Body

Head and neck cancer patients may no longer have to undergo invasive post-treatment surgery to remove remaining cancer cells, as research shows that innovative scanning-led surveillance can help identify the need for, and guidance of, neck dissection.

The study from the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, used advanced imaging to identify cancer cells still present after treatment of head and neck cancer with primary chemoradiotherapy.

Although nearly three-quarters of women taking a recent survey had one or more risk factors for heart disease, a startlingly small proportion--just 16 percent--had actually been told by their doctors that these factors put them at risk for heart disease, according to a study scheduled for presentation at the American College of Cardiology's 65th Annual Scientific Session.

Female cardiologists are less likely than their male counterparts to get married and have children and more likely to face challenges related to child care, family leave policies and professional discrimination, according to a study scheduled for presentation at the American College of Cardiology's 65th Annual Scientific Session.

Taking long naps or being excessively tired during the day is associated with a higher risk for developing metabolic syndrome, according to a study scheduled for presentation at the American College of Cardiology's 65th Annual Scientific Session.

PHILADELPHIA - Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease (CMT) is a family of inherited disorders of the peripheral nervous system, affecting approximately one in 2,500 Americans. Its most common iteration, CMT1, comes in many forms, most of which have to date been linked to a small set of causative genes. New research from the department of Neurology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia recently spanned the globe to uncover a new genetic cause of CMT1. Their findings are published online this week in Brain.

DALLAS, March 23, 2016 -- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may decrease the ability of blood vessels to dilate, raising the risk of heart attack and stroke in veterans, according to new research in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Honing in on when life on Earth evolved from single-celled to multicellular organisms is no easy task. Organisms that old lacked many distinguishing characteristics of modern life forms, making their fossils exceptionally rare.

But University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee paleontologist Stephen Dornbos and his research partners have discovered new clues in the quest. The team found fossils of two species of previously unknown ancient multicellular marine algae, what we now know as seaweed - and they're among the oldest examples of multicellular life on Earth.

HOUSTON - (March 23, 2016) - Rice University students and their mentors have created a sterilization station for surgical instruments that can help minimize risk of infections to patients anywhere in the world.

The station built into a standard 20-foot steel shipping container houses all the equipment necessary to prepare surgical instruments for safe reuse, including a water system for decontamination and a solar-powered autoclave for steam sterilization. Autoclaves are standard in modern hospitals but badly needed in low-resource settings.

Dogs labelled as "pit bulls" may wait three times as long to be adopted from shelters than differently labelled lookalikes, according to a study published March 23, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lisa Gunter from Arizona State University, USA, and colleagues.

In collaboration with researchers from UGent, VIB scientists from KU Leuven have revealed a remarkable link between malignant melanoma and a non-coding RNA gene called SAMMSON. The SAMMSON gene is specifically expressed in human malignant melanoma and, strikingly, the growth of aggressive skin cancer is highly dependent on this gene. The conclusions could pave the way for improved diagnostic tools and skin cancer treatment.

(Boston)--For the first time, researchers have determined how bromodomain (BRD) proteins work in type 2 diabetes, which may lead to a better understanding of the link between adult-onset diabetes and certain cancers.

The findings, which appear in PLOS ONE, show that reducing levels in pancreatic beta cells of individual BRDs, called BET proteins, previously shown to play a role in cancer, may also help patients who are obese and diabetic.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - March 23, 2016 - Advances in personalized medicine allow doctors to select the most promising drugs for certain types of malignant tumors. But what if before initiating treatment, they could go a step further and use a mini-model of the human body to see how each patient's actual tumor responds to the drugs and learn if and where the tumor is likely to spread?

Your DNA governs more than just what color your eyes are and whether you can curl your tongue. Your genes contain instructions for making all your proteins, which your cells constantly need to keep you alive. But some key aspects of how that process works at the molecular level have been a bit of a mystery--until now.

A method to rotate single particles, cells or organisms using acoustic waves in a microfluidic device will allow researchers to take three dimensional images with only a cell phone. Acoustic waves can move and position biological specimens along the x, y and z axes, but for the first time researchers at Penn State have used them to gently and safely rotate samples, a crucial capability in single-cell analysis, drug discovery and organism studies.

A store's decision to sell organic food depends on its neighborhood demographics, and the range of organic foods offered for sale is linked to the size of the store, finds research by NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

The study, which focuses on New York City stores and is published in the Journal of Food Products Marketing, is among the first to provide an understanding of the factors that influence the range of organic food products offered by retailers.