The intense exchanges that human mothers share with their newborn infants may have some pretty deep roots, suggests a study of rhesus macaques reported online on October 8th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.
The new findings show that mother macaques and their infants have interactions in the first month of life that the researchers say look a lot like what humans tend to do.
(Boston) – Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have identified a tool, the "Getting-Out-of-Bed (GoB) measure" to assess motivation and life outlook in older adults. The study, which appears in the October issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, shows that the tool has the potential to be an easy-to-use measure to bolster motivation and thus, improve health behaviors and outcomes in the growing population of older adults.
If a little vitamin A is good, more must be better, right? Wrong! New research published online in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) shows that vitamin A plays a crucial role in energy production within cells, explaining why too much or too little has a complex negative effect on our bodies. This is particularly important as combinations of foods, drinks, creams, and nutritional supplements containing added vitamin A make an overdose more possible than ever before.
Elderly cancer patients need a combination of treatments tailor-made to their specific needs to successfully combat the disease. The challenge is to boost their immune response to cancer vaccines, because like the rest of our organs, our immune system ages and gradually becomes less efficient as we get older. Dr. Joseph Lustgarten, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in the US, reviews the effects of aging on the immune system and strategies used to activate a stronger antitumor immune response in the elderly, including genetic modifications in animal models.
A Japanese research group led by Prof. Makoto Tominaga and Dr. Sravan Mandadi (National Institute for Physiological Sciences: NIPS) found that ATP plays a key role in transmitting temperature information from skin keratinocytes to afferent sensory neurons. Their findings were presented in the Pflugers Archiv European Journal of Physiology published on October 2009.
Overweight individuals are not just at greater risk of having sleep-disordered-breathing (SDB), they are also likely to suffer greater consequences, according to new research.
According to the study, to be published in the October 15 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, an official publication of the American Thoracic Society, excess weight increased the severity of oxygen desaturation in the blood of individuals with SDB during and after apneas and hypopneas.
Patients with moderate to severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) can benefit from triple therapy that includes a long-acting β-agonist (LABA), an inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) and an anti-muscarinic agent, according to researchers in Germany.
DALLAS – Oct. 8, 2009 – The antidote for acute liver failure caused by acetaminophen poisoning also can treat acute liver failure due to most other causes if given before severe injury occurs, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers and their colleagues at 21 other institutions have found.
This release is available in http://chinese..org/zh/emb_releases/2009-10/w-scw100509.php">Chinese.
North Carolina, October, 2009 – Scientists from the United States and China have revealed the potential for human stem cells to provide a vaccination against colon cancer, reports a study published in Stem Cells.
Current figures underestimate the number of children who may be at risk of harm from parental substance use. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Public Health have generated new estimates using five national surveys which include measures of binge, hazardous and dependent drinking, illicit drug use and mental health.
People with coeliac disease may develop osteoporosis because their immune system attacks their bone tissue, a new study has shown.
It is the first time an autoimmune response – a condition whereby the body can attack itself – has been shown to cause damage to bones directly.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh studied a protein called osteoprotegerin (OPG) in people with coeliac disease – a digestive condition that affects 1 in 100 people.
Clinical research out of University Hospitals Case Medical Center has found that African Americans with a common form of lung cancer have a lower frequency of drug-sensitizing genetic mutations, which may impact response to new cancer-fighting drugs. Published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study by Rom Leidner, MD, and colleagues report that ethnicity plays a significant role in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) genetics and more personalized treatments may be beneficial to cancer patients.
New York, NY (October 7, 2009) – Autism Speaks' Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) and the Autism Tissue Program (ATP) continue to play an integral role in continuing genetic research and new findings in the complex autism inheritance and causation puzzle. In a study published in the October 7, edition of the journal Nature, an extensive research team of more than 75 research institutions identified semaphoring 5A, a gene implicated in the growth of neurons to form proper contacts and connections with other neurons.
OKLAHOMA CITY – Researchers at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center are helping to lead a massive international study on the possible genetic effects of radiation and cancer drug exposures on future generations. The study's principal investigators are meeting this week at the OU Health Sciences Center to discuss their recent findings, which will be presented at an upcoming meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.
This press release is available in Japanese.
The debut issue of Science Translational Medicine -- a new journal intended to help speed basic research advances into clinics and hospitals -- describes a microfluidics device for detecting tiny amounts of estrogen, which could potentially improve breast cancer screening.