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 Back to Eurekalert Medical and Health News Archives
Eurekalert Medical and Health News: 09-23-2004
New research shows that there may be a physiological disposition in females to overindulge in sweets. Though exercise reduces overeating in both genders, females receive less of an appetite-reducing benefit than males.
The recent FDA proposal to force antidepressants to carry warnings about increased suicide risk is the subject of a pair of articles by leading experts in The Annals of Pharmacotherapy. According to "Antidepressants, Suicide, and the FDA: A Loose Association," the FDA proposal is premature and may be counterproductive. The companion piece "Antidepressants: an Avoidable and Solvable Controversy" cautions the warnings simply don't address the fundamental problem.
This issue of the Journal of Neuroscience contains articles about ethanol and its channel targets and opiate-induced sensitization of the locus ceruleus.
Drinking a glass of red wine a day may cut a man's risk of prostate cancer in half, and the protective effect appears to be strongest against themost aggressive forms of the disease.
A naturally occurring chemical that may repel yellow fever mosquitoes can now be made in the laboratory, Indiana University Bloomington scientists report.
Harvard University scientists have found that ultra-thin silicon wires can be used to electrically detect the presence of single viruses, in real time, with near-perfect selectivity. These nanowire detectors can also differentiate among viruses with great precision, suggesting that the technique could be scaled up to create miniature arrays easily capable of sensing thousands of different viruses.
The compound in marijuana that produces a high may help block the spread of cancer-causing herpes viruses.
New research by UCLA microbiologists published in Nature may lead to an effective alternative to antibiotic drugs for treating bacterial diseases.
Transplant surgeons at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphiahave found that a new combination of drugs -- including a monoclonalantibody -- results in fewer incidences of rejection in liver transplantpatients than do current treatments. The results, they say, could change thestandard of care for liver transplantation.
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital have prolonged the lives of mice with a rare blood disorder by using an experimental drug that blocks signals promoting runaway growth of blood cells. The researchers also tested the drug, PKC412, in a patient with the hard-to-treat disease, called Myeloproliferative Disease (MPD), and saw her symptoms improve.
The University of Illinois at Chicago unveiled today the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging machine for human studies, capable of imaging not just the anatomy but metabolism within the brain.
The eradication of brain tumors in mice following treatment with a novel drug suggests that certain cancers might one day be cured without the use of toxic chemotherapy and radiation. This finding, by investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, is published in the current issue of Cancer Cell.
The highly evolved pathogen Burkholderia mallei - which causes the horse disease glanders and has been used as a biowarfare agent - shows a highly regulated set of virulence genes and an unstable genome that may explain the bacterium's ability to thwart the immune responses of its host animals.
Broken bones often mean lifelong disability in the developing world, due to a lack of access to simple, inexpensive initial treatment, says the director of the University of Toronto's international surgery program.
In addition to its popular role in flavoring ice cream, fudge and cake frosting, vanilla may have a future use as a medicine. Recent laboratory research in mice has strengthened the possibility that a form of vanilla may become a drug to treat sickle cell disease.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine report a novel strategy for stimulating the production of utrophin - an important muscle protein in young mice - for muscular dystrophy therapy. The investigators gave mdx mice (the mouse model for Duchenne's muscular dystrophy) heregulin, a small molecule to turn on the production of utrophin in their muscles. Utrophin improved muscle function in the mdx mice.
A single gene called cylE within the important bacterial pathogen Group B Streptococcus (GBS), controls two factors that act together as a "sword" and "shield" to protect the bacteria from the killing effects of the immune system's white blood cells, according to researchers at the UCSD School of Medicine.
Children who had intravenous (IV) access for ear tube placement surgery spent more time in the operating room and in the hospital and required more pain medication than children who underwent the same procedure without IV access, according to an article in the September issue of The Archives of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Patients with vitiligo, a skin disorder characterized by patches of white, or de-pigmented skin, had better repigmentation of these patches when they were treated with a combination of laser therapy and tacrolimus ointment than patients treated with laser therapy alone, according to an article in the September issue of The Archives of Dermatology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Although there is an increased risk of wound complications in patients who underwent breast reconstruction directly after mastectomy, the procedure did not delay the initiation of postsurgical chemotherapy, according to an article in the September issue of The Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Critically injured obese trauma patients have higher rates of death than nonobese trauma patients, according to an article in the September issue of The Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Cosmetic surgery is perceived as less risky with a shorter recovery time and less pain than plastic or reconstructive surgery, according to an article in the September issue of The Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Researchers have combined sophisticated biochemical and imaging techniques to get a glimpse of the stepwise assembly of amyloid fibers in a yeast prion protein. Their findings suggest that these structured fibers form in competition with the amorphous globules that some believe may cause toxicity in amyloid diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The researchers say this may have important implications for those designing drugs to prevent formation of the brain-damaging proteins in those diseases.
By specifically deleting the adhesion protein d-catenin, which is found exclusively in the brain, researchers have found evidence that loss of d-catenin produces severe cognitive and synaptic dysfunction. Researchers have been particularly interested in d-catenin because clinical observations suggest it plays a critical role in brain function.
It is common to say "I can't believe my eyes" when surprised by what we see. Recent scientific evidence suggests that we are right to be sceptical and that what we see depends in no small part on what we expect to see. In new work reported this week, researchers have made headway in understanding how signaling in the brain allows expectation to influence visual perception.
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