby foods, suggests research published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Often perceived as the best option, home cooked meals are usually cheaper--unless organic ingredients are used--but they usually exceed energy density and dietary fat recommendations, the findings indicate.

Prostate cancer: should screening test procedures be tightened again?

The number of new cases of men suffering from metastatic prostate cancer has risen significantly in a decade's time, and is 72 percent greater in the year 2013 compared to 2004. This increase is especially worrying among men aged between 55 and 69 years old - the age group thought to benefit most from prostate cancer screening and early definitive treatment. These are some of the findings of a study published in Springer Nature's journal Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases.

Risk of low blood sugar differs among similar diabetes drugs

Adding sulphonylureas (SUs) to metformin remains a commonly used strategy for treating type 2 diabetes, but individual SUs differ and may confer different risks of abnormally low blood sugar, or hypoglycemia. SUs -- which include newer generation agents such as gliclazide, glipizide, glimepiride, and glibenclamide--stimulate the production of insulin in the pancreas and increase the effectiveness of insulin in the body.

High fat diet improves cartilage repair in mice

Obesity is a well-known risk factor for osteoarthritis, but its effects on cartilage repair are unknown. In a recent study in a mouse model of cartilage repair, a high fat diet and increased body weight did not negatively impair cartilage repair, and it could even accelerate it.

Surgical expenses cause financial catastrophe for millions each year

According to an analysis of publicly available data from 186 countries, direct medical costs of surgery put an estimated 43.9 per cent of the world's population at risk of financial catastrophe and between 30.8 and 57.0 per cent at risk of falling below national and international poverty lines.

Direct medical expenditures on surgery will push approximately 30 million individuals into financial catastrophe and 11 million below their country's poverty line every year.

Policy makers and ecologists must develop a more constructive dialogue to save the planet

Dublin, Ireland, Tuesday July 19, 2016 - An international consensus demands human impacts on the environment "sustain", "maintain", "conserve", "protect", "safeguard", and "secure" it, keeping it within "safe ecological limits". But, a new Trinity College Dublin-led study that assembled an international team of environmental scientists shows that policy makers have little idea what these terms mean or how to connect them to a wealth of ecological data and ideas.

Beware of antioxidants, warns scientific review

The lay press and thousands of nutritional products warn of oxygen radicals or oxidative stress and suggest taking so-called antioxidants to prevent or cure disease. Professor Pietro Ghezzi at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and Professor Harald Schmidt at the University of Maastricht have analyzed the evidence behind this. The result is a clear warning: do not take these supplements unless a clear deficiency is diagnosed by a healthcare professional.

On the path to controlled gene therapy

The ability to switch disease-causing genes on and off remains a dream for many physicians, research scientists and patients. Research teams from across the world are busy turning this dream into a reality, incuding a team of researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Led by Dr. Mazahir T. Hasan, and working under the auspices of the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, the team has successfully programmed a virus to transport the necessary genetic material to affected tissue and nerve cells inside the body.

Ancient rocks reveal how Earth recovered from mass extinction

Scientists have shed light on why life on Earth took millions of years to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time.

The study provides fresh insight into how Earth's oceans became starved of oxygen in the wake of the event 252 million years ago, delaying the recovery of life by five million years.

Findings from the study are helping scientists to better understand how environmental change can have disastrous consequences for life on Earth.