The Foundation for Art & Healing today releases the proceedings from its groundbreaking Arts and the Heart Roundtable (AHR), a gathering of luminaries from the medical, arts and public health sectors regarding the connection between creative engagement and cardiac health. Held during the summer of 2009 in New York, the goal of the meeting was to draw on research and clinical expertise as well as the direct experiences of cardiac patients who have found creative endeavors to aid in their own personal healing processes.
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Small sales taxes on soft drinks in the range currently in force in some states are insufficient to reduce consumption of soda or curb obesity among children, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Such small taxes may reduce consumption in some subgroups such as children at greater risk for obesity, but reducing consumption for all children would require larger taxes, according to the study published by the journal Health Affairs.
A novel stem cell therapy that arms the immune system with an intrinsic defence against HIV could be a powerful strategy to tackle the disease.
Professor Ben Berkhout speaking at the Society for General Microbiology's spring meeting in Edinburgh today explains how this new approach could dramatically improve the quality of life and life expectancy for HIV sufferers in whom antiviral drugs are no longer effective.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) possesses extraordinary survival ability by masking itself from the host immune system and persisting for decades inside the host. Speaking at the Society for General Microbiology's spring meeting in Edinburgh today, Dr Kristine Arnvig provides further insight into how the bacterium causes tuberculosis (TB) by fine-tuning its behaviour in response to its surroundings to escape detection.
Viruses can wreak havoc on bacteria as well as humans and, just like us, bacteria have their own defence system in place, explains Professor John van der Oost, at the Society for General Microbiology's spring meeting. Uncovering the workings of the bacterial "immune system" could be used to keep industrial microbes at peak performance.
Over half of patients who need emergency investigation of sudden bleeding from their gut are still facing potentially "serious" delays, finds an audit of endoscopy services across the UK.
Endoscopy involves passing a camera on the end of a flexible tube down the gullet into the stomach. It is a recommended procedure for this type of bleed, known as acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding or AUGIB.
AUGIB is a common medical emergency, usually caused by bleeding from ulcers in the stomach or from veins (variceal bleeds) in the gullet (oesophagus).
Tumour cells depend upon estrogens to survive and proliferate in about 70% of all breast cancer cases. The most frequently used treatment to fight this variety of tumours relies on anti-estrogens such as tamoxifen. However, resistance to this type of therapy develops in more than 30% of the patients. Understanding the mechanisms involved in the appearance of resistance to tamoxifen is thus essential to develop new therapeutic approaches.
A drug already prescribed to shrink benign, enlarged prostates has been shown to reduce the risk of a prostate cancer diagnosis by 23 percent in men with an increased risk of the disease, a large international trial has found. Results are reported April 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A Los Alamos National Laboratory toxicologist and a multidisciplinary team of researchers have documented potential cellular damage from "fullerenes"—soccer-ball-shaped, cage-like molecules composed of 60 carbon atoms. The team also noted that this particular type of damage might hold hope for treatment of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, or even cancer.
Today's publication in Nature of the genetic blueprint for the zebra finch marks 10 years of success for the Ensembl project in helping researchers to navigate the genomes of a Noah's Ark of species.
Take a look at this: Scientists from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Oklahoma City made a huge step toward making the blind see, and they did it by using a form of gene therapy that does not involve the use of modified viruses.
In research to be published tomorrow (01 April 2010) in Nature, scientists break the news that they have sequenced the zebra finch genome. This is only the second ever bird genome to be sequenced – the first being that of the chicken.
A study of the genetics of common diseases including diabetes, heart disease and bipolar disorder has found that commonly occurring copy number variations – duplicated or missing chunks of DNA in our genome – are unlikely to play a major role in such diseases. The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, is published online today in the journal Nature.
The main cause of a rapid global cooling period, known as the Big Freeze or Younger Dryas - which occurred nearly 13,000 years ago - has been identified thanks to the help of an academic at the University of Sheffield.
A new paper, which is published in Nature today (1 April 2010), has identified a mega-flood path across North America which channelled melt-water from a giant ice sheet into the oceans and triggering the Younger Dryas cold snap.
An international research consortium has identified more than 800 genes that appear to play a role in the male zebra finch's ability to learn elaborate songs from his father. The researchers also found evidence that song behavior engages complex gene regulatory networks within the brain of the songbird– networks that rely on parts of the genome once considered junk.