ANAHEIM, March 28, 2011 — In what they described as the opening of a new era in the development of potentially life-saving new drugs, scientists today reported discovery of a way to tone down an overactive gene involved in colon cancer and block a key protein involved in asthma attacks. Those targets long had ranked among hundreds of thousands that many scientists considered to be "undruggable," meaning that efforts to reach them with conventional medicines were doomed to fail.
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Reducing cardiovascular risk factors like high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes and being overweight could potentially reduce more than half of all cases of atrial fibrillation, according to research reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
A third of patients thought to have resistant hypertension had "white coat" hypertension during 24-hour ambulatory monitoring, in a large study reported in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.
In ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, the patient's blood pressure is checked at regular intervals under normal living and working conditions.
Calculations by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley estimate that the cancer risk associated with one type of airport security scanners is low based on the amount of radiation these devices emit, as long as they are operated and function correctly.
A team of scientists has discovered that descendants of "exploratory" butterflies that colonized new habitats differ genetically from their more cautious cousins.
TORONTO, ON – With birds chirping and temperatures warming, spring is finally in the air. But for University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) environmental chemist Torsten Meyer, springtime has a dark side.
"During the winter months, contaminants accumulate in the snow," says Meyer, an expert on snow-bound organic contaminants and a post-doctoral fellow at UTSC. "When the snow melts, these chemicals are released into the environment at high concentrations."
ATLANTA – Transplant and reconstructive surgeons from Emory University Hospital announced today at a news conference that they have successfully performed a rare complete hand transplant on 21-year-old Linda Lu, a college student from Orlando, Fla. This is a first for the Atlanta Hospital.
The 19-hour surgery took place on Saturday, March 12 and involved multiple teams of surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and operating room support staff. Two teams – one dedicated to the patient – and the other to the donor arm – successfully completed the surgery at approximately midnight.
When influenza pandemics arrive, the specter of disease spread through person-to-person contact can mean that schools close, hand sanitizer sales rise, and travellers stay home. But is severing social and business interactions with our neighbors really better than taking a chance on getting sick?
"Infectious disease can mean making trade-offs between the risks and rewards of meeting others," says Eli Fenichel, an Arizona State University scientist. "It's critical that we more clearly understand the role that human decisions play in transmitting disease."
Working with Professor Jeremy Harvey and Professor Adrian Mulholland of Bristol's School of Chemistry, Dr Julianna Olah, an EU Marie Curie Fellow in Bristol at the time, studied a class of enzymes – cytochromes P450 – which play an important role in removing drug molecules from the body.
STANFORD, Calif. — Heart transplant recipients and their physicians are likely more concerned with the function of the donated organ than with the donor's DNA sequences that tag along in the new, healthy tissue. However, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that an increase in the amount of the donor's DNA in the recipient's blood is one of the earliest detectable signs of organ rejection.
NEW YORK (March 28, 2011) -- Bariatric surgery should be considered earlier in the treatment of eligible patients to help stem the serious complications that can result from diabetes, according to an International Diabetes Federation (IDF) position statement presented by leading experts at the 2nd World Congress on Interventional Therapies for Type 2 Diabetes in New York.
Just like snowflakes, no two people are alike, even if they're identical twins according to new genetic research from The University of Western Ontario. Molecular geneticist Shiva Singh has been working with psychiatrist Dr. Richard O'Reilly to determine the genetic sequencing of schizophrenia using identical or monozygotic twins. The study is published in this month's PLoS ONE.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – How exactly bacterial pathogens cause diseases in plants remains a mystery and continues to frustrate scientists working to solve this problem. Now Wenbo Ma, a young plant pathologist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed research on the soybean plant in the lab that makes major inroads into our understanding of plant-pathogen interactions, a rapidly developing area among the plant sciences.
For the first time, a virus that causes respiratory disease in humanshas been linked to the deaths of wild mountain gorillas, reports ateam of researchers in the United States and Africa.
The finding confirms that serious diseases can pass from people tothese endangered animals.
The researchers are from the non-profit Mountain Gorilla VeterinaryProject; the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California,Davis; the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University;and the Rwanda Development Board.
New Delhi, India – The Indian Government today released new tiger population numbers for the first time since 2007, indicating that numbers have increased in the country that has half of the world's remaining wild tigers.
The government estimated current tiger numbers in India at 1,706, up from 1,411 during the last count in 2007. However, the 1,706 figure includes an additional tiger reserve in the count, the Sundarbans, that contained 70 tigers. This area was not counted in 2007.