Clinical Research

I don't get excited about the singularity the way some on Science 2.0 do (and certainly elsewhere) though I admire the optimism.    So when I got an email from a publicity person at PBS about NewsHour Science Correspondent Miles O’Brien’s report on the upcoming match between Jeopardy masters Brad Runner, Ken Jennings and the super computer Watson I had to wonder if this would lead to more claims about an upcoming singularity and exponential leaps in artificial intelligence. Don't get me wrong, Watson is a smart computer, but not because of its horsepower, about 6,000 home computers…

In every study done over the last 70 years, since weight loss research began, the one solution guaranteed to work was ingesting fewer calories than you burn.   Nevertheless, any number of gimmicks have come into fashion. One claim is that eating a big breakfast will lead to weight loss.   It can be confusing for laypeople because almost anything can begin with 'clinical tests show' and sound authoritative. Research did suggest that eating a big breakfast reduced total calorie intake over the day but it only looked at the ratio of breakfast calories to daily calories and in a new…

I think I can safely assume that when it comes to feeding newborns, people have heard that if possible breastfeeding is best - immune system, bonding, etc etc. But when do you wean? Ten years ago, the World Health Organization recommended that mothers "exclusively breastfeed for the first six months of their infants' lives," and this recommendation was picked up by governments around the world. Now, a study in the British Medical Journal says perhaps that can be adjusted down to four months, based on information including more recent research. Naturally, there are caveats and controversies…

Why haven't antioxidant therapies yielded more positive results?   The answer may be that Nrf2, a protein that plays an important role in some antioxidant therapies, may not be as effective due to additional mechanisms that cause it to promote atherosclerosis - clogging of the arteries. Nrf2 has been thought to be an important drug-therapy target for diseases such as cancer because it can induce chemopreventive activity by attaching to specific sequences of DNA, leading to the release of numerous antioxidant and anti-inflammatory genes and enzymes that can decrease or inhibit the effects…

Couple-and treatment-specific factors can be used to provide infertile couples with an accurate assessment of the likelihood of having a successful outcome following in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) using a new prediction model created by Scott Nelson from the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland and Debbie Lawlor from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England.  They say it provides a more accurate and contemporary assessment of likely outcomes after IVF than a previously established model because the new model includes intracytoplasmic sperm injection outcomes.  Between 2003 and…

Randomized, controlled trials have shown the effectiveness of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) for preventing sudden cardiac death in patients with advanced systolic heart failure but a new study shows that far too many patients receiving ICDs do not meet evidence-based guidelines for receipt of an ICD, and that these patients had a significantly higher risk of in-hospital death than individuals who met criteria for receiving an ICD. The study included more than 100,000 patients who received ICDs and found that about 20 percent did not meet evidence-based guidelines.   In…

Last Wednesday, this paper, published in PLoS ONE, hit the popular news in the medicine/science category, with articles such as this one from MedPage Today and this, from Reuters. The headlines are consistent, implying that the study has shown that the placebo effect works even when patients know that they’re getting placebos. From the MedPage article: While this may seem counterintuitive, the results suggest that physicians don’t have to resort to deception to harness the power of the placebo effect, Kaptchuk explained in an interview.Conventional wisdom says that in order for a placebo to…

Many metals have special oxygen transfer properties which improve the utility of hydrogen peroxide. By far, the most common of these is iron which, when used in the prescribed manner, results in the generation of highly reactive hydroxyl radicals (. OH). The reactivity of this system was first observed in 1894 by its inventor H.J.H. Fenton, but its utility was not recognized until the 1930s once the mechanisms were identified. So say US Peroxide, a company marketing ‘Technologies for a Clean Environment’. Today, Fenton's Reagent is used to treat a variety of industrial wastes containing a…

Researchers may have found a way to reverse damage to nerves caused by multiple sclerosis, according to a study by scientists at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. A report by AFP said the team "identified a mechanism essential to regenerating myelin sheaths - the layers of insulation that protect nerve fibres in the brain - and showed how it could be used to make the brain's own stem cells undertake this repair." "Therapies that repair damage are the missing link in treating multiple sclerosis," said Professor Robin Franklin, director of the MS Society's Cambridge Centre for…

Sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL) is a condition that causes deafness in 40,000 Americans each year, usually in early middle-age.    A new treatment has been developed SSHL, say researchers writing in BMC Medicine who describe the positive results of a preliminary trial of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) applied as a topical gel. Takayuki Nakagawa, from Kyoto University, Japan, worked with a team of researchers to test the gel in 25 patients whose SSHL had not responded to the normal treatment of systemic gluticosteroids. He said, "The results indicated that the topical IGF1…