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 Back to Eurekalert Medical and Health News Archives
Eurekalert Medical and Health News: 10-24-2004
Researchers at the OHSU Oregon National Primate Research Center have identified a key gene that impacts the timing of puberty and can shorten the time span for reproduction. Using a mouse model, scientists determined that the absence in the brain's hypothalamus of a gene called TTF-1 causes a delay in the onset of female puberty. The work may be an important step in investigating both the delay and early onset of puberty in young women.
Human primitive spinal cord cells delayed symptoms and paralysis by a week when implanted in the spinal cord of rats destined to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, researchers from Johns Hopkins report.
Inebriated bees could give researchers better insight into alcohol's effects on human behavior, a new study suggests. "Alcohol affects bees and humans in similar ways - it impairs motor functioning along with learning and memory processing," said Julie Mustard, a study co-author and a postdoctoral researcher in entomology at Ohio State University.
Because the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) has been linked to many types of cancers, manipulation of the enzyme is considered an attractive anti-cancer strategy. Researchers now describe COX-2's harmful impact on key cells that result in the immune system's tolerance of deadly brain tumor cells. By blocking the enzyme's expression in gliomas before exposure to dendritic cells, COX-2's effects may be interrupted and a more effective immune response may be launched.
Leaders in science, public policy and public health will discuss the "hidden" nature of TSEs, specifically "mad cow" disease and vCJD, its human form, at an Evening Symposium at the annual AABB blood conference in Baltimore on Monday, October 25. (The Symposium is particularly timely in light of news from France that the blood of a frequent donor, identified as the country's eighth victim of vCJD, was used for transfusions to 10 people and in the manufacture of medicines.)
An international research team, led by scientists at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), has discovered a gene, which when mutated, causes Parkinson's disease in some families. Although Parkinson's disease is usually not inherited, the discovery of this gene and further study of how it works could open up new avenues of research for preventing or delaying the onset of the disease.
W. Mark Saltzman, Goizueta Foundation Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering,at Yale was named the Biomedical Engineering Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2004, the Society's highest award. His research has led to biocompatible polymeric materials for the controlled delivery of drugs, proteins, and genes, and has created polymer implants to promote the regeneration of diseased and traumatized tissues in the nervous system.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded two collaborative contracts, totaling $46 million, to Northrop Grumman Corporation's information technology sector. A portion of the funds will be allocated to UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas to create two bioinformatics centers designed to help scientists combat infectious diseases and immune disorders.
Genes affect how patients with mild asthma respond to albuterol, according to results of the first study of an asthma drug in patients selected according to their genotype. Researchers in the NHLBI Asthma Clinical Research Network found that over time, patients with the arginine genotype at the beta-2 adrenergic receptor had poorer asthma control after using albuterol regularly for several weeks. About 1 out of 6 people with asthma (more than 2 million) have the arginine genotype.
Estrogen treatment had less beneficial effect on memory in female mice that raced on running wheels and played with other toys than in mice raised in non-stimulating environments.
On rare occasions, the anti-tachycardia pulses from implanted defibrillators produce the wrong effect: they trigger an even faster and more dangerous heartbeat. Johns Hopkins engineers may have figured out why.
Today sees ESA's first ever microsatellite complete three years of successful operations. The size of a large television set, Proba was launched to demonstrate new technologies for future European spacecraft, but continues to provide fantastic images of Earth.
Researchers have identified a new gene that causes a common form of inherited Parkinson's disease (PD) and whose understanding they believe "will impact not only patients and their families but will open novel avenues of research aimed at identifying and ultimately halting the molecular events that lead to PD."
Low-income Asian and Pacific Islander children in California are becoming overweight at an alarming rate -- and will soon catch up to low-income white, black and Latino children in the proportion who are overweight or obese, according to research reported today at the 5th Asian American Cancer Control Academy.
Scientists in Tokyo have discovered a new protein, named PICT-1, that is involved in regulating PTEN, the second most commonly mutated tumor suppressor in human tumors. This discovery suggests the possibility of a new tumorigenic pathway that is due to defects in a protein involved in stabilizing PTEN rather than defects in PTEN itself.
Many of the 15,000 Hmong immigrants arriving in the United States this year will confront an illness that has no name in the Hmong language -- cancer.
California's Asian Americans smoke at a lower rate than the state's population as a whole, but the better an Asian California woman's English, the more likely she is to smoke.
The incidence of cancer among Asian Americans in California has dropped 5.9 percent and deaths from the disease have dropped 16.3 percent since 1988.
New data from a pilot study conducted by Martin B. Scharf, Ph.D., founder of Tri-State Sleep Disorders Center in Cincinnati shows that a plant-derived synthetic conjugated estrogen called Cenestin. (synthetic conjugated estrogens, A) reduced the number of nocturnal hot flashes by nearly 80 percent. The study also found that women taking Cenestin experienced an improvement in sleep latency and total sleep time, falling asleep faster and sleeping for a longer period of time.
A discovery at Oregon Health & Science University is giving researchers detailed, visual clues into how gram-positive bacteria, including those that cause life-threatening diseases, can stay alive in adverse environmental conditions. The findings, published recently in the journal Cell, could someday lead to the development of a new class of drugs that disrupt a crucial mechanism that bacteria use to adapt to available energy sources, and essentially starve these pathogens to death.
Eyetech Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: EYET) today announced that the treatment effect with the investigational drug Macugen (pegaptanib sodium injection) extends for two years in patients with neovascular or wet, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), who are at risk of losing their vision. A treatment benefit was also seen for patients who received Macugen for two years compared to those only receiving one year of therapy.
Bowing to crushing increases in the cost of delivering medical services to Americans, the troubled health care system will begin to adopt operations research and other techniques that have proven successful in the relatively unfashionable manufacturing sector, predicts a leading expert.
Researchers reported in the October issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine on a study that measured the molecular changes in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients over a 7.5-year time span that began during the early stages of the disease. The study demonstrates that it is possible to measure, quantitatively and over a significant period of time, the molecular changes that take place in the brain as it undergoes progressive deterioration.
British scientists have developed a tabletop DNA test laboratory that can cut the diagnosis of disease and infection from hours to 30 minutes.
Over 18 months, researchers at University Hospitals of Cleveland and Case Western Reserve University studied the frequency and prevalence of musculoskeletal (MSK) complaints in obese patients before and after undergoing gastric bypass surgery. The researchers concluded that the complaints, which involved joint and tendon pain, decreased significantly following surgery and initial weight loss, even in non-weight bearing areas of the body.
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