Cancer Research

Cranberry juice, long dissed as a mere folk remedy for relieving urinary tract infections in women, is finally getting some respect. Thanks to Prof. Itzhak Ofek, a researcher at Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, the world now knows that science supports the folklore. Prof. Ofek's research on the tart berry over the past two decades shows that its juice indeed combats urinary tract infections. And, he’s discovered, the refreshing red beverage has additional medicinal qualities as well. Prof. Ofek has found that cranberry juice exhibits anti-viral properties against the flu,…

Mitch Waldrop has written an informative piece on the Science 2.0 movement in Scientific American: Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? Consistent with the content of the article, Mitch invites feedback: Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form. The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it's my feature story on "Science 2.0," which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a…

Methadone is a possible cause of sudden cardiac death even when it isn’t overdosed but is taken at therapeutic levels primarily for relief of chronic pain or drug addiction withdrawal, a new study by Oregon Health & Science University researchers suggests. The study’s findings, described in the January 2008 issue of The American Journal of Medicine, are based on an evaluation of all sudden cardiac deaths in the greater Portland, Ore., metropolitan area between 2002 and 2006 where detailed autopsies were performed. The analysis was based on a comparison of two case groups. One group…

Stress, to put it bluntly, is bad for you. It can kill you, in fact. A study reveals that stress causes deterioration in everything from your gums to your heart and can make you more susceptible to everything from the common cold to cancer. Thanks to new research crossing the disciplines of psychology, medicine, neuroscience, and genetics, the mechanisms underlying the connection are rapidly becoming understood. The first clues to the link between stress and health were provided in the 1930s by Hans Selye, the first scientist to apply the word “stress”— then simply an engineering term— to…

Donated, freeze-dried tendon grafts loaded with gene therapy may soon offer effective repair of injured tendons, a goal that has eluded surgeons to date. According to study data published today in Molecular Therapy, a new graft technique may provide the first effective framework around which flexor tendon tissue can reorganize as it heals. Such tissue-engineering approaches could significantly improve repair of anterior cruciate ligaments and rotator cuffs as well, researchers said. The study was in a mouse model designed to resemble hard-to-repair flexor tendons in human hands, and the…

It seems like common sense but a new study adds empirical weight to commonly held beliefs about health: 1) Don't smoke 2) Exercise 3) Moderate alcohol intake 4) Eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day People who do those four things live on average an additional fourteen years of life compared with people who adopt none of these behaviors, according to a study published in PLoS Medicine. The results of this study need to be confirmed in other populations and an analysis of how the combined health behaviors affect quality of life is also needed but the results of the study suggest…

The Commonwealth Fund has issued another indictment of US health care, this one stating that the United States showed the least improvement among 19 countries when it comes to preventable deaths. The new research is published in the January/February issue of Health Affairs and advances their belief that government-controlled health care would be better for U.S. patients than the current system. The top performers in the survey were France, Japan, and Australia and the authors say there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths in the U.S. if America had been among the top three. Ellen Nolte and…

A team of U.S., Israeli and German scientists used computational biology techniques to discover 480 genes that play a role in human cell division and to identify more than 100 of those genes that have an abnormal pattern of activation in cancer cells. Malignant cells have lost control of the replication process, so detecting differences in cell cycle gene activation in normal and malignant cells provides important clues about how cancers develop, said Ziv Bar-Joseph, a Carnegie Mellon University computational biologist who led the study. These genes also are potential targets for drug…

CALGARY, Canada, January 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (TSX: ONC, NASDAQ: ONCY) ('Oncolytics') reported today that a research group led by Dr. Richard Vile of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, published the results of its work testing the antitumor efficacy and safety of various combinations of reovirus and cyclophosphamide in vivo. The paper, entitled "Cyclophosphamide Facilitates Antitumor Efficacy against Subcutaneous Tumors following Intravenous Delivery of Reovirus" appears online in the January 1, 2008 issue of Clinical Cancer Research. "…

BASEL, Switzerland, January 7 /PRNewswire/ -- - For non US or non UK Media Only - Oral Chemotherapy Tablet Option Reduces the Time Patients Need to Spend in the Hospital Data recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirm oral chemotherapy tablet Xeloda (capecitabine) as a first-line treatment for advanced stomach cancer. The publication reinforces the drug's use for this difficult-to-treat disease, enabling clinicians to prescribe Xeloda in combination with platinum-based chemotherapy. Stomach cancer is the fourth most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second leading…