Women who regularly enjoy an alcoholic drink or two have a significantly lower risk of having a non-fatal heart attack than women who are life-time abstainers, epidemiologists at the University at Buffalo have shown.
Moderation is the key, however. Women in the study who reported being intoxicated at least once a month were nearly three times more likely to suffer a heart attack than abstainers, results showed.
New evidence indicates that small pieces of noncoding genetic material known as microRNAs (miRNAs) might influence cancer susceptibility. Differences in certain miRNAs may predispose some individuals to develop cancer, say researchers.
Findings presented today at Digestive Disease Week® 2007 (DDW), from long-term extensions of the ACT trials (Active Ulcerative Colitis 1 & 2) show that subjects with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis (UC) who had responded to REMICADE® (infliximab) in the blinded phase of the trials maintained improvement in their clinical symptoms for up to two years.
A data-driven computational approach developed by a University of Illinois statistician is revealing secrets about inner Earth and discovering unique gene expressions in fruit flies, zebra fish and other living organisms.
"Using mathematical concepts from inverse scattering and modern statistics, we let the data 'speak,' and automatically generate an appropriate model," said Ping Ma, a professor of statistics at the U. of I. and lead author of a paper describing the technique that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
UCLA and Dartmouth scientists have identified a crucial enzyme in plant vitamin C synthesis, which could lead to enhanced crops. The discovery now makes clear the entire 10-step process by which plants convert glucose into vitamin C, an important antioxidant in nature.
Integrating bio-chemical sensors into textiles for continuous monitoring of a person's health is the goal of the EU-funded BIOTEX ('Bio-sensing textile for health management') project.
As the first of its kind, the project is developing optimal electric, electrochemical and optical sensors which will be embedded into a textile substrate to create 'sensing patches' able to monitor the biochemical parameters of a user.
Botox is not just for keeping aging actresses looking eerily young any more. Injecting botulinum toxin A, or Botox, into the prostate gland of men with enlarged prostates eased symptoms and improved quality of life for up to a year after the procedure.
The study was based on 37 men with benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH).
The University of Delaware is helping to build a huge "IceCube" at the South Pole, and it has nothing to do with cooling beverages.
"IceCube" is a gigantic scientific instrument--a telescope for detecting illusive particles called neutrinos that can travel millions of miles through space, passing right through planets.
The IceCube telescope's optical detectors are deployed in mile-and-a-half deep holes in the Antarctic ice. Credit: James Roth, University of Delaware
A colon cancer researcher at the Ireland Cancer Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center (UHCMC) has laid out the roadmap for how medical science should employ aspirin and new aspirin-like drugs for use in preventing colon cancer in certain high-risk individuals.
Scientists subjected mice to a diet that was 40 percent fat and lots of high fructose corn syrup - the human equivalent of a McDonald's meal and 8 cans of soda per day - and it took only four weeks for liver enzymes to increase and for glucose intolerance, the beginning of type II diabetes, to begin.
Heart researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College have used gene therapy to reverse heart failure in animals. In addition, they found that this gene therapy strategy had "unique and additive effects" to currently used, standard heart failure drugs called beta-blockers.
Call it the cellular equivalent of big glasses, a funny nose and a fake mustache.
Bone marrow stem cells attracted to the site of a cancerous growth frequently take on the outward appearance of the malignant cells around them, University of Florida researchers report in a paper to be published in the August issue of Stem Cells.
Long before animals with limbs (tetrapods) came onto the scene about 365 million years ago, fish already possessed the genes associated with helping to grow hands and feet (autopods) report University of Chicago researchers.
Paddlefish fins exhibit a unique pattern of Hox expression previously thought present only in the developing hands and feet of land vertebrates (tetrapods). This result supports the notion that fossil fish already possessed the genetic toolkit needed to evolve hands, feet, fingers and toes.
Could the food we eat be contributing to the continuing rise of antibiotic-resistant infections? Harmless and even beneficial bacteria that exist in our food supply may also be carrying genes that code for antibiotic resistance. Once in our bodies, could they transmit the resistance genes to disease-causing bacteria?
Circadian clocks regulate the timing of biological functions in almost all higher organisms. Anyone who has flown through several time zones knows the jet lag that can result when this timing is disrupted.
Now, new research by Cornell and Dartmouth researchers explains the biological mechanism behind how circadian clocks sense light through a process that transfers energy from light to chemical reactions in cells.