|
Insurance & Litigation
•
|
Tools & Information
•
•
•
|
|
 Back to Eurekalert Medical and Health News Archives
Eurekalert Medical and Health News: 01-17-2005
Alexander Levitzki, the Wolfson Famly Professor of Biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has been named as one of the three winners of the 2005 Wolf Prize in Medicine. All three recipients were awarded the prize for their research in cancer development and treatment.
Changes to the training of junior medical doctors, combined with the increased emphasis on clinical work in the new consultant contract will damage the future of clinical research in the UK, a University of Edinburgh Professor will state in his inaugural lecture on Tuesday, 18 January, 2005.
Clinical researchers seeking patient volunteers within the U.S. are invited to submit information about their clinical trial to a new patient website dedicated to Parkinson's clinical trials, www.PDtrials.org.
Ancient woodlands in Europe may have been remarkably similar to the dark forests of ancient folklore according to a paper in Journal of Ecology by Dr Fraser Mitchell. He provides new evidence about the nature of ancient woodlands in temperate Europe, which has been the source of much controversy among forest ecologists. The Dutch ecologist Frans Vera argued that ancient woodlands would have resembled modern parkland because of the action of large grazing animals.
Newsworthy highlights include studies showing that: total maternal vitamin C intake during pregnancy was associated with wheeze during the infant's second year; in a study of 2,760 asthma patients, inhaled corticosteroid combined with a long-acting beta2-agonist reduced exacerbation rates by 45 percent, improved symptom control, and resulted in better lung function; and U.S.-born Mexican Americans have a higher prevalence of asthma than do Mexican Americans born in Mexico.
Advanced melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, can be successfully treated in some cases by vaccinating patients with tumor proteins. How these vaccines work and why they are only effective in some patients remains unclear. Pierre Coulie and colleagues now show, in two articles in the January 17 issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, that these vaccines work by increasing the number of immune cells called killer T cells that can attack the tumor.
New and sophisticated methods for studying the relationship between human genetic differences, the environment, health and behavior, all made possible by the completion of the Human Genome Project, have made traditional race-based measurements of human differences obsolete, according to numerous authors writing in a special issue of the American Psychologist
More than 16,000 biological and biomedical scientists will gather for the Experimental Biology 2005 meeting in San Diego, Saturday, April 2, through Wednesday, April 6. The annual meeting, now in its 14th year, is world renowned for its emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to scientific and medical problems. The International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) will hold its 35th Congress - a meeting held every five years - in conjunction with the EB 2005 meeting.
Tobacco smoke triggers the production of COX-2, a cellular protein linked to the development and progression of cancer, according to research published in the January 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research.
Scientists report that they have successfully cloned and characterized a previously intractable, 554-kilobase-pair genomic segment near the centromere of the human Y chromosome. This sequence may contain genes involved in sex-associated height differences and in gonadal tumor development.
Highlights from the journals of the American Society for Microbiology include: Llama Antibodies May Help Prevent Dandruff; New Coronavirus Identified in Pneumonia Patients; andHousehold Dust May Be Source of Infant Botulism.
Maintaining the accessibility, succinctness, and comprehensiveness of Van Nostrand Reinhold Encyclopedia of Chemistry, VAN NOSTRAND'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CHEMISTRY, FIFTH EDITION still represents the benchmark chemical reference for individual researchers and students. Incorporating more than 1,350 entirely new articles and updates of more than 1,300 existing articles, this new edition presents a wider area of coverage, as well as developments made in the past 20 years.
How do you remember your own name? Is it possible ever to forget it? The memory trace, or engram, "feels" like it is stored permanently in the brain and it will never be forgotten. .Northwestern University neuroscientist Aryeh Routtenberg has presented a provocative new theory that takes issue with the 40-year-old view of how long-term memories are stored. Routtenberg, with doctoral student Jerome L. Rekart, outlined the new theory on memory storage in the January issue of the journal Trends in Neuroscience.
Imagine an entire chemistry laboratory reduced to the size of a postage stamp. It could happen. While others may think big, Texas A&M University physicists Don Naugle and co-worker Igor Lyuksyutov are thinking small - as in micro small. They have successfully managed to levitate micron-sized fluids using magnets, which could lead to new advances in medicine, chemistry, chemical engineering and other related fields.
Developing depression while on interferon-alpha plus ribavirin may impact how well the medications work. Emory researchers observed that patients who develop depressive symptoms during interferon-alpha plus ribavirin therapy were significantly less likely to have cleared the hepatitis C virus from their blood following six months of treatment.
Abscesses are a common malady found mostly in grain-fed cattle, the result of an aggressive feeding program. About 20 to 40 percent of the grain-fed cattle in feedlots are afflicted with abscesses, which can not be detected until the animals are slaughtered. A Kansas State University professor has developed a vaccine to prevent liver abscesses.
Mutations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) play an important role in the development of prostate cancer, according to new research that provides the first evidence that individuals who inherit a mutation of the mitochondrial DNA are at an increased risk of developing prostate cancer later in life.
Dr. Erkki Ruoslahti, Distinguished Professor at The Burnham Institute, has been named as recipient of the 2005 Japan Prize in the category of cell biology. Dr. Ruoslahti will share the prize, 50 million yen (approximately $487,000 U.S.), with Dr. Masatoshi Takeichi, Director of RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan. The award will be presented to the scientists in ceremonies to take place in Tokyo on April 20, 2005 as part of a week-long celebration of "Japan Prize Week".
A training program in mental health and deafness at the Wright State University School of Professional Psychology (SOPP) that is unique in American higher education is planning to expand to other locations in Ohio, according to Miami Valley clinical psychologist Robert Basil, Psy.D.
The Georgia Medicaid program reduced its prescription-drug costs by $20.6 million over a one-year period by requiring enrollees to get permission before filling prescriptions for anti-ulcer medications called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). The savings were reported in a study published today in the American Journal of Managed Care by researchers at Express Scripts, the pharmacy benefit manager serving the Georgia Medicaid program.
A team of engineers takes a unique, top-to-bottom look at ways to improve patient flow in one of the nation's largest public hospitals.
In a letter sent Tuesday to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, an informal coalition of stakeholders who support reforms that will make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public, expressed deep disappointment after NIH cancelled a planned briefing and announcement on new guidelines. No explanation was given for the cancellation of the announcement.
USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center oncologists are testing the effectiveness of a new drug against pancreatic cancer in a phase II clinical trial sponsored by the NCI.
A chance for television viewers to spend a half-hour learning from two of the world's leading surgeons is the concept behind Mini-Med School TV, which debuts nationally on PBS in 2005. Northwestern Memorial Hospital was selected to be solely featured in the first two episodes, "Hi-Tech Brain Repair" and "Lifesaving Heart Repair."
Shedding light upon evolution, a University of Houston professor studying cell lineages found surprising simplicity in the logic of animal development. Ricardo Azevedo, assistant professor in the department of biology and biochemistry, specializes in how evolution changes the way animals develop. His findings using computational biology to reveal the surprisingly simple patterns of cell division in the embryos of small invertebrates is described in a paper titled "The Simplicity of Metazoan Cell Lineages" in Nature.
|
|
