Protected by its own nutrients and blood supply, a beating heart supported by an investigational organ preservation device was successfully transplanted into a 47-year-old man with congestive heart failure and pulmonary hypertension on Sunday, April 8. The surgery was performed at UPMC by Kenneth R. McCurry, M.D., assistant professor of surgery, division of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of cardiopulmonary transplantation at UPMC's Heart, Lung and Esophageal Surgery Institute.
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A key aspect of how embryos create the cells which secrete insulin is revealed in a new study published tomorrow (18 May) in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The researchers hope that their findings will enable the development of new therapies for diabetes, a condition caused by insufficient levels of insulin.
Scientists at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), in cooperation with the CSIC, have developed a new electro-chemical biosensor which detects the presence, in food, of very small amounts of atrazine –one of the most widely used herbicides in agriculture and which also has very long lasting effects on the environment- as well as antibiotics in food.
Despite the fact that they both infect the liver, the hepatitis A and hepatitis C viruses actually have very little in common. The two are far apart genetically, are transmitted differently, and produce very different diseases.
By the time they are adults, men and women have distinctive attitudes about the roles women should play in society. But little is known about how these views develop. The first longitudinal study to track young people's attitudes toward gender found that no single course of gender attitude development contributed to adult attitudes, but rather that attitudes develop as a result of such factors as gender, birth order, gender of sibling, and parents' influences.
Chemical "relaxers" used to straighten hair are not associated with an increased risk of developing breast cancer among African-American women, say researchers who followed 48,167 Black Women's Health Study participants.
Tomatoes might be nutritious and tasty, but don’t count on them to prevent prostate cancer. In the May issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers based at the National Cancer Institute and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center report that lycopene, an antioxidant predominately found in tomatoes, does not effectively prevent prostate cancer.
One of the world’s largest and least studied freshwater turtles has been found in Cambodia’s Mekong River, raising hopes that the threatened species can be saved from extinction.
If you have Mom's smile, Dad's eyes and Grandpa's laugh, you might wonder what other traits you picked up from the genealogic fabric of the ol' family tree.
Automobile crashes remain the leading cause of death for adolescents and young adults, compounded by the effects of alcohol and failure to use seatbelts. Although males have tended to be associated with alcohol-related crashes, a study to be presented at the 2007 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Annual Meeting shows that young females are beginning to show an alarming increase in fatal automobile crashes related to alcohol use and a failure to use seatbelts.
Scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda teamed up with local, eastern Ugandan farmers to evaluate the effectiveness of low-cost alternatives for soil treatment. By implementing alternative soil fertility management and a reduction in crop tillage, scientists hope to help small-scale farmers to increase crop outputs.
Despite hundreds of families being told their children have peanut allergies every year, many of the children may be able to eat peanuts safely, a study by researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Sydney Children's Hospital has found.
Peanut allergies occur in one in 200 infants, according to the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy.
"This is a really important finding," said Dr Brynn Wainstein, a Sydney Children's Hospital immunologist and MD candidate at UNSW.
A challenging goal in biology is to understand how the principal cellular functions are integrated so that cells achieve viability and optimal fitness under a wide range of nutritional conditions. Scientists from the French research centers INRA and CNRS showed by genetic approaches that, in the model bacterium Bacillus subtilis, central carbon metabolism (which generates energy from nutrients) and replication (which synthesizes DNA), two key functions in the fields of nutrition and heredity, are tightly linked.
When it comes to growing cells in a lab, technique matters. A new Brown University study shows that nerve cells grown in three-dimensional cultures use 1,766 genes differently compared to nerve cells grown in standard two-dimensional petri dishes.
A new study says that Pycnogenol natural pine bark extract from the French maritime pine tree helps prevent damage that high blood pressure causes to the heart. The study demonstrates Pycnogenol counteracts the "wearing out" of the heart, which may aid the five million Americans living with heart failure.
Previous studies have shown Pycnogenol supplementation to be associated with improved cardiovascular health, such as cholesterol reduction, blood pressure control and prevention of thrombosis.