The idea of "healthy" obesity is a misleading concept in that most obese individuals become progressively less healthy over time, according to a study that tracked the health of more than 2,500 men and women for 20 years. The research was published online today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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The common cold virus can reproduce itself more efficiently in the cooler temperatures found inside the nose than at core body temperature, according to a new Yale-led study. This finding may confirm the popular yet contested notion that people are more likely to catch a cold in cool-weather conditions.
DDT hasn't been used in America for 40 years but it is still a popular research subject because everyone has heard of it. And it is still quite popular in other countries because science recognizes it is the best way to control malaria with the least impact on humans and the environment.
The roles that white fat and brown fat play in metabolism is well documented, but new research published in the January 2015 issue of the FASEB Journal presents a new wrinkle: each type of fat may change into the other, depending on the temperature. In particular, cold temperatures may encourage "unhealthy" white fat to change into "healthy" brown fat.
Eating more whole grains is associated with reduced mortality, especially deaths due to cardiovascular disease (CVD), according to a new report.
Whole grains are widely recommended in many dietary guidelines as healthful food. However, data regarding how much whole grains people eat and mortality were not entirely consistent. They don't help cancer deaths, though.
Metformin is a proven, oral diabetes medicine but many patients with type 2 diabetes in the United States may be discouraged from taking it because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inappropriately labels the drug unsafe for some patients also suffering from kidney problems, researchers from Penn Medicine and Weill Cornel Medical College report this week in a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
And that's without supplement-selling nutritionists promoting the belief that real medicine is harmful.
In studying the cellular structure and function of insulin, a research team has uncovered previously unknown steps in the development of insulin resistance, a hallmark of type 2 diabetes.
When biologists fed mice sugar in doses proportional to what many people eat, the fructose-glucose mixture found in high-fructose corn syrup was more toxic than sucrose or table sugar. It reduced both the reproduction and lifespan of female rodents. The study found no differences in survival, reproduction or territoriality of male mice on the high-fructose and sucrose diets., because both sugars may be equally toxic to male mice.
On Christmas Eve, 2002, 2-year-old Bryce Faber was diagnosed with a deadly cancer called neuroblastoma. The toddler's treatment, in addition to surgery, included massive amounts of radiation followed by even more massive amounts of antibiotics, and it no doubt saved his life. But those mega-doses of antibiotics, while staving off infections in his immunosuppressed body, caused a permanent side effect: deafness.
A healthy and robust immune response may depend greatly upon what lies beneath. In a new paper published in Science, researchers report the surprising discovery that fat cells below the skin help protect us from bacteria - and thus skin infections,
The human body's defense against microbial infection is complex, multi-tiered and involves numerous cell types, culminating in the arrival of neutrophils and monocytes - specialized cells that literally devour targeted pathogens.
Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have created a statistical model that measures the proportion of cancer incidence, across many tissue types, caused mainly by random mutations that occur when stem cells divide. By their measure, two-thirds of adult cancer incidence across tissues can be explained primarily by "bad luck," when these random mutations occur in genes that can drive cancer growth, while the remaining third are due to environmental factors and inherited genes.
By targeting telomeres with a small molecule called 6-thiodG, that takes advantage of the cell's 'biological clock' to kill cancer cells and shrink tumor growth, researchers may have a new therapy.
A MERTK gene defect responsible for a recently identified form of progressive retinal atrophy in Swedish vallhund dogs has been discovered. This discovery opens the door to the development of therapies for diseases that cause blindness both in dogs and humans.(10.1371/journal.pone.0111941)
The first patient was dosed in a Phase 1b clinical trial of SYN-004, an investigational oral beta-lactamase enzyme for the prevention of Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) infection, antibiotic-associated diarrhea and secondary antibiotic-resistant infections in patients receiving intravenous (IV) beta-lactam antibiotic therapy.
The American Cancer Society's annual cancer statistics report finds that a 22% drop in cancer mortality over two decades led to the avoidance of more than 1.5 million cancer deaths that would have occurred if peak rates had persisted.