Body

Weight loss reduces obstructive sleep apnoea in obese men, with the greatest effect seen in patients with severe disease, according to new research published on bmj.com today.

Obstructive sleep apnoea is a common sleep disorder characterised by pauses in breathing during sleep. Each episode (apnoea) lasts for at least 10 seconds and is caused by the collapse of the upper airways during sleep.

A new model can help physicians determine if a kidney disease patient on dialysis is likely to die within the next few months, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN). This clinical tool could help medical professionals initiate discussions with patients and their families about end-of-life care such as hospice.

A protein that plays a key role in copying DNA also plays a vital role in repairing breaks in it, UC Davis scientists have found. The work is helping researchers understand how cancer cells can resist radiation and chemotherapy, as well as how cells become cancerous in the first place.

The protein, known as proliferating cell nuclear antigen, forms a ring that fits around the DNA double helix. This cuff-like ring helps to keep in place DNA polymerase, the enzyme that makes a copy of the DNA strand when cells divide into two new cells.

RENO, Nev. – A University of Nevada, Reno professor who thinks the present weight management charts and screening tools for children are too difficult to understand and use has devised new, simpler charts that pediatricians and parents can use to help combat the increasing rates of obese and overweight children in the United States.

Adaptive vaccination strategies, based on age patterns of hospitalizations and deaths monitored in real-time during the early stages of a pandemic, outperform seasonal influenza vaccination allocation strategies, according to findings reported Dec. 3 by researchers, including two from Arizona State University, in the online journal PLoS ONE.

In a dramatic finding, a new drug for hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections that targets liver cells produced a substantial drop in blood levels of the virus in animals and continued to work up to several months after treatment, say scientists at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) in San Antonio.

Hoersholm, Denmark/San Diego, California, December 3, 2009 — A study published online in this week's Science shows that SPC3649, a breakthrough microRNA-targeted therapy developed by Santaris Pharma A/S using its proprietary Locked Nucleic Acid (LNA) technology, holds promise as a novel treatment for patients infected with the Hepatitis C virus (HCV).

An antibiotic that binds to a well-established target in a novel and unexpected way could be the inspiration for designing new, more potent antibacterial drugs.

"A completely new way to beat bacteria is an exciting find at a time when resistance to existing antibiotics is growing," said Professor Tony Maxwell from the John Innes Centre, lead author on the research to be published in Science. JIC is an institute of the BBSRC.

A new strategy for saving tropical forest species was published in the leading journal Science on the eve of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark, by a team of researchers, including William Laurance, senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and distinguished professor at James Cook University. The authors state that wealthy countries should adopt a carbon-payment system that explicitly incorporates biodiversity values.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Most scientists believe that staph infections are caused by many bacterial cells that signal each other to emit toxins. The signaling process is called quorum sensing because many bacteria must be present to start the process.

But the Jeff Brinker research group has determined that the very first stage of staph infection, when bacteria switch from a harmless to a virulent form, occurs in a single cell and that this individual process can be stopped by the application of a simple protein.

Feeding birds in winter is a most innocent human activity, but it can nonetheless have profound effects on the evolutionary future of a species, and those changes can be seen in the very near term. That's the conclusion of a report published online on December 3rd in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, showing that what was once a single population of birds known as blackcaps has been split into two reproductively isolated groups in fewer than 30 generations, despite the fact that they continue to breed side by side in the very same forests.

Researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine have pinpointed a mechanism that may help explain how chromosomal translocations – the supposedly random shuffling of large chunks of DNA that frequently lead to cancer – aren't so random after all. They have developed a model of such chromosomal mix-ups in prostate cancer which indicates that the male sex hormone (androgen) receptor unexpectedly plays a key role in driving specific translocations in the development of cancer.

The extinction of plant and animal species can be likened to emptying a museum of its collection, or dumping a cabinet full of potential medicines into the trash, or replacing every local cuisine with McDonald's burgers.

But the decline of species and their habitats may not just make the world boring. New research now suggests it may also put you at greater risk for catching some nasty disease.

In the 1980s, Harald zur Hausen and his co-workers discovered that specific types of human papillomavirus (HPV) cause cervical cancer. Scientists soon found out how these pathogens cause cells to degenerate. It is known today that the main culprits are viral proteins E6 and E7. Both proteins switch off different cellular control functions, thus promoting cell growth.

A special issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International contains the first scientific presentation of clinical experience with the novel influenza A virus (H1N1/09) in the German-speaking countries since the start of the pandemic. Ralf Winzer and his coauthors from the Düsseldorf University Hospital retrospectively evaluated data from a large clinical cohort of infected persons in Germany (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2009; 106[47]: 770-6).