|
Insurance & Litigation
•
|
Tools & Information
•
•
•
|
|
 Back to Eurekalert Medical and Health News Archives
Eurekalert Medical and Health News: 12-23-2004
There is a desert in the heart of the South Pacific. Surrounding Easter Island is the purest and bluest seawater on Earth, almost empty of the microscopic phytoplankton at the base of the marine food web. French vessel L'Atalante recently completed a research cruise through this region, its day-to-day route guided by ocean colour satellites.
Sudden cardiac death from emotional stress may be triggered by uneven signals from the brain to the heart, according to a study by University College London (UCL) scientists published in the January issue of Brain.
Despite critics who say patients' bills of rights laws are actually designed to protect health care providers, new research published in the current issue of the American Journal of Medicine found just the opposite.
If you want to avoid allergies or asthma, scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School suggest you start paying more attention to what's in your gut.
East Hanover, December 22, 2004 - Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Enablex. (darifenacin) extended-release tablets (7.5mg and 15mg) for the treatment of overactive bladder (OAB) with symptoms of urge urinary incontinence, urgency and frequency. Enablex, a once-daily medication, is expected to launch in the U.S. in early 2005.
The latest holiday gifts being offered to the scientific community this season by scientists in the laboratory of Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Roger Y. Tsien come in a dazzling variety of hues -- cherry, strawberry, tangerine, tomato, orange, banana and honeydew. The color spectrum would make Pantone proud. No, Tsien's group is not giving out fruit baskets; the names describe vibrant new varieties of fluorescent protein that the researchers have created to tag cells and observe a range of cellular processes.
Fascinated by the efficient way the human immune system generates a rapid response to create a near-infinite variety of antibodies, researchers have "hijacked" that machinery and used it to evolve a new type of fluorescent protein. The researchers say their technique is widely applicable, and should prove useful in mutating genes faster to produce proteins with useful new properties.
HydroGlobe, a Technogenesis environmental technology company incubated at Stevens Institute of Technology, which produces patented products for the removal of heavy metals - including lead and arsenic - from water, has been acquired by Graver Technologies, a leading manufacturer of filtration and separation products.
Devices the size of pagers now have greater capabilities than computers that once occupied an entire room. Similar advances are being made in synthetic biology at the University of Houston, now allowing researchers to mass produce and inexpensively program the chemical synthesis of entire genes on a single microchip. The findings of Professor Xiaolian Gao are appearing in the current issue of Nature in the paper "Accurate multiplex gene synthesis from programmable DNA microchips."
Researchers at The Molecular Sciences Institute revealed means for sensitive detection and precise quantification of arbitrarily designated molecules. The work is published in the current issue of Nature Methods.
The American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in Fairfax, Va., has won the Award of Excellence in the 2005 Associations Advance America awards program, a national competition sponsored by the American Society for Association Executives. ASTRO received the award for its public awareness campaign to help cancer patients and their families better understand their treatment options. The campaign is now in the running to receive a Summit Award, ASAE's top honor for association programs.
Researchers at McMaster University have developed the first assessment tool of its kind for evaluating risks faced by Canadians suffering from a rare and often fatal bleeding disorder.Their detailed bleeding questionnaire helps discriminate between patients - often in the same family - affected by a puzzling and rare condition known as Quebec Platelet Disorder (QPD) and those who are not.
Flu. Smallpox. Anthrax. Whooping cough. The words represent a veritable murderers' row of infectious agents whose death toll runs in the millions. Between them and us stand a few small groups of nurses at select institutions around the country who protect the population from such scourges.
Well-fed male field crickets die young because they spend too much time courting members of the opposite sex, according to research by Australian scientists in the latest edition of Nature.The results reveal how male crickets (Teleogryllus commodus) fed on a high protein diet engaged in more "sexual calling" and died sooner than males reared on a low protein diet. The well-fed males also died earlier than well-fed female crickets (females don't "call" to males).
The US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI), culminating a 16-year effort, has completed its share of the Human Genome Project with the publication of the DNA sequence and analysis of chromosome 16 in the Dec. 23 issue of Nature.
A team led by Johns Hopkins scientists has found the first clear evidence that the process behind the human immune system's remarkable ability to recognize and respond to a million different proteins might have originated from a family of genes whose only apparent function is to jump around in genetic material.
Breast implants after mastectomy to treat breast cancer do not reduce the long-term survival of patients, reveals the first study on the long-term effects of breast implants, published today in Breast Cancer Research.
Study published in the December 23 issue of New England Journal of Medicine reports that a non-invasive test for DNA mutations present in stool has an encouraging rate of detecting colorectal cancer compared to the standard non-invasive method -- fecal occult (hidden) blood stool testing, although neither approached the detection rate of colonoscopy.
Premenopausal women who seek help for excessive hair growth, even if it is not significant enough to meet the clinical definition of hirsutism, need to be evaluated for endocrine and reproductive system abnormalities. In a study of 188 women, researchers found that more than half of patients with only minimal unwanted hair growth in male-type patterns had excessive amounts of "male" hormones. While this symptom is often considered merely cosmetic, the underlying causes and long-term consequences may be serious.
Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered that the shape of a protein on the surface of pneumonia bacteria helps these germs invade the human bloodstream. This finding, published Dec. 16 online by the EMBO Journal, could help scientists develop a vaccine that is significantly more effective at protecting children against the disease.
With the dynamic evolution of wireless technology, Mayo Clinic researchers have been concerned about the potential effects of electromagnetic interference on heart pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. In the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers report they did not detect interference from personal digital assistants (PDAs).
In the December issue of Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research, orthpaedic surgeon William Harris, MD, DSc, of Massachusetts General Hospital tells a remarkable story of how a new disease was inadvertently caused by successful medical treatment, ultimately understood, and eventually defeated by scientific innovation.
.Very few jails in the United States continue methadone treatments for opiate-dependent inmates, and half fail to follow standard methadone detoxification protocols, according to a national survey by the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Doctors are less likely to actively engage their black patients in conversation when compared to the conversations they had with their white patients, according to a new study of primary care visits conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine.
Researchers knew that prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad cow disease and other brain disorders, were killing off a class of important brain cells in a transgenic mouse model. But when they found a way to rescue those cells, they were astonished to discover the mice still became sick.
|
|
