Great strides have been made in treating neuroblastoma, the most common cancer in infants and toddlers. However, advanced cases are often fatal, and children who survive often face life-long physical and intellectual challenges related to their treatment. A study led by researchers at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, finds that a microRNA called let-7 plays a central role in curbing neuroblastoma and could focus efforts to find a targeted, nontoxic alternative to chemotherapy.
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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new study from the University of Illinois confirms a link between routine Pap smear screenings and a lower risk of developing cervical cancer in women over age 65. However, most American health guidelines discourage women in that age range from receiving screenings unless they have pre-existing risk factors.
The new findings are published in the journal Gynecologic Oncology.
Providing structural support and protection against such conditions as blistering, cataracts and dementia, intermediate filament proteins (IFs) reside in every cell in the human body. In insects, however, IFs are nowhere to be found.
Scientists posit that another kind of protein has taken over key IF functions in insects, but exactly what kind -- or even where to start looking -- has been a mystery.
In a look-back study of medical records, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine concluded that a major operation to fuse the spines of children with a rare form of severe, early-onset scoliosis can be eliminated in many cases.
Amphibians that tolerate higher temperatures are likely to fare better in a world affected by climate change, disease and habitat loss, according to two recent studies from the University of California, Davis.
Frogs are disappearing globally, and the studies examine why some survive while others perish. The studies reveal that thermal tolerance -- the ability to withstand higher temperatures -- may be a key trait in predicting amphibian declines.
HEAT-TOLERANT FROGS ESCAPE DEADLY FUNGUS
A new scientific study conducted by a team of leading AIDS scientists reveal results that lead the way to the development of an effective human vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In the study published in Nature Medicine, researchers worked with a species of Old World monkeys, rhesus macaques to reproduce the trial results of RV144, the only HIV vaccine that has been tested and shown to reduce the rate of HIV acquisition in a phase III clinical trial.
In a new paradigm of breast cancer research, physicians are fast-tracking promising new experimental drugs for further study, while immediately dropping drugs and drug combinations that don't work.
Funding for trauma research is needed now more than ever, and should become a priority in the wake of so many lives lost at mass casualty events--including most recently at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, say experts in an opinion piece published in the online journal Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open.
The fossilised remnants of tube-like "dwellings" which housed a primitive type of prehistoric sea worm on the ocean floor have been identified in a new study.
According to researchers, the long, perforated tubes may have looked like narrow chimneys reaching up from the sea bed, and were made by a creature called Oesia, which lived a solitary existence inside them about 500 million years ago.
6 July 2016 - In the first genome-scale experiment of its kind, researchers have gained new insights into how a mouse embryo first begins to transform from a ball of unfocussed cells into a small, structured entity. Published in Nature, the single-cell genomics study was led by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
Genetic testing in men with advanced prostate cancer could pick up a significant proportion whose disease may be caused by inherited mutations in genes involved in repairing DNA damage, a major new study reveals.
Testing prostate cancer patients for mutations in key DNA repair genes could identify those who may benefit from precision treatments that specifically target DNA repair weaknesses in cancer cells.
Society must align the overlapping priorities and often clashing interests of medical intelligence, national security agendas and the global health community, according to global health advocates writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have made an important breakthrough in their ongoing efforts to develop a diagnostic test that can tell health-care providers whether a patient has a bacterial infection and will benefit from antibiotics.
The study will be published July 6 in Science Translational Medicine.
Bacterial infections that don't respond to antibiotics are of rising concern, as is sepsis -- the immune system's last-ditch, failed attack on infection that ends up being lethal itself. Reporting online in Nature on July 7, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital describe new potential avenues for controlling both sepsis and the runaway bacterial infections that provoke it.
Viral hepatitis has become one of the leading causes of death and disability across the globe - killing at least as many people annually as TB, malaria or HIV/AIDS.
This is the finding of new research from scientists at Imperial College London and University of Washington, who analysed data from 183 countries collected between 1990 and 2013.
Viral hepatitis exists in five forms - A, B, C, D and E and is transmitted through bodily fluids, or, in the case of A and E, through food or drink contaminated with faeces.