Just one "pulse" of artificial light at night disrupts circadian cell division, reveals a new study carried out by Dr. Rachel Ben-Shlomo of the University of Haifa-Oranim Department of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology along with Prof. Charalambos P. Kyriacou of the University of Leicester. "Damage to cell division is characteristic of cancer, and it is therefore important to understand the causes of this damage," notes Dr. Ben-Shlomo. The study has been published in the journal Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics.
Body
Palpation continues to be of great value in modern medicine, both practiced by doctors and as a technique for self-examination. However, palpation is limited to a few accessible organs, and the interpretation of the information sensed by the fingers is highly subjective.
Iron overload, a common feature of chronic liver disorders, has been linked with oxidative DNA damage, insulin resistance and liver steatosis, and with triggering of hepatic stellate cells thus inducing liver fibrosis. Recently, a key iron regulatory hormone, hepcidin, was discovered. This hormone has been found to suppress intestinal absorption of iron through its binding to ferroportin. Hepcidin is synthesized in the liver from its precursor protein, prohepcidin.
There are several papers which report the association of GI symptoms with diabetes. Epidemiological data regarding the association of GI symptoms with diabetes are, however, inconsistent, and the reported frequency of upper and lower GI symptoms varies among different ethnic groups/populations.
Atrophic gastritis and intestinal metaplasia are two important precursory lesions in the process of intestinal type gastric cancer. However, the precise mechanism of the progression of these two lesions is still unclear, a few studies have investigated the risk of host gene polymorphism on the atrophic gastritis and intestinal metaplasia, but all of them are limited by their one-time point screen.
A global study of nearly 10,000 women with early breast cancer has found wide variations in how they were treated, despite international consensus on best practice, according to the May issue of the British Journal of Surgery.
Researchers from Europe, Japan and America compared 9,779 women with an average age of 64 from 566 study sites in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK/Ireland and the USA.
Paleoindian groups* occupied North America throughout the Younger Dryas interval, which saw a rapid return to glacial conditions approximately 11,000 years ago. Until now, it has been assumed that cooling temperatures and their impact on communities posed significant adaptive challenges to those groups.
LIVERPOOL, UK – 12 April 2010: Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that dangerous strains of Salmonella are beginning to emerge in people infected with HIV in Africa.
Their research has found that, in adults with HIV, new African Salmonellae can cause severe disease by invading cells in the blood and bone marrow, where they can hide away, allowing them to evolve into more dangerous, multi-drug resistant strains over time. This is made possible by the loss of immune cells that occurs in HIV which renders the body vulnerable to attack.
BOSTON – Cancer of the lower esophagus develops almost exclusively in patients with Barrett's esophagus, an otherwise benign complication of esophageal reflux that affects approximately 3 million Americans. Although the prognosis of patients diagnosed with esophageal cancer is poor, the chances of successful treatment increase significantly if the disease is detected at an early dysplastic stage.
An international research team co-led by the Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI) has discovered a compound that kills specific lymphoma cells – a discovery that will accelerate developing targeted drugs to fight the most common form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
The research findings, published online today in Cancer Cell (DOI 0.1016/j.ccr.2009.12.050), show how the scientists used a chemical compound to block protein BCL6, the cancer-causing culprit in about half of all non-Hodgkins lymphoma cases, the fifth most common type of cancer in Canadians.
INDIANAPOLIS – It's not uncommon for individuals to take as many as a dozen different prescriptions, each with its own set of possible side effects. If a patient experiences one of the potential hundreds of different adverse reactions such as nausea, headaches, insomnia or heart palpitations, how does the physician quickly and accurately determine which drug is the culprit?
LETHBRIDGE, AB -- APRIL 2010 -- Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.
A paper published in the March edition of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America, reports that between 1961 and 1985, the ice cap grew in some years and shrank in others, resulting in an overall loss of mass. But that changed 1985 when scientists began to see a steady decline in ice volume and area each year.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Most women scheduled for gynecologic surgery to address noncancerous symptoms said in a recently published survey that they were not worried about the effects of the procedure on their sex lives.
However, a surprising 37 percent of women planning to be sterilized did express concern in this study that they might have less sexual desire after the operation – even though that surgery does not affect hormone levels.
URBANA –University of Illinois scientists have learned that a specific omega-6 fatty acid may be critical to maintaining skin health.
"In experiments with mice, we knocked out a gene responsible for an enzyme that helps the body to make arachidonic acid. Without arachidonic acid, the mice developed severe ulcerative dermatitis. The animals were very itchy, they scratched themselves continuously, and they developed a lot of bleeding sores," said Manabu Nakamura, a U of I associate professor of food science and human nutrition.
A team of researchers from the United States and Europe has identified more than a dozen genes that may play a role in the etiology of common forms of kidney disease. The team, known as the CKDGen Consortium, examined common variations in DNA sequences in more than 65,000 individuals of European descent. Common variations in several genes were found to be more frequent among people with poor kidney function or chronic kidney disease than in those with normal kidney function. The researchers further confirmed their findings in more than 20,000 additional individuals.