Body

DALLAS, May 19, 2021 — Steps to ensure safety and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have had some unintended consequences on the management of chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, a leading cause of heart disease and health disparities in the United States.

A new article from Liverpool ocular researchers demonstrates that small uveal (intraocular) melanomas are not always harmless, as the current paradigm suggests.

Instead, a reasonable proportion of them have molecular genetic alterations, which categorises them as highly metastatic tumours. The article recommends that they should not be observed but rather treated immediately, to improve patients' chances of survival.

The paper shows that uveal melanoma patients with small tumours, when treated within a certain time frame in Liverpool, do indeed have improved outcomes.

Traditionally, an infection is thought to happen when microbes - bacteria, fungi, or viruses - enter and multiply in the body, and its severity is associated with how prevalent the microbes are in the body.

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - May 19, 2021 - A study led by scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute has identified a tumor marker that may be used to predict which breast cancer patients will experience resistance to endocrine therapy. The research offers a new approach to selecting patients for therapy that targets HER2, a protein that promotes the growth of cancer cells, to help avoid disease relapse or progression of endocrine-sensitive disease.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

New research from BYU published in PLOS Medicine found that providing medical patients with social support leads to an increased chance of survival and elongation of life. Such findings come at a critical time as doctors and healthcare professionals seek new ways to improve care and decrease mortality.

Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt has launched a study to determine the impact of a predictive model for identifying pediatric patients at risk for developing blood clots or venous thromboembolisms (VTEs).

The study uses advanced predictive analytics to inform medical teams of patients at risk for blood clots before they happen.

"Hospital-associated blood clots are an increasing cause of morbidity in pediatrics," said the study's principal investigator, Shannon Walker, MD, clinical fellow of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at Children's Hospital.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers at Oregon State University have found a key new piece of the puzzle in the quest to use gene therapy to enable people born deaf to hear.

The work centers around a large gene responsible for an inner-ear protein, otoferlin. Mutations in otoferlin are linked to severe congenital hearing loss, a common type of deafness in which patients can hear almost nothing.

What The Study Did: Demographic information from 105 randomized clinical trials for primary open-angle glaucoma was combined to compare the rate of participation between individuals from racial/ethnic minority groups with white individuals.

Authors: Deepkumar G. Patel, D.D.S., M.P.H., of New York Ophthalmology Associates in Manhattan, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

Fields of opium poppies once bloomed where the Zurich Opera House underground garage now stands. Through a new analysis of archaeological seeds, researchers at the University of Basel have been able to bolster the hypothesis that prehistoric farmers throughout the Alps participated in domesticating the opium poppy.

HERSHEY, Pa. -- According to the World Health Organization, cervical cancer is the fourth most common form of cancer affecting women worldwide, and those in developing countries face a higher risk of dying from it. If detected early, cervical cancer responds well to treatment, however not everyone receives cancer screenings.

You can do a lot in four years: go from white to black belt in taekwondo, plant a dwarf apple tree and pick its fruit, see your grandchild off to college and attend her graduation or get your own degree. But the most severe complications of diabetes--from stroke to neuropathy to amputation--can make activities like these difficult or impossible for some people.

A new cancer vaccine could boost the positive effects of existing immunotherapy drugs, improving the success rate of treatments from 20% to 75% of cases, according to a new study by immunologists from the University of Konstanz. The vaccine, which incorporates a new immunostimulant that is safe for use in humans, was shown to partially eliminate tumours in mice.

A large survey of women in California shows significant racial and ethnic differences in the types of personal care products women use on a daily basis. Because many personal care products contain endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like parabens and phthalates that interfere with the body's hormones, the findings could shed light on how different products influence women's exposures to harmful chemicals that contribute to health inequities.

For the first time, researchers can quantitatively predict blood flow conditions that likely cause pathological behavior of the human blood protein von Willebrand factor (vWF). Predictions from this new method of simulation, developed at Lehigh University, can be used to optimize the design of the mechanical pumps known as left ventricular assist devices used in heart failure patients.

The research teams at the University of Hong Kong led by Professor Xuechen LI from the Research Division for Chemistry and Department of Chemistry, and Professor Yu WANG from the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy, reported a synthetic biotherapeutics with promising anti-tumour, insulin sensitising and hepatoprotective activities in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.