More research is needed before conclusions can be drawn about the effect of recent reforms on hospital quality, let alone about the merits of the coalition government's proposals to extend competition, warn experts on bmj.com today.
Professor Gwyn Bevan and Matthew Skellern at the London School of Economics and Political Science argue that the jury is still out on the effects of hospital competition on quality of care within the English NHS.
Antivirulence drugs disarm pathogens rather than kill them, and although they could be effective in theory, antivirulence drugs have never been tested in humans. A new study to be published in the online journal mBio® on Tuesday, October 18 reveals these drugs have the potential to fight infection while avoiding the pitfalls of drug resistance.
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- People who are able to cross their legs soon after having a severe stroke appear to be more likely to have a good recovery compared to people who can't cross their legs. That's according to new research published in the October 11, 2011, print issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
If you're a middle-aged woman with Restless Legs Syndrome, you may have a higher risk of developing high blood pressure, according to new research reported in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.
RLS is a common yet under-recognized sensory motor disorder characterized by intense, unpleasant leg sensations, and an irresistible urge to move the legs. RLS symptoms can lead to poor sleep and daytime drowsiness. It affects as many as 15 percent of the adult population.
Researchers found that women who reported:
CHICAGO – Consuming dietary supplements, including multivitamins, folic acid, iron and copper, among others, appears to be associated with an increased risk of death in older women, according to a report in the October 10 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The article is part of the journal's Less Is More series.
Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin have shown that a protein can inhibit metastasis of colon and melanoma cancers. The findings are published in the October 10, 2011 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Michael B. Dwinell, Ph.D., director of the Bobbie Nick Voss Laboratory and associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, is the lead author on the paper.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say that losing the ability to make a particular kind of sugar molecule boosted disease protection in early hominids, and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, the genus Homo.
The findings, published in this week's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are among the first evidence of a novel link between cell surface sugars, Darwinian sexual selection, and immune function in the context of human origins
Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have today (07/10/2011) announced a new technique to reprogramme human cells, such as skin cells, into stem cells. Their process increases the efficiency of cell reprogramming by one hundred-fold and generates cells of a higher quality at a faster rate.
Some cancers can be effectively treated with drugs inhibiting proteins known as receptor tyrosine kinases, but not those cancers caused by mutations in the KRAS gene. A team of researchers led by Jeffrey Engelman, at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, has now identified a potential way to effectively use receptor tyrosine kinases inhibitors to treat individuals with KRAS mutant colorectal cancers — combine them with inhibitors of the MEK/ERK signaling pathway.
Huntington disease is a devastating neurogenerative disorder that causes a progressive loss of functional capacity and reduced life span. It is an inherited condition caused by a mutant HTT gene. Although this has been known for many years, the functions of the normal Htt protein and the mechanisms by which the mutant protein generated from the mutant HTT gene causes disease are not well understood.
The number of individuals with type 2 diabetes continues to rise, primarily a self-inflicted epidemic. One of the main risk factors for developing type 2 diabetes is resistance of cells in the body (particularly liver, fat, and skeletal muscle cells) to the effects of the hormone insulin.
An attenuated, or weakened, strain of Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria can be used as a vaccine to prevent or reduce the severity of trachoma, the world's leading cause of infectious blindness, suggest findings from a National Institutes of Health study in monkeys.
A new study has found that an osteoporosis drug protects against the bone damaging side effects of certain breast cancer medications. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study indicates that some breast cancer patients could take zoledronic acid in addition to their anti-cancer medications to maintain bone health.
Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – In order for cells of different types to maintain their identities even after repeated rounds of cell division, each cell must "remember" which genes were active before division and pass along that memory to its daughter cells. Cells deal with this challenge by deploying a "bookmarking" process. In the same way a sticky note marks the last-read page in a book, certain molecules tag the active genes in a cell so that, after it divides, the same genes are reactivated right away in the new cells.
Could controlling cell-membrane fat play a key role in turning off disease?
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago think so, and a biosensor they've created that measures membrane lipid levels may open up new pathways to disease treatment.
Wonhwa Cho, distinguished professor of chemistry, and his coworkers engineered a way to modify proteins to fluoresce and act as sensors for lipid levels.
Their findings are reported in Nature Chemistry, online on Oct. 9.