Twice-yearly treatment with denosumab, a new targeted therapy to stop bone loss, increased bone density and prevented spinal fractures in men receiving androgen-deprivation therapy for prostate cancer. The report from an international research study, the first to document reduced fracture risk in men receiving the hormone-blocking treatment, will appear in the August 20 New England Journal of Medicine and is receiving early online release.
Body
PHILADELPHIA – A new study conducted at the Jefferson Headache Center at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania shows an investigational, orally-inhaled therapy is effective in treating migraines. The multi-center, phase three FREEDOM-301 trial for the orally-inhaled migraine therapy, LEVADEX™, shows study participants had significant relief from symptoms such as pain, nausea and light and sound sensitivity when compared to placebo treatment.
Rats fed a high-fat diet show a stark reduction in their physical endurance and a decline in their cognitive ability after just nine days, a study by Oxford University researchers has shown.
The research, funded by the British Heart Foundation and published in the FASEB Journal, may have implications not only for those eating lots of high-fat foods, but also athletes looking for the optimal diet for training and patients with metabolic disorders.
Research on blood transfusions points to a potential risk of transfusing donated platelets, especially to patients with bone marrow failure syndromes who are subsequently candidates for bone marrow transplantation.
The results are online and scheduled for publication in the September 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Until now immediate cooling of the newborn infant was the only treatment that could possibly prevent brain damage following oxygen deprivation during delivery. New research findings from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg and Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden, in collaboration with Zhengzhou University in China, open up the possibility of a new and effective treatment that can be started as late as two days after birth.
An international team of researchers from the Netherlands, Russia and Austria discovered that monolayer coverage and channel length set the mobility in self-assembled monolayer field-effect transistors (SAMFETs). This opens the door to extremely sensitive chemical sensors that can be produced in a cost-effective way. The research was done at Philips Research Eindhoven and Eindhoven University of Technology. The findings were published as an Advanced Online Publication in Nature Nanotechnology.
SAMFETs
Biologists have long known how adaptive evolution works. New mutations arise within a population and those that confer some benefits to the organism increase in frequency and eventually become fixed in the population.
By washing your hands after digging in beach sand, you could greatly reduce your risk of ingesting bacteria that could make you sick. In new research, scientists have determined that, although beach sand is a potential source of bacteria and viruses, hand rinsing may effectively reduce exposure to microbes that cause gastrointestinal illnesses.
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- If manmade devices could be combined with biological machines, laptops and other electronic devices could get a boost in operating efficiency.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have devised a versatile hybrid platform that uses lipid-coated nanowires to build prototype bionanoelectronic devices.
Mingling biological components in electronic circuits could enhance biosensing and diagnostic tools, advance neural prosthetics such as cochlear implants, and could even increase the efficiency of future computers.
Hamilton, ON (August 10, 2009) –Accumulating safety data from the large, international ORIGIN trial have been reviewed by its independent data monitoring committee, who have concluded that there is no cause for concern.
This six-year study, which is lead by McMaster University professors Dr. Hertzel Gerstein and Dr. Salim Yusuf of the Population Health Research Institute, is determining whether insulin glargine and/or omega 3 fatty acids can reduce cardiovascular events in 12,578 people with elevated blood sugar levels from around the world.
DALLAS – Aug. 11, 2009 – People diagnosed with type 2 diabetes often resist taking insulin because they fear gaining weight, developing low blood sugar and seeing their quality of life decline.
A study recently completed at UT Southwestern Medical Center suggests that those fears are largely unfounded and that patients and physicians should consider insulin as a front-line defense, as opposed to a treatment of last resort for non-insulin-dependent diabetes.
Heart attacks and strokes — the leading causes of death in the United States and other developed countries — may have been rare for the vast majority of human history, suggests a study to be published in PLoS ONE on Tuesday, August 11.
"Understanding how physiological systems respond in [indigenous] populations helps us better understand conditions in countries like the United States at the beginning of the 20th century," said senior author Eileen Crimmins of the USC Davis School of Gerontology. "This also offers some insight into the worlds we evolved in."
Working with researchers in China, biologists at UC San Diego have discovered how a Chinese drug effective in killing parasitic roundworms works.
Their discovery of the drug's biological mechanism provides important new information about how to combat parasitic roundworms, which infect more than a billion people in tropical regions and are one of the leading causes of debilitation in underdeveloped countries. The researchers detail their findings in the current issue of the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
The patient described in this paper, Amanda Mayer, age four, of Staten Island, N.Y., had previously undergone all three stages of the Fontan procedure at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, but developed severe complications. Her oxygen saturation was very low – only 72 percent, compared to normal levels of at least 95 percent – which indicated the possibility of abnormal connections between the veins and arteries in one of her lungs.
Edith Hessel and colleagues, at Dynavax Technologies Corporation, Berkeley, have identified the reason that humans and rodents respond differently to a molecule that is being developed to treat allergic diseases.